The Means and Meanings of Carceral Mobility

U.S. Deportation Trains and the Early Twentieth-Century Deportation Assemblage

ETHAN BLUE

Immigrant restriction and selective criminalization after the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act impeded but never stopped migrants displaced by the forces of racial capitalism and empire from seeking opportunities in the United States. Indeed, the long lesson of multiple American restrictive immigration policies simply forced travel underground and along what many came to call the “crooked path” of covert migration.1 Yet as migrants ventured from their points of entry into their respective American hinterlands, the border traveled with them. The threat of capture and deportation helped secure national territory in the transition from a period of settler conquest to social management within a broadly, if always incompletely, pacified territory, attempting to control precisely who the settlers in this settler colonial regime would be.

This chapter examines the early twentieth-century history of American deportation, and especially the novel technical innovation in the technologies of rail travel for deportation for their contribution to the emergence of modern carceral mobilities in the rise of the American carceral state.2 Trains and the rail network knit together North America as an integrated settler capitalist economy at the nexus of the Atlantic and Pacific worlds, at the same time they produced new forms of dominance and difference.3 Analysis of the deportation train offers both a transnational history of carceral regimes that crossed and reified borders through coercive state power and a spatial history of places where border policing and state formation took particularly strident turns. Other modern states have employed violence, imprisonment, and forced removal, but the scale and suppleness of modern U.S. state powers of biopolitical abjection and spatial elimination—as a white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, settler-colonial, liberal capitalist democracy—mark a unique place on that spectrum.

Removing people from national settler space required the development and sustenance of an infrastructure that was simultaneously local, regional, national, and transnational. Infrastructures are, as Brian Larkin has argued, “matter that enable the movement of other matter”; they are “things and also the relation between things.”4 As a material infrastructure, the deportation train compressed what had been vast continental time and distance. At Angel Island and Ellis Island, it interlaced with transoceanic shipping lines and their respective formal and informal European and Asian continental transport networks.5 As a political infrastructure, deportation produced new administrative pathways (enabled by the new application of telegraphy through use of the telegraphic arrest and deportation warrant) between municipal, state, and federal government.

Despite the deportation infrastructure’s vast spatial distribution, as David Manuel Hernández argues in this volume, the struggles and conflicts in the North American West and Pacific border states, and particularly at the moment of this infrastructure’s emergence, set a foundation on which the U.S. deportation regime would build in the coming century. To be sure, nineteenth-century settler-citizen anxiety in the Pacific borderlands revised prior forms of anti-Catholic nativism and rearticulated Southern notions of controlling blackness and freed peoples’ postbellum travels.6 But at the turn of the twentieth century, they largely congealed around—but were not reducible to—the complex of antipathies around anti-Chinese ethnoracial hatred.

These broad dynamics of settler colonial reaction to nonwhite immigration would, in many respects, characterize what scholars have identified as Sunbelt conservatism in the second half of the twentieth century. Recent scholarly debates about the Sunbelt revisit older discussions about the nature of space, place, and region. They question whether the Sunbelt as a category of analysis maintains geographic coherence and assess its uniqueness relative to other similarly contested regions and heuristic geographies.7 And though many of the aforementioned issues arose most stridently in the U.S. Pacific state borderlands (northern and southern), the issues traveled quickly. Wherever noncitizen migrants settled in—or passed through—ethnic enclaves or among broader multiethnic communities nearer or further from national ports and borders, the complex dialectic of anti-immigrant movement beckoned. The border would inhere within migrants’ bodies wherever they went, prompting a politico-spatial introgression of the border, in which the “regulation of national boundaries is not confined to the nation-state’s physical or territorial border but extends into the territorial interior as well.”8 The border could erupt wherever a migrant confronted the law’s multifarious apparatus of capture, each linked to the carceral-regulatory regimes affiliated with multiple, intersecting categories of difference: madness, criminality, poverty, and radicalism, all of which articulated with “sexuality [as] an iteration of—and amendment to and of—race.”9

