Mass Immigrant Detention from the 19th Century to Today

We are far from the height of immigrant detentions, when more than 55,000 migrants were locked up on any given day, but the rate of immigrant incarceration has been skyrocketing in recent months. If this trend continues, President Biden will be responsible for squandering an opportunity to end mass immigrant detention and returning to the decades long cruel and inhumane bipartisan policy of locking up people whose only crime is seeking a better life for themselves and their families.

The long history of immigrant detention in the United States stretches back to the late nineteenth century when Chinese migrants were locked up pending deportation. The numbers of migrants put behind bars has ebbed and flowed over the course of the twentieth century, and the places in which they have been incarcerated has also varied.

In the early twentieth century, most foreign-born people were held in mental hospitals, with relatively few in jails and prisons or immigrant detention. By the late twentieth century, as mental hospitals were shuttered, more and more migrants ended up in jails, prisons and immigrant detention facilities. The number of people in immigrant detention has soared in recent decades, reaching half a million per year under President Trump.

According to data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, the highpoint for daily immigrant detention was reached in August 2019, when more than 55,000 were being detained. Since then, the numbers dropped, reaching around 38,000 just before the Covid-19 pandemic, and then steeply declining to just under 14,000 by the end of March 2021. What is noteworthy about this trend is that migrant detentions began falling before the pandemic, and that they continued their drop under both Trump and Biden. Unfortunately, immigrant detentions have begun a dramatic increase in recent months, almost doubling from the end of March to end of June to over 26,000 per day.

Added to these disturbing incarceration trends is that the fact that the vast majority of deported migrants are being expelled through Title 42, a 1944 Public Health Service Act that allows for expedited removal without the normal safeguards to protect asylum seekers. In fact, such expulsions grew from around 70,000 a month under Trump to well over 100,000 a month, March-May under Biden. In just seven months of FY 21, almost 650,000 migrants have been removed through Title 42.

As Adam Goodman shows in Deportation Machine, there have always been various forms of expulsion that are not neatly captured by just looking at formal deportations. A Washington Post article in May ran with a headline “ICE deportations in April fell to lowest monthly level on record,” suggesting that deportations were at an all-time low, but that’s only true is one ignores Title 42 expulsions.

My book Forever Prisoners reveals that mass immigrant detention has been around for a long time, and although its shape has shifted, rising and falling, Democrats and Republicans have been equally responsible for a policy of locking of up migrants. As we move beyond the honeymoon with President Biden, it’s worth keeping track of the hundreds of thousands of migrants being pushed out of the country and the increasing numbers of them being locked up in detention centers.

Chart based on data from Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).