"The Sheriff Grows Fat"

“In 1903 a journalist for Collier’s magazine wrote, “The sheriff grows fat on this sort of boarding house and is eager to get all the Chinese boarders he can find….[N]ine-tenths of the $4 per week he gets in clear profit.” The article was about the fact that the federal government then paid New York county jails $4 per week to imprison accused Chinese immigration violators, caught attempting to enter the U.S. via Canada. Now, over one hundred years later, not much has changed: the federal government still pays, directly or indirectly, city and county jails millions of dollars to house migrants.

Standing on the shoulders of giants, Prof. Brianna Nofil shines a painfully brilliant light on the extent to which the Department of Homeland Security, via Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), still relies on local jails for migrant detention. In The Migrant’s Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration (Princeton University Press, 2024) Prof. Nofil lays bare the very old practice of housing federal immigration “detainees” in city and county jails…and the politics and profit motive behind the practice.”

Those are the opening two paragraphs of my review of Prof. Nofil’s brilliant new book. Please read the review, and buy the book.

More notes here, and a podcast here.

Thank you.

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