By Pacific State borderlands, I refer to the Pacific Coast states and also extend them to encompass not just seaports but also the land borders than extended eastward from the coast across the Canadian Rockies to the Great Plains to the north, and along the U.S.–Mexico border, ill-defined as it remained, from Tijuana to Brownsville. But this is only part of the story, because immigrants landed in complex worlds in which ethnoracial and spatial boundaries commonly overlapped. American cities, large and small, near or far from the border, were also thick with richly variegated borderland spaces. Workplaces often contributed to ethnoracial hierarchies, but in street-corner interactions and popular culture venues, in bars and restaurants to rooming houses and prisons, multiple communities overlapped and intermingled, with various degrees of conviviality, intimacy, antagonism, and banality.10

The capacious instability of any regional designation in which to firmly center the deportation infrastructure stresses how in this period, travelers from the Pacific world—the United States’ broader (aspirational) colonial domain—found reactionary state and racial formations wherever they set foot. New York’s Chinatown was as much of a Pacific site as San Francisco’s; Pittsburgh’s Mexican enclaves saw borderland struggles akin to those in Brownsville. And just as Pacific border struggles could erupt in the Midwest or Atlantic seaboard, so too could the Atlantic world’s means of control extend west—a bar in Gary, Indiana, rehearsed Ellis Island’s aversion to supposed Greek sexual immorality; a hospital in Pasco, Washington, became a staging ground to expel a disabled Englishman; a brothel in Portland, Oregon, was the site of a French woman’s exclusion. For Europeans, the border hovered along with their contextual proximities to whiteness, but that distance threatened to collapse with a brush with the carceral state. For migrants of color, the border was everywhere. With capacities for capture ever more finely cast, and technologies of removal ascendant and durable, deportability became an ontological state.11

Expansive U.S. anti-immigrant legislation would be enforced by the deportation regime’s new administrative policing and welfare apparatuses, operating across the full complexity of governance identified by scholars in American political development and in new histories of the U.S. state.12 It was characteristic of the Progressive and New Deal Eras’ faith in the benevolence of experts’ coercion; a humanistic, racially gendered, hierarchal regulation of health, force, and arrangement of bodies in space (from urban to carceral and national space) lasting well into the twentieth century.13 Federal agents in the Department of Labor were in command of the trains, but they used newfound regulatory leverage and the promise of lucrative contracts to ensure cooperation from large-scale for-profit capitalist transport firms.14 Armed guards, either federal immigration officers or private railroad guards, threatened violence to police the space of the train. But the trains also employed physicians and matrons to extend liberal coercive care. In this, the deportation regime’s combination of governmental-based force, medical coercion, and private security recapitulated the multiple elements of border policing and control.

The deportation train featured controls that were redolent of the prison, the border, the asylum, and other stationary carceral spaces. But because the trains were mobile, some means of control, and of subversion, were unique. To this end, this chapter answers carceral geographers’ calls to examine the “subjugating nature of many everyday mobilities,” as well as to chart how carceral mobility affected opportunities for opposition.15 Moving across multiple scales of mobility, the chapter begins by tracing the legal foundations as well as the practical mechanics of forced national and international travel. In doing so, it understands the Pacific Coast and border states as laboratories for new technologies of racial formation and means of policing national territories. In the end, this chapter asks how these mobile, carceral spaces functioned as sites of struggle, on micropolitical as well as macropolitical scales.16 What structural and human features imparted turbulence in what the state hoped would be the frictionless dynamics of deportation?17 To understand the coercive mobility of deportation and the physical structure and infrastructure of the deportation train, logistics, speed, flow, fixity, and turbulence must be added to historians’ critical lexicon. Carceral studies—expanded here beyond the commonsense understanding of the prison to including mental asylums, county jails, hospitals, and workhouses, because the deportation infrastructure’s assemblage linked them all—requires a “mobility turn,” just as mobility studies need more direct reckoning with diverse modes of imprisonment. Deportation is one place to begin.18

