In 1926, the Galveston League of Women Voters wrote to their U.S. senator to express concern over the “dreadful conditions which exist in regard to the detention of deportees in this part of the world.” The women referred to the Galveston County Jail—a squalid, perpetually louse-infested local lockup that received federal money for each migrant they held. The migrants at Galveston hailed from across the globe: They were Jewish refugees fleeing political violence, Estonian maritime workers absconding from ships, Mexicans accustomed to regularly crossing the border for work. They awaited immigration hearings, investigations, and deportations. And for weeks, months, and even years, they found themselves in an uneasy legal limbo, staring at the blank walls of the Galveston jail. It was “the dirtiest and rottenest place on earth,” a group of migrants wrote in 1930.
Similar detention arrangements were taking root throughout Texas and throughout the U.S. Outside of urban sites like Ellis Island, the federal government had little detention space of its own. Instead, it relied on contracts with sheriffs and localities to detain migrants in county jails. In some communities, these arrangements were popular and profitable, pumping federal money into local economies. But in other cases, they sparked pointed conversations about policing and punishment. What did it mean for Galveston County to incarcerate deportees, who in the words of the League of Women Voters, “have broken some law of this country … but are not in the true sense of the word criminals”?
Today, the relationship between localities and the federal immigration service is hotly contested in Texas, as the federal courts debate Governor Greg Abbott’s efforts to allow local law enforcement to arrest migrants on illegal entry charges, and as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continues to rent bed space in Texas jails for migrant detention. Yet these contemporary fights point to an enduring historical reality—mass deportations have long relied on local jails, local police power, and local community support. Even though immigration control is a federal responsibility, immigration officials have spent decades farming the dirty work of detention out to local partners (and later, to private corporations). Working with localities enabled the immigration service to insulate itself from some of detention’s worst abuses, arguing that episodes of violence and neglect were carried out by contractors rather than the federal government itself. Nowhere has this pattern been more evident than in Texas.
Texas sheriffs worked with the immigration service to secure jail space since the end of the 19th century, primarily aiding in the enforcement of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act which barred all Chinese laborers from the United States. By the 1920s, the States had a host of new immigration laws to enforce: anti-trafficking provisions, literacy tests, and quota laws which placed significant restrictions on migration from Europe for the first time. As the population of migrant detainees diversified, more and more communities expressed hesitations about whether migrant incarceration was a worthwhile, or even morally defensible, local project. Jailing Chinese migrants may have seemed like easy money at the turn of the 20th century, but it became considerably more controversial as the immigration service asked localities to hold European women, children, and families in their jails.
Europeans were joined by growing numbers of Mexican migrants, whose numbers surged after the 1929 passage of the so-called Undesirable Alien Act. The law made illegal entry a criminal offense with criminal punishments. Mexican migrants penned dispatches from jail, bemoaning that crossing a border now meant sharing cells with “big criminals … bank robbers, murderers, thiefs.” The Mexican government questioned why “crossing a river” had become “an act that must be purged in a penitentiary alongside those who rob and kill.” In Texas, as elsewhere throughout the nation, migrants did not passively await deportation and tolerate long detentions: They contacted consuls, defaced their cell walls with writing and drawings, filed habeas corpus petitions in court, plotted escapes, and marshaled sympathetic locals.
One of the most intense campaigns around migrant incarceration took place in 1920s Galveston; the city had a history of prison reform activism and a robust community of both Christian and Jewish religious leaders concerned with the status of migrants. But most notably, the Galveston County Jail had a reputation for being a place where the immigration service detained high numbers of European migrants, sparking loud local outcry about the jail’s inadequacy. Following a 1925 investigation into deportees’ conditions of confinement, a grand jury in Galveston declared detention in the jail “a crime against humanity,” while a local reporter wrote of the dangers of “sending these unwelcome guests back to their countries embittered by months spent in a reeking jail.”
Conditions facing detained female migrants were especially precarious: Jailed migrant women faced language barriers, looming deportation, and few legal protections, along with a heavy veil of suspicion that they were sex workers. In the spring of 1928, Alvin M. Johnson, a U.S. immigration inspector, found a Mexican woman named Gertrudis Hernandez de Rodriguez sitting in the Galveston County Jail office. When Johnson asked the local jailer why the woman was there, he responded, in “an embarrassed manner,” that Hernandez de Rodriguez had been crying so he brought her to the administrative wing. To the immigration inspector, this seemed an incomplete story. Johnson noted in an incident report that one of his colleagues previously saw another unnamed jail employee “loving [Hernandez] up” in the jail office.
Three days later, the inspector again discovered Hernandez de Rodriguez sitting in a room, disheveled, with the chief jailer and another jail employee. A jailer broke the uncomfortable silence with a snide joke about how Hernandez de Rodriguez wanted the immigration inspector to “take her to the movies.” The Galveston jailers did not seem to anticipate punishment from the immigration bureaucrats; if anything, their comment might be read as a winking invitation to participate in the assault of a detained woman.
When migrants brought accusations of sexual misconduct against immigration officials in this era, the Bureau of Immigration invested considerable time into investigating allegations—even if the officials involved were rarely harshly punished. But when local jailers were accused, the immigration service effectively washed their hands. They could not do the work of the sheriff, noting that “men of ambition … education and intelligence” would not work in a jail. The day following Johnson’s report, immigration officials transported Hernandez de Rodriguez to the Harris County Jail in Houston, roughly fifty miles away. This, too, was characteristic of detention’s power. When issues arose, the immigration service could effectively make complainants disappear by transferring them across a constellation of local jails—a pattern that continues in migrant detention today.
The relationships between Texas counties and the immigration service changed quickly over the coming years. While using city and county jails gave the immigration service a footprint in nearly every American community, both federal and local officials found these relationships frustrating. With each additional federal investigation into Galveston jail conditions, Sheriff R.E. Kirk’s annoyance grew; in 1928, he told the Bureau of Immigration that if they were not happy with the conditions, they could take their deportees elsewhere—“[Kirk knows] full well we have no other place in which to confine them,” an immigration bureaucrat sighed.
In the 1940s and 50s, the immigration service experimented with building its own “detention camps” along the border, which could house thousands of migrants per night, nearly all Mexican. However, many locals expressed concern with these new arrangements, arguing that they had expanded their jails specifically to accommodate the immigration service’s demand. How were towns to anticipate, asked McAllen-area Congressman Lloyd M. Bentsen, that the immigration service would decide “to go into the prison business on a grandiose scale”? An Odessa newspaper raised a parallel question: what would happen to sprawling Texas jails if the immigration service no longer needed their beds? “Now apparently [Texas towns] are stuck with big jails and nobody to put in them but each other. The immigration service and the Border Patrol prefer a concentration camp of their own.”
The mid-century detention landscape in Texas was a harbinger of a new era, one in which a sprawling network of local sites, federal sites, and private sites would work together to immobilize the people the nation deemed illegal. Bentsen’s 1952 observation that the immigration service had become a central player in the prison business was prescient. Even as ICE builds new detention facilities and contracts with private prison companies for operations, its reliance on Texas jails, and jails throughout the Gulf South, continues. Today’s immigration detention system is far more expansive than the system of the 1920s or 1950s—incarcerating more than 12 times as many people per night as the immigration service did in 1950—but many of the 20th-century operating logics endure. Detaining migrants in county jails has become a way for the federal immigration authorities to foster collaboration with local communities, produce financial incentives for cooperation, and obscure migrants as they move through a vast landscape of carceral control.
