The Long History of the U.S. Outsourcing Immigrant Detention to Latin America

    On April 15, 1942, the Emergency Advisory Committee for Political Defense held its first meeting in Montevideo, Uruguay. The U.S. State Department had created this group, initially made up of representatives from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Uruguay and Venezuela, “for the protection of their security and solidarity against hostile acts of political warfare, particularly the totalitarian activity of the Axis powers and their agents and sympathizers.”1 By 1943, the Advisory Committee, representing all countries in the Americas, had recommended a resolution that called for “continuous detention” of all “dangerous nationals” of Axis powers within their territories.” Detention camps could be established in each country or the “enemy aliens” could be deported to the U.S. where they would be held or used for prisoner exchanges.” By 1943, at least 16 Latin American countries carried out such detention policies against 8,500 Axis nationals, 6,500 of whom were interned in Latin America and 2,000 were sent to the U.S. When the war ended, more than 6,400 Japanese, Germans and Italians living in twelve Latin American countries had been forcibly brought to the U.S. under the Enemy Alien Control Program.2 There was no evidence that the Japanese, Germans and Italians who were kidnapped were working on behalf of Axis powers, and yet they remained locked up even after the war had ended with no recourse to the courts or to justice.

There is a long history of the U.S. pressuring Latin American countries to enforce its geopolitical goals and immigration restrictions. In the late nineteenth century, the U.S. pushed Mexico, Canada and Cuba to ban Chinese laborers following the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act. More recently, the U.S. has been funneling hundreds of millions of dollars to Mexico to detain and deport Central Americans. From 2002 to 2017, Mexico arrested, detained, and deported more than 1.9 million Central Americans (from three Northern Triangle countries: El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras). This is more than double the number of Central Americans than the U.S. deported during the same time period. As Vice President Kamala Harris heads to Central America on Sunday to try to prevent migration from the region to the U.S., it is important to remember the much longer trajectory of the U.S. outsourcing its harsh migration policies to Latin American countries.