Roots and Routes of Deportability: From Border Regulation to the Flow of Removal

For much of the late nineteenth century and into the twentieth, the United States government’s immigration services focused its attention on screening migrants, first at the nation’s ports and soon thereafter at its land borders. Federal immigration restrictions expanded from excluding the Chinese to prohibiting the entry of a range of other unwelcome peoples—prostitutes, criminals, contract workers, anarchists, and those deemed mentally or biologically unfit. Deportation provisions were written into the laws passed between 1891 and 1924, which extended the categories of deportable peoples and the time periods of chargeable offenses that would mandate removal. Yet deportation procedures remained remarkably disorganized, with few actual mechanisms to specify how deportation would work or who would pay for it. Despite mounting nativist furor, deportation remained disorganized, with a few hundred migrants deported each year after 1892. After the length during which immigrants could be deported was legally extended in 1907, the pace increased, and deportees would number in the thousands rather than the hundreds.19 This changed again when the federal government realized the utility of the transcontinental railroad train—perhaps the exemplary technology of industrial modernity—as a means of mass deportation. With the discovery of the train as an efficient means of moving large numbers of people, the federal government developed the bureaucratic and technological capacities necessary to sustain an international deportation network and a viable threat to control noncitizens.20 When the first transcontinental “deportation parties” were institutionalized in 1914, expulsion reached a new high. Anti-immigrant fervor surrounding the Mexican Revolution and World War I deepened animosities. Moreover, the trains helped exclusionists imagine deportation as a new disciplinary tool, becoming what John Higham called an “absolute weapon against the foreign-born radical.”21 Deportations accelerated with the war’s end and put literal steel into the Immigration Acts of 1917 and 1924, materializing policy through motive force. Indeed, deportation, along with censorship and imprisonment, became powerful enforcement mechanisms behind the “100-percent Americanism” programs of the 1920s. Moreover, and drawing once again on anti-Chinese precedent, the practices were unencumbered by such niceties as judicial review.22 There were eleven transcontinental train trips between April 1914 and February 1916, nine in 1921, and nineteen in 1931.23 In the 1930s, some trains would carry as many as six hundred unwilling passengers, on twenty-two different cars.24

Building State Capacity: Genealogies of Public–Private Partnership in Global Mobility and Restriction

When the federal government began its special transcontinental deportation parties in 1914, it had neither the human capital nor infrastructural capacity to administer deportation. But this is by no means to assert that it was a “weak” state. Rather, its considerable strength grew through its collaboration with large transportation firms, notably Southern Pacific Railroad, but also others, for the people and the material required for deportation’s complex infrastructure and its methods of policing international migration.

Private firms had long played key roles in the enactment of administrative power.25 Immigration laws passed as early as 1645 held ship’s captains or owners accountable for the suitability of their human cargo and liable for fines if they carried excludable peoples.26 The Chinese Exclusion Act and the Geary Act virtually replicated the language of their seventeenth-century antecedents, holding ships’ captains liable for the fitness of their human cargo, but neither customs officials nor transnational shipping firms made many provisions for where or how such travelers would be detained. Initially, Chinese migrants were held on board the steamships that brought them or shuttled to another private ship or floating hulk while the documents claiming suitability were examined. In 1898, the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, which held a monopoly of transpacific passenger traffic for much of the nineteenth century, opened a detention shed on the dock on San Francisco’s Pier 40. Detained migrants were housed by private firms, guarded by private guards, and kept in private detention centers. Firms used their financial as well as coercive capacity to help police national borders. Angel Island was opened as a federally administered immigrant detention center only in 1910, nearly three decades after the Exclusion era began.27 But even then, transportation firms had to pay for detainees’ upkeep while they were under investigation, which made the governance of Angel Island a public–private matter.

