Immigrant Detention Is Not New

America has a long history of demonizing and confining groups of people

On July 7, an ICE agent killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a construction worker who had lived in Houston for thirty-five years and raised three US-citizen sons. That morning, he was driving to work when ICE agents began pursuing his van because they believed two people they were seeking were inside. They were wrong. When Salgado Araujo stopped, an agent fired a shot and killed him.

Days later, ICE agents killed 25-year-old Johan Sebastián Durán Guerrero during another vehicle stop in Maine. Once again, they were pursuing someone else. Durán Guerrero, a Colombian immigrant legally authorized to work in the United States, delivered food and cleaned a veterinary clinic at night to support his wife and three-year-old daughter. Neither man was the person ICE claimed to be looking for. Neither was a threat to society. It did not matter. They were immigrants. They were Latinos.

Their deaths drew national attention because they occurred in public. Their families could speak to reporters. Witnesses could describe what happened. Video recordings could challenge the government’s account.

Memorial image of Durán Guerrero

Far fewer people have heard of Mamuka Artmeladze, Denny Adan Gonzalez, Aled Carbonell Betancourt, Alejandro Cabrera Clemente, Tuan Van Bui, José Guadalupe Ramos Solano, Royer Pérez Jiménez, Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal, Emmanuel Damas, Pejman Karshenas Najafabadi, Alberto Gutiérrez Reyes, Jairo García Hernández, Lorth Sim, Víctor Manuel Díaz, Heber Sánchez Domínguez, Parady La, Luis Yáñez Cruz, Luis Núñez Cáceres, and Geraldo Lunas Campos.

Harm behind closed doors

They, too, died under ICE’s authority in 2026. But unlike Salgado Araujo and Durán Guerrero, they did not die on streets where witnesses could see them but inside immigration detention centers — institutions hidden from public view.

One of them, Geraldo Lunas Campos, was a fifty-five-year-old Cuban father of four. ICE later said that Lunas Campos had been attempting suicide and that staff intervened to save him. But the agency’s initial account of his death had made no mention of a suicide attempt. Detainees nearby described something very different: they said that guards handcuffed Lunas Campos, held him down, and compressed his neck as he repeatedly cried that he could not breathe. The El Paso County medical examiner found abrasions on his chest and knees and hemorrhaging in his neck and ruled his death a homicide caused by asphyxia from compression of his neck and torso. The autopsy report made no mention of a suicide attempt.

Months before Lunas Campos’s death, Ricardo H., another Cuban man held at the same detention camp, said that guards had denied him food for more than twenty hours. When he demanded a meal, about fifteen officers responded. According to Ricardo, they slammed him to the floor, pinned him facedown, stomped on his neck, and dragged him down a hallway while ICE officers watched and laughed. Ricardo survived to describe what happened. Lunas Campos did not.

Bunk beds at the Carrizo Springs migrant detention center in Texas in 2019

During the first 500 days of Trump’s second term, 52 people died in ICE custody. The mortality rate reached its highest level in over a decade. Physicians for Human Rights medical experts reported a high suspicion of inadequate or delayed care in several of the deaths they reviewed, raising serious concerns that some may have been preventable. Yet incomplete government reporting made it impossible for reviewers to determine conclusively what had happened in many cases.

In detention centers, official secrecy and incomplete reporting can obscure both the circumstances of deaths and the abuses and suffering to which migrants are subjected. That invisibility helps sustain the fiction that detention is merely an administrative necessity rather than a form of state violence. The violence of confinement does not take the form of a bullet fired in public but that of a man pinned down until he cannot breathe, another beaten for asking for food, families separated, people subjected to degrading conditions, and treatable illnesses left unattended until they become fatal.

Trump first promoted the idea of detention as a necessity when he launched his 2016 presidential campaign, claiming that immigrants were “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.” His administration has continued to portray immigrants as violent gang members, cartel operatives, and hardened criminals from whom the public must be protected. In Trump’s words, those arrested by ICE are the “worst of the worst.”

