A quarter century after the Eisenhower administration closed the Ellis Island prison, the United States veered sharply from abolishing the immigration prison system to expanding it. In 1980 the Carter administration began constructing detention camps for refugees in response to large numbers of Haitians arriving, many of whom requested asylum—a history that Carl Lindskoog tells in Detain and Punish: Haitian Refugees and the Rise of the World’s Largest Immigration Detention System.
By 1982, Ronald Reagan had formalized the Carter administration’s ad hoc incarceration policy, ordering the imprisonment of all Haitians who entered the United States without the federal government’s permission. Justifying this shift, Reagan’s attorney general, William French Smith, said, “Detention of aliens seeking asylum was necessary to discourage people like the Haitians from setting sail in the first place.”1 Despite the official policy of deterrence, soon Cubans set off for the United States, where they would also be targets of government imprisonment. (Not to mention targets of cultural scorn: in the opening scene of Brian De Palma’s Scarface, for example, Cuban migrants are described as “the dregs of [Castro’s] jails,” the Hollywood version of a political narrative that had broad appeal in the mid-1980s.)
Since then, whether Democrats or Republicans occupied the White House, law has been subservient to politics. In their detailed history of the creation of modern immigrant detention practices, Boats, Borders, and Bases: Race, the Cold War, and the Rise of Migration Detention in the United States, Jenna Loyd and Alison Mountz describe the political building blocks of a massive legal architecture.
In 1986, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (later divided into three agencies, including today’s ICE) opened a prison in rural Oakdale, Louisiana, “a place that epitomized the production of remoteness: designed to be far from attorneys, and thereby to ‘increase the speed and number of deportations.’” More remote still was the US naval outpost in Guantánamo, Cuba, where 10s of thousands of Haitians were held in the 1990s, spanning the presidencies of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Eerily similar to detention patterns that have become common in recent years, the Guantánamo facility included a unit for families, another for unaccompanied minors, and one that its residents called “kid jail.”