People in Cold Storage: The Cruel Limbos of Historical and Current Detainees in the United States

Abstract

People in Cold Storage:The Cruel Limbos of Historical and Current Detainees in the United States Lori A. Flores (bio) Elliott Young, Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World's Largest Immigrant Detention System. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. xi + 280 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95 The Oxford definition of limbo is "an uncertain period of awaiting a decision or resolution" or "a state of neglect or oblivion." Some synonyms are: unfinished, incomplete, suspended, put off, on ice, in cold storage, abandoned, forgotten. In the realm of immigration, the word and act of deportation have a sense of decisiveness to them. Yet half a million people are detained in the U.S. every year, and the conditions of detention are much more mysterious and liminal, and intentionally designed to be so (p. 18). In Forever Prisoners, Elliott Young homes in on case studies of communal and individual detention in the United States from the nineteenth century to the present. He seeks to prove how the country's two vast systems of policing and immigrant detention have been inextricably linked during this entire time period, and not just in recent decades. Over the centuries, the United States has used different places to incarcerate immigrants—prisons, islands, insane asylums, hastily-constructed camps—and maintained an historical and consistent concern about detaining foreigners to the point that "[r]oughly the same proportion of immigrants were deprived of their liberty then as now" (p. 7). Young's book joins other recent works that tie carceral history and immigration history together, including Adam Goodman's The Deportation Machine (2020), Laura Briggs's Taking Children (2020), Jenna M. Loyd and Alison Mountz's Boats, Borders, and Bases (2018), and Kelly Lytle-Hernández's City of Inmates (2017). Structurally, through "select granular experiences of detention" that cross time, space, and different foreign populations, Young shows readers how America "built the world's largest system for imprisoning immigrants" (p. 3). Beginning in the late nineteenth century at the height of anti-Chinese violence and xenophobia, the U.S. government held hundreds of Chinese people in federal prisons off the coast of Washington State, with unpredictable waits [End Page 217] before their deportations. Meanwhile, on the East Coast during the early twentieth century, the intertwined medical pathologization and criminalization of immigrants made insane asylums, hospitals, and "charitable" institutions the new detention centers for thousands of foreigners. Then, during World War II, the U.S. abducted "enemy aliens" from Latin America and Europe and placed them in immigrant detention/labor camps in Texas and New Mexico. The 1980s brought waves of darker-skinned and poorer refugees from the Caribbean, and the U.S. government held over 125,000 Cubans and 23,000 Haitians, prolonging determination on their cases to examine their criminal histories. A confluence of factors in the 1990s—greater militarization of the U.S.-Mexico border, governmental expansion of the range of crimes for which immigrants could be deported, and courts' hyper-punishment of low-level offenses—amplified what Juliet Stumpf has termed "crimmigration," or the merging of criminal and immigration law in America (p. 12). With local police now given federal powers to arrest and detain immigrants, millions of people live, work, and parent in fear of being apprehended every day. Ending with the case of a Central American woman haunted by a crime in her California youth that triggered her deportation a decade later and the separation from her U.S.-born children, Young illustrates the plight of numerous mixed-immigration-status families in America. Chapter One drops readers two miles off the coast of Tacoma, Washington on McNeil Island, a territorial jail that opened in 1875 with just three prisoners but soon became "the western birthplace of immigrant incarceration" (p. 24). Angel Island has received more scholarly attention, but unauthorized Chinese, Mexican, Canadian, and other immigrants were sent to McNeil for several decades. The island joined a nationwide network of carceral institutions (jails, workhouses, prisons) that held a disproportionate population of foreigners at the turn of the twentieth century. By the 1920s, Young observes, illegal entry had fallen away as the primary recorded violation for immigrants in favor of...