Completely uncontroversial statements about Donald J. Trump are vanishingly rare these days, but I think I can propose one: Trump isn’t exactly known for his powers of attention. During his four years as president, it was nearly impossible for him to focus on any policy question for very long — something that even his most committed supporters would be hard-pressed to deny.
But amid all the mind-wandering, flip-flopping and havoc-wreaking, there happened to be one node of unwavering consistency: a fixation on borders and immigration that was remarkably tenacious. Build walls, ban Muslims, separate families — Trump has suggested he would do all that again and more if he wins in November. His language is also becoming ever more violent. He now vilifies migrants as “animals” who are “poisoning the blood of our country.”
This escalation dovetails with Trump’s demonstrated predilections. He has always been drawn to the soft spots in the democratic system, to those areas that would allow him to wield the kind of absolute power he insists he is entitled to, and immigration policy is perhaps the softest target of all.
Unlike American citizens, who are protected by constitutional rights (and have legal recourse if those rights are violated), immigrants are exceptionally vulnerable to government power. Even the right to due process is inconsistently applied to them, and sometimes denied altogether. Migrants have been locked up without explanation. They have been locked up for being “likely to become a public charge.” They have been locked up and never accused of committing any crime at all.
As Ana Raquel Minian explains in a new book, “In the Shadow of Liberty: The History of Immigration Detention in the United States,” the American government has a long record of detaining migrants in places that are, legally speaking, black sites. “Every day in the heart of the self-described ‘greatest democracy on earth,’” Minian writes, “people are incarcerated without charges for indefinite periods of time, under horrific conditions and without basic constitutional protections.”
Such accusations might sound like the heated hyperbole of a polemicist, but Minian, a historian at Stanford who uses they/them pronouns, meticulously lays out their case. “In the Shadow of Liberty” traces immigration detention from the late 1800s through the present day. In 2018, many Americans were understandably shocked when they learned that the Trump administration was separating migrant parents from their children. Those migrants were seeking asylum, and so were not breaking the law. But what Minian wants to show is how family separation was part of a much larger detention system, designed to be palpably intimidating to migrants while comfortably invisible to the rest of us. “Trump’s policy of using family separation as a deterrence method simply extended a strategy that had been the norm for decades.”
Minian, who, in addition to archival research, conducted more than 100 oral history interviews, settled on the stories of four figures: Fu Chi Hao, a Christian who fled China in 1901, during the Boxer Rebellion; Ellen Knauff, a Holocaust survivor and wife of an American G.I. who was detained for more than three years on Ellis Island in the late 1940s; Gerardo Mansur, who landed in the United States in 1980, one of the 21,611 Cubans who arrived as part of the Mariel boatlift; and Fernando Arredondo, who fled gang violence in Guatemala with his family in 2017 and was separated from his 12-year-old daughter at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Minian recounts their experiences in detail, braiding the narratives in alternating chapters, the better to depict each person in full. The structure is also rhetorically effective: It’s only by looking closely at the strange twists in each individual’s trajectory that a reader can get a sense of how the immigration system actually works in practice — as well as how absurd and arbitrary it can be.
Of Minian’s principal subjects, only one, Mansur, was detained after being accused a crime: possessing marijuana, in his case, less than an ounce. He and his wife, a fellow Cuban immigrant, were arrested and separated from each other and from their two young children, who were put in foster care. Fu, despite his valiant efforts to protect American missionaries in China and despite having received an invitation to study at Oberlin College, was detained over issues with his paperwork, the details of which were apparently never made clear to him. Knauff was locked up at Ellis Island not knowing why or for how long she would be held there; a few months later, she learned that American officials suspected her of being a spy, a rumor started by her husband’s ex-girlfriend. In August 2018, Arredondo was sent back to Guatemala; the government had disobeyed a judge’s order and deported him.
How is any of this possible? Minian gives a short explainer on what’s known as the “entry fiction,” the doctrine that migrants who land on American soil are not actually in the country proper but are in an “extraterritorial limbo” that is an extension of the border. The same goes for detention sites, a number of which are “deep in the heartland,” or, as in the case of Guantánamo, are categorically under American control. While migrants are detained, “they are treated as if they are not here,” Minian writes. “Since they are ‘not here,’ detainees are not guaranteed basic constitutional protections — even when subjected to the laws and forces of the state.”
“Here” but “not here” — this legal no-man’s-land means that migrants who have been wrongfully detained have often had to rely on media attention to publicize their plight. Minian’s book is dotted with examples of American citizens recoiling once they learned that their government was detaining people in a manner that seemed dismayingly redolent of an authoritarian regime. For more than a quarter century, from 1954 to 1980, American officials turned away from detention, toward what one described at the time as a more “humane administration of immigration laws.” The rivalry of the Cold War helped, forcing Americans to recognize that the country’s reputation was at stake. But public opinion soured after the Mariel boat lift, Minian says, when the Reagan administration reintroduced detention in 1981 — not just as a matter of policy, but as a form of deterrence.
“In the Shadow of Liberty” is an effort at moral suasion, written with the explicit purpose of moving readers to pay attention to the cruelty that is meted out in their name. In the book’s acknowledgments, Minian thanks the historian Jill Lepore, “who suggested I write this book in the first place and taught me the importance of narrative.” Storytelling allows Minian to convey the physical and emotional toll of detention with potent specificity. The result is a book-length plea against dehumanization, at least for those who are willing to listen.
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