The same was true for deportation. Deportation trains were a materially and financially hybrid public–private space. When deportation trains were first used in 1914, federal immigration services did not yet have their own train cars, and consequently, they used special cars provided by Southern Pacific or other private firms. Yet some immigration officials reported that Southern Pacific’s were “not entirely satisfactory.” The first sets of eastbound European deportees were typically conveyed in ordinary Pullman tourist cars, which contained few material features to either prevent escape or segregate the contagious and insane from less dangerous deportees. Tourist cars were updated versions of the mid-nineteenth-century emigrant cars intended for working-class and middle-class customers—more comfortable than the earlier generation but a far cry from the domestic opulence that wealthier travelers might find on the suite of sleepers, parlor cars, libraries, and dining cars that Pullman could provide.28 Southern Pacific would soon prove to be a well-suited partner in helping with (and profiting from) deportation traffic. Southern Pacific would soon develop and refine its own “prison cars.”29 The genealogy of those cars was revealing.30

To make its prison cars, Southern Pacific reconfigured Pullman tourist coaches by covering the windows with steel mesh and staffing coaches with armed guards.31 The firm owed its developments in profitability and human control to the role it played in updating the nineteenth century’s “coolie” trade. Indeed, Southern Pacific began carrying contract Chinese laborers aboard these cars from San Francisco to New Orleans, and then by sea to Cuba, to work in the island’s booming sugar and molasses industries.32 Despite the exclusions against the Chinese and others from the Asiatic Barred Zone after the 1917 immigration act, international law required that those otherwise denied entry would still be permitted the “privilege of transit” through U.S. territory—a fact that many migrants used to evade immigration law.33 Yet Southern Pacific would do all that it could to prevent escapes—thus the bars and the guards. Moreover, transportation firms were required to post large, blanket bonds to Immigration Services and pay a $500 penalty to the U.S. government for any transit Chinese who might escape from trains or remain in the country longer than twenty days. This monetary penalty helped to compel railroad firms’ control of in-transit Chinese. It did not mean they were always successful.34

The significance of Southern Pacific’s efforts to physically control in-transit Chinese bound for Cuba carried on beyond the rattling walls of the prison car. It resonated with the very meanings and experiences of national territory and law and would, as we will see, carry over into the deportation regime. In-transit Chinese, bound by contracts, locked in prison cars, and under the oversight of Southern Pacific’s private guards, may have been spatially in the United States, but they were not legally of the United States. These prison cars were, in some sense, then, an extraterritorial domain folded within but distinct from the nation’s geopolitical space.35 In-transit Chinese had few rights that the nation was bound to respect, for their legally acknowledged entry could permit their ability to make claims for belonging, to demand the right to have rights, as when Chinese legal advocates filed habeas corpus writs demanding justification of their imprisonment or removal.36 States are generally held to be the sovereign arbiters of rights claims (and denials), and thus it is doubly striking that private firms like Southern Pacific were responsible for enforcing travelers’ extraterritorial, mobile confinement across the United States. Scholars might pose an analytical distinction between infrastructural and despotic state power, but for deportees, they were one and the same.

Running the Train: Staff, Guards, Doctors

Despite the fact that Southern Pacific provided the prison cars used for deportation, the capital investment in this specialized equipment, and much of the staff, the “deportation party” was overseen by a chief deportation agent, appointed by the Immigration Bureau. The deportation agent was responsible for the general administration of the train, planning the route of the deportation journey, and ensuring that all deportees were duly loaded, that their paperwork was kept, and that they were ultimately delivered to Angel Island, Ellis Island, or an official land border port of entry for deportation. Leo Russell was an early chief deportation officer. Russell oversaw a number of guards—usually four per car—but also the physicians and matrons who would oversee physically or mentally unwell deportees.