But the government’s own detention practices tell a different story. Of the nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested during the administration’s first year, fewer than 14% had been accused or convicted of a violent offense, while almost two in five had no criminal record at all. In fact, some of those portrayed as the “worst of the worst” have been children. In Trump’s second term, over 6,200 people under the age of 18 have been detained. Detention does not merely respond to an actual risk to public safety; by confining people, it helps manufacture the appearance of it.

A history of hysteria and detention

This pattern has deep historical roots. Since the federal government began confining immigrants, detention has been driven less by migrants’ actual conduct than by the particular hysterias of the moment. The feared population has changed — from Chinese migrants to alleged foreign radicals to Cuban refugees to the immigrants targeted today — but the logic has remained the same: first portray a group as a threat, and then use that supposed threat to make its confinement appear necessary.

Federal immigration detention first took shape alongside anti-Chinese exclusion. During the 1870s, white workers in California blamed Chinese immigrants for unemployment, low wages, and declining living standards. These accusations drew power from longstanding portrayals of Chinese people as heathen, immoral, diseased, and incapable of belonging in the United States. In response, Congress passed the Page Act of 1875, which was used especially to exclude Chinese women suspected of prostitution, and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred Chinese laborers from entering the country while permitting only limited exempt classes to enter. Economic resentment had hardened into a racial and moral panic backed by federal law.

Exclusion required confinement. Chinese migrants whose right to enter was questioned were held in county jails, aboard ships, and eventually in dedicated detention quarters. In San Francisco, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company converted the second floor of a wooden warehouse into a locked detention shed. Its few screened windows offered little light or ventilation; hundreds of people were crowded onto grimy floors and four-tier bunks, and detainees ate without tables or chairs.

Angel Island, which opened in 1910, subjected Chinese immigrants to invasive examinations, interrogations, and detentions that could last for months or even years. The confinement itself sometimes proved fatal: some detainees died by suicide rather than face continued imprisonment or deportation. What made these conditions politically acceptable was not evidence that each person posed a threat. Racial panic cast Chinese migrants as a menace before they had even arrived.

A “Red Scare” supplied the next justification for mass confinement. During 1919 and 1920, the Russian Revolution, widespread labor unrest, and a series of bombings attributed to militant anarchists fed government fears that foreign-born radicals planned to overthrow the government. Although the bombings were real, officials used them to cast suspicion on a much broader range of political movements and associations.

Officials, employers, and newspapers blurred together anarchism, communism, union activism, and immigrant identity, often treating political beliefs, organizational membership, or attendance at meetings as evidence that an individual belonged to a revolutionary conspiracy. Palmer’s own language revealed the breadth and prejudice of that campaign: he claimed to be ridding the country of the “moral perverts and hysterical neurasthenic women who abound in communism.” His words cast communists not simply as people suspected of illegal acts but as morally and psychologically defective enemies whose identities and beliefs alone made them inherently suspect.

Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer’s agents, working with local police, arrested or briefly detained an estimated 10,000 people, often without warrants. The raids concentrated on immigrant political organizations, and during its first eight months the Justice Department’s Radical Division prepared 6,396 deportation cases against noncitizens. Many of those targeted came from Italy and Eastern Europe, including territories of the former Russian Empire, and belonged to Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Jewish communities.

The government confined many noncitizens facing deportation at sites including Ellis Island in New York and Deer Island in Boston. At Deer Island, detainees endured freezing, overcrowded, and unsanitary conditions. One man died after jumping from the prison’s fifth floor, another was committed to an asylum, and others were reportedly driven close to psychological collapse. At Ellis Island, prominent anarchist Emma Goldman described how the “quarters were congested, the food was abominable, and [we] were treated like felons.” Political dissent, organizational affiliation, labor activism, and foreign birth were frequently treated as evidence of individual culpability.

