In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States

In this harrowing account of immigrants’ experiences in American detention centers, Stanford historian Minian (Undocumented Lives) outlines the central role incarceration has played in the past century of U.S. immigration policy. In 2018, furor over Donald Trump’s family separation policy led to a wellspring of outrage over the punitive conditions of immigrant detention, but Minian demonstrates that “Guantánamo-like facilities have arisen in towns and cities across America since the nineteenth century” and that the U.S. has long been “crisscrossed by a vast network of facilities where people are detained without basic rights.” She tells this history through profiles of four immigrants, among them Fu Chi Hao, who in 1901 fled Christian repression in China and, after a monthslong detention in unsanitary conditions upon entering the U.S., endured a costly, burdensome, and years-long parole process, and Ellen Knauff, the German wife of a U.S. soldier, who arrived in 1948 and was incarcerated on Ellis Island for nearly two years. Minian’s up-close narration of her subjects’ lives brings home the intimate and unbearable human suffering of incarceration, and her analysis is fueled by anger at both the hypocrisy of a country that denies freedom-seeking immigrants their liberty and the fickleness of protestors who no longer care about immigrant detention (in 2022, America detained approximately 307,000 immigrants). It’s a must-read for anyone invested in U.S. immigration policy. (Apr.)