Embracing Progressive notions of expertise, as a handful of scholars have shown, and as David Manuel Hernández discusses in this volume, border policing took on a biomedical cast that criminalized, racialized, and pathologized migrants. At Angel Island, immigration agents presumed Asian travelers’ intrinsic pollution; they examined migrants’ bodies in intimate detail for contagion, for signs of sexual or other immoralities that might taint the imagined purity of American whiteness. Mexican laborers at the border, like Chinese migrants, were targeted as vectors of racial pollution and disease, to be examined and constrained through processes of quarantine, examination, coercive treatment, or refusal.37 Related biomedical examinations searching for signs of disease, disability, or madness took place at Ellis Island, too. Examiners might hone in on supposedly inferior ethnoracial or religious groups from the Atlantic world—Deirdre Moloney notes that examiners thought Jewish migrants’ putative “poor physique” suggested a propensity for becoming a public charge—but compared with the concerted racial animus Chinese and other Asian migrants faced at Angel Island, Europeans’ examinations were relatively cursory and nonexistent for wealthier travelers.38

Dr. Leo L. Stanley’s career addressed key aspects of the biopolitics of social hygiene. Stanley was San Quentin State Penitentiary’s chief surgeon from 1913 until 1951 and an avowed eugenicist whose medical and penal work aligned with a broad project of protecting society from the unfit.39 Stanley was also an avid traveler. When the opportunity arose for Stanley to join in deportation special train parties, he jumped. Serving as “physician in charge of a Deportation Train, carrying insane criminals and otherwise undesirable aliens,” as he called them, allowed him to extend a eugenic vision for national protection from the unfit, the criminal, and the ill; for tempering the punitive practices of removal with a liberal notion of medical concern.40

Nevertheless, some of the officers worked for the Immigration Bureau, and others were paid by Southern Pacific or another rail firm. Cars were also staffed by more typical Pullman car crews, with stewards and black or Filipino porters providing meals and general upkeep services. By 1922, the Immigration Bureau agents and private guards who worked together evinced considerable camaraderie. Part of it was based on white racial solidarity, as when Stanley and his white colleagues poked fun at “John,” the black porter who was denied a surname in Stanley’s journals (but at least wasn’t called “George,” as Pullman porters often and degradingly were).41 Train staff surely found common ground in their authorization to use force against those facing removal. Stanley was glad that the Southern Pacific men had experience guarding the transit Chinese, who, he said, “have to be carefully guarded so that they will not escape. As a result of this experience,” he opined, “our guards were very trustworthy and reliable, and knew all the best ways of handling such a party.”42

Immigration Bureau guards might be appointed for a single trip, depending on the size and the makeup of a deportation party, and sometimes lacked the experience of their private firm counterparts. Indeed, in 1921, even though Leo Stanley was himself an occasional participant, he was tasked with finding another guard. Stanley consulted with members of the San Quentin staff, but none were available. He contacted a Stanford University student whom he thought to be “quite an athlete,” but the student was unavailable. He eventually reached a former San Quentin medical assistant. The deportation agent wanted to be sure the man was prepared for violence. Stanley confirmed that the medical assistant would “ ‘well account for himself in a battle.’ ”43