World War II and beyond

Two decades later, during World War II, wartime hysteria showed that foreign birth was not even necessary: Japanese ancestry alone could lead the government to treat American citizens as alien threats and incarcerate them. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, military officials and politicians claimed, without evidence of widespread espionage or sabotage, that West Coast residents of Japanese descent posed a collective threat to national security, whether they were U.S. citizens or immigrants.

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which was used to forcibly remove and incarcerate approximately 120,000 people, about two-thirds of whom were American citizens by birth. Indeed, a 1982 congressional committee concluded that incarceration resulted not from military necessity but from “race prejudice, war hysteria and a failure of political leadership.” Here too, confinement proved deadly: inadequate and delayed medical care contributed to preventable deaths.

The government itself eventually demonstrated that mass immigrant detention was not necessary. In 1954, the Eisenhower administration closed Ellis Island and other seaport detention facilities and began releasing most migrants on parole or bond while their cases proceeded. The average detained population fell sharply, and for more than two decades long-term confinement remained unusual.

Immigrants in the men’s dormitory at Ellis Island

As I show in my book, In the Shadow of Liberty, the panic surrounding the Mariel Boatlift helped reverse that approach. Between April and October 1980, nearly 125,000 Cubans traveled from the port of Mariel, Cuba, to Florida. Americans initially celebrated their departure as a rejection of Fidel Castro and communism. The welcome quickly changed after Castro claimed that Cuba had sent criminals and psychiatric patients among the exiles.

News coverage shifted from the “Freedom Flotilla” to warnings of a criminal invasion, focusing especially on the young Black and brown men whose appearance differed from earlier, largely white Cuban migrants. Although some arrivals had been imprisoned in Cuba, most of those had committed only minor offenses or had been confined under vague political categories such as “social dangerousness.” Sensational claims that Mariel had brought an army of violent criminals had little factual basis.

Nevertheless, the government sent thousands of the arrivals to military bases for processing and resettlement. Many remained confined because they lacked sponsors, who became increasingly difficult to find as press coverage portrayed the Mariel Cubans as criminal and undesirable. They lived in barracks under armed supervision. Queer and gender-nonconforming Cubans were placed in segregated dormitories. When some detainees protested or attempted to leave Fort Chaffee, a military base in Arkansas, Frank White, then running for governor, used footage of the unrest to depict Mariel Cubans as a threat to public safety and argue that Governor Bill Clinton had failed to protect the state’s residents.

The vast majority of Mariel arrivals were eventually released to sponsors but approximately 400 men who could not secure sponsors willing to support them financially as they established themselves in the United States were sent to the maximum-security federal penitentiary in Atlanta. They were to remain incarcerated without hope of ever being released or deported, as Cuba would not accept them back, and without having been accused of committing a crime.

By then, Americans had come to fear the Mariel exiles so deeply that few objected to their prolonged confinement. Even the Cuban American community, which had vigorously supported previous Cuban immigrants, remained for the most part silent about the imprisonment of Mariel Cubans. Indefinite detention had come to seem not exceptional or unjust, but necessary and normal. Just like other sites of detention, the Atlanta penitentiary, as well as other federal prisons that opened up to hold Mariel exiles were sites of preventable death through inadequate medical care, violence by guards, and suicides driven by prolonged confinement and the absence of any clear prospect of release.

As we have seen, the history of detention has never been a straightforward response to the conduct of particular migrants. From the anti-Chinese panic and the Red Scare to wartime anti-Japanese racism and the criminalization of Mariel Cubans, the government has repeatedly used particular events, allegations, or fears to cast entire groups as threats and confine them.

This incarceration, in turn, has made those sweeping characterizations appear justified. Today’s anti-immigrant hysteria takes a different form, but it performs similar work: it casts migrants as criminals and allows the public to turn away from what occurs behind detention walls, where families are separated, people endure brutal conditions and medical neglect, and some die. The walls conceal the suffering, but the rhetoric of criminality has already taught many people not to care. We should not look away. No matter what form it takes, state violence must never be allowed to remain beyond public scrutiny.