The hidden history of US immigration detention

Welcome to the History Extra podcast. By the middle of December 2025, more than 68,400 people were being held in immigration detention in the United States, according to figures published by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. This is a detention system that relies on the use of many local jails, and today's guest, Brianna Nofel, has written a book showing that this is nothing new. The federal government has been detaining migrants in city and county jails for more than a hundred years.

In this episode, she speaks to Eleanor Evans about the historical pressures and factors that have shaped the world's largest system of migrant incarceration and explores how it remains a defining and deeply contested feature of American immigration policy today. We are here today to talk about the long history of this type of detention and the people that it's affected through the last century or so. Could you introduce our listeners to the scope of your new book? Yes. My book is called The Migrants Jail, an American History of Mass Incarceration.

And it looks at the the very deep roots of migrant detention in the United States. Even though migrant detention is at an absolutely sort of unprecedented scale, Today, the US has been using incarceration as a tool of border control and a tool to facilitate deportations for basically as long as the US has had restrictive immigration law. So my book begins in the 1880s with the Chinese Exclusion Act, which is the US's first law. that really significantly restricts who can immigrate to the United States.

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