Rather than this catch-as-catch-can system, deportation agent Leo Russell believed that immigration agents should draw on a consistent pool of “specially designated persons” with “suitable qualifications” and backgrounds. Russell envisaged a more professional deportation staff, with experience in the “police department, United States marshals, sheriffs, etc.… accustomed to handling prisoners of this kind.”44 For his part, Leo Stanley thought most of the private guards were competent, though a few were not. He was particularly concerned about one longtime Southern Pacific guard who, Stanley lamented, spoke English with a thick Italian accent and “frequently misunderstood what was told him.” Consequently, the guard would do the opposite of Stanley’s instructions—though whether this was the guard’s willful misinterpretation (Stanley was something of a tourist on these cars, after all) or an actual misunderstanding is hard to know. On another occasion, Stanley complained about another guard who he thought was easily manipulated by the deportees. Stanley, with longer expertise in battling convict wiles, disdained the “feeble” guard’s foolishness, which could lead to an escape.45 Nevertheless, available evidence suggests that most guards, including the railroad guards, did have some of the police, immigration service, or U.S. marshal background that Deportation Agent Russell would have found appropriate. Female matrons hired to look after female deportees often had a background in nursing or else as translators or were otherwise employed by the Immigration Bureau.46 Even though matrons were among the lowest paid employees of immigration services, on occasion the Department of Labor sought to save money and make use of the “stewardess” already employed on steamships by private firms.47 Regardless of the makeup of a specific deportation party’s staff, it revealed a symbiotic relationship between municipal, state, and federal governments and private transportation firms. The collaboration was never seamless, and at times state agents and private agents worked at cross-purposes. Nevertheless, the emergent deportation infrastructure they staffed spanned the continent, and its radial arms shot overseas, from Angel Island to Hong Kong and Yokohama, and from Ellis Island to London and Le Havre.

The physician’s role was important. Stanley, of course, located himself at the center of the stories he told, but his role exceeded his vanities. As a racially stratified capitalist liberal democracy, the United States eschewed the murderous politics of removal undertaken in the Armenian genocide or that the Nazis would later undertake. This was a sign of the United States’ self-image as a benign international power. But such politics were self-interested. Physicians and medical attendants may have been costly members of a deportation party, but their presence helped avoid the negative publicity that roiled the immigration services when stories emerged of the maltreatment—or disappearance—of mentally ill deportees.48 They were also, more pointedly, a means of biopolitical efficiency. First and foremost, the doctor facilitated a smoother flow of removal. Physicians’ medical bags contained drugs useful to treat the ill or to sedate the mad when they threatened to disrupt the train’s forward motion. Stanley described a German deportee who was “almost helpless” as well as “mentally deranged,” wracked by amoebic dysentery. Stanley treated him, but he likely had only a short time to live. He believed that “We would be fortunate to arrive with him alive at our destination.” John, the porter, also tried to keep the man comfortable and clean. One deportation agent lauded John’s kindness by calling him “Uncle Tom’s twin brother”; it is hard to know how John might have received the sentiment.49

Another deportee had an acute ear infection, which required considerable attention, and for which this unwilling traveler was surely grateful.50 But when Stanley administered medical care to deportees and eased their journey, he helped the deportation state to function, facilitating the biopolitics of circulation and smoothing its eliminative function. Keeping people alive and well until they reached the border helped the trains run on time. Medical services beyond the border, whatever they may have been, were no longer his concern. Stanley said that “we” (by which he meant the deportation party) would be fortunate to arrive at Ellis Island with the “amoebic German” alive. Stanley was less concerned with the German’s own luck, for he was no longer among the American “we.” The deportation regime’s apparent biopolitical largesse always existed in relation to the potential of murderous expedience, as the Nazi regime would make clear.51 But for Stanley, undesirable migrants would be allowed to live, but they could not live in the United States.

Forces of Coercive Mobility: Segregation, Speed, Turbulence

Trains and steamships were uniquely suited toward controlling and channeling migrants’ movement.52 The deportation cars on which they traveled were likely the heavy steel cars that Pullman designed in 1907 and introduced for wider service in 1910. Steel was touted as a safety feature, and the cars featured electrical light and a low-pressure vapor heat system. By 1917, Pullman cars advertised “innumerable hidden mechanisms” designed to make travel more comfortable. An individual car contained “nearly a mile of laminated copper wire, over a half mile of pipes,” as well as a dizzying number of switches, circuit boards, dynamos, motors, ventilators, push-buttons, “and other apparatuses.”53 They were wonders of modern technological development.

Enthusiasts could marvel at feats of mechanical and electrical engineering that went into these complex conveyances, and ordinary passengers could enjoy the comforts of public domesticity appropriate to the tickets that their budgets—or race, given Jim Crow regulations—could permit.54 But deportation trains also employed the social engineering undertaken in modern (stationary) penal institutions. This involved, first, means of enclosure that separated undesirable aliens from the citizens of the outside world. The material characteristics of the train cars, like steamships, as relatively closed capsules, proved conveniently suited to this purpose. Second, control involved the presence of guards authorized to use force, including lethal force, to prevent escape. Moreover, guards might sit in modified, elevated seats that allowed better lines of sight, and bars across the windows meant passengers could leave only by getting past guards stationed at each door.55 At an additional level of complexity, and still drawing on penal practice, the trains were internally organized to differentiate among perceived degrees of dangerous and pitiable deportees. The deportation train thus both reproduced and inverted the early twentieth-century working class train’s dense spatial public and domestic hybridity of multiethnic (white) sociability.56 At the same time, it modified the train into a space of varied racialized alienage—for deportees’ racialized othering as “undesirable,” but also as black migrants from the Atlantic world sat among the fairer-skinned Europeans, contra the anti-black segregative precepts sanctioned under Plessy v. Ferguson.57

Supposedly “dangerous” deportees included anarchists, members of the Industrial Workers of the World, and communists, as well as those whose criminal conviction (regardless of crime) was taken as proof of malefaction. The Chinese were also, automatically, considered dangerous escape risks. Immigration agents conflated Chinese legal resistance to deportation with physical confrontation, complaining that some Chinese had “fought their cases through to the court of last report” and others had forfeited “heavy bonds” and therefore must be flight risks.58 Some deportees probably were dangerous, for there were murderers and rapists among the poverty stricken, the mad, and those whose place of birth made them racially ineligible for citizenship.

Leo Stanley, who left perhaps the best firsthand account of the deportation trains, described the basic deportation car as a “barricaded car.”59 If fewer than forty deportees were traveling, the dangerous and the pitiable might all fit in a single carriage. On an eastbound trip in 1920, which began at the rail yard in Oakland, California, Stanley described some of the train’s unwilling passengers. The first had been gathered from state hospitals across California. Many were U.S. citizens being expelled from California to live with family or in institutions in other states, objects of the United States’ domestic deportation regime for the mad.60 As they were offloaded and space became available, criminal aliens came aboard. In Portland, Oregon, migration agents brought a Turkish man aboard. According to Stanley, he was a “weazened [sic] dark skinned little fellow of about a hundred pounds … well dressed in a black suit and panama hat” who would be deported “because he had been a procurer.” Another was a Spaniard, convicted of violating the White Slavery Act. Three Germans were also added to the train. One, a young man, had been at Alcatraz during World War I, presumably a prisoner of war. The two older German men had been in insane asylums in Oregon and Washington. Stanley also noted an Italian convicted of bootlegging, who was judged “otherwise objectionable to Washington.”61 In Pendleton, an insane Italian man was brought aboard, and in Omaha, additional deportees were brought on, including an insane Bulgarian man whom Stanley dubbed “Happy Hooligan” and an insane Canadian man.62 The deportees were compelled to sleep two to a berth.

In Chicago, immigration agents brought five more deportees aboard. One was, in Stanley’s description, a “middle aged Italian with long black moustache and wild flashing eyes full of resentment.” He was being deported along with his four-year-old son, “who was likewise wide eyed with wonder at being placed in such surroundings.” There was also a “blank faced Finn,” a “dull countenanced Swede,” and an anarchist, for whom Stanley and the other guards had little but disdain. The anarchist, according to Stanley, was a small, well-dressed man, about thirty years old, with large, tortoise-shell glasses. He seemed unfazed by the proceedings and maintained what Stanley called a “self-satisfied pose.” Stanley and the guards thought the anarchist was imperious and condescending, because rather than bantering with other deportees, “he held himself aloof from the others and read a small limp back book most of the time.”63

A 1921 trip was similar in many respects. Women and children were differentiated from men. Female public charges were not kept apart from the mad, nor were men much differentiated between the criminal or the insane. The train Stanley described on this 1921 trip left California with just one car. Its passengers were mostly insane women or women deemed public charges, along with their children. There were some men among them, but Stanley did not describe who they were. In Ogden, Utah, an additional fifteen men, who had been transferred from Washington State, were brought on board. Some had been imprisoned in Walla Walla; others were mad and had been in state asylums. They were all contained in the single car, which Stanley confessed was “a little more than comfortably filled.”64 Some Pullman Tourist cars were divided by small interior seating sections, each of which could ordinarily accommodate four passengers. On this journey, a mad Italian woman with her infant child, and a “simpleminded” woman, whose nationality and ethnicity went unnamed, shared a section. A British woman and her adopted child, both deemed public charges, shared another section with the party’s matron.65 The men on this train were not differentiated between the mad or the criminal and were assigned four to a section. But special provisions were made for a “big, wild-eyed” Swede who had reportedly killed a Seattle policeman with his bare hands. The Swede was shackled hand and foot, with just enough chain at his ankles to allow him to take short steps. He was placed in a curtainless lower section, “where he could be easily watched,” and above him was an “insane boy of about twenty years,” who had recently had a stomach operation.66 Officials were concerned about the Swede, but he did little other than smoke cigars and recline. He was kept in the manacles for the duration of the trip and could not change clothes, if he even had any.67

There did seem to be some self-selection of seatmates, sometimes by language or ethnicity, as when two mad Italians sat together, one of whom suffered from “persecutory insanity” but quite generously looked after the other, a “simpleton” who could scarcely feed or clean himself.68 Other deportees grouped themselves through a kind of convict affinity. Four had been in prison together and played cards to pass time. Guards considered dividing them into different parts of the car, thereby keeping them spatially apart and lessening the chance to scheme. “But as they made no false moves,” Stanley reported, “we decided to let them ride as they were.”69

The deported women seemed to keep to themselves, especially if they were looking after children. The children, according Stanley, who, for a eugenicist, could be quite romantic about childhood innocence, just wanted to play and frolic. He told many anecdotes about young deportees and shared his concern for their futures. According to Stanley, Dennis, Mrs. Smith’s adopted child, played in the train “with the few toys … entirely oblivious to the heartaches and complications from which he had passed.”70

Disorderly deportees, like the Bulgarian “Happy Hooligan,” could cause problems. “Hooligan” bothered other deportees and destroyed the tattered clothing he wore. But because he never reached the point of disrupting the forward progress of travel, guards had “considerable fun watching the other prisoners battle with him.” A deportee named Carl, “who was younger and strong, had several tussles with him, and several times it was necessary to pull Carl off, for fear he would hurt the poor lunatic.”71 In Erie, a young Italian man was brought aboard. For much of the rest of the journey, he and Carl openly discussed how to return to the United States after their expulsion.72

If the number of deportees on a given trip was larger than a single barricaded car might hold, additional cars could be added. When they were, the deportees who were deemed dangerous were gathered in the barricaded car. The others—poor or disabled, and who were merely objects of pity or disgust rather than danger—might be deported in ordinary tourist cars, though still under guard. Stanley wandered between the cars on an eastward trip in 1922, musing and making notes about the “motley crowd” of unwilling passengers, as the chief deportation agent, Ed Kline, assigned them to their cars.73 Two greeted Stanley. One had served time for mail fraud at San Quentin; Stanley recognized the other as a passenger on a previous deportation train.74 Another was an Italian man who had been in an asylum in Washington State. According to Stanley, the man incessantly declared that he wanted to kill himself, which prompted the other deportees to jibe him about the mess it would make.75 An Italian named Tony La Force had done time at Walla Walla. “Because he was an alien, a criminal, and otherwise undesirable, he was being sent back to prey upon his own country.”76 Stanley’s editorial comment here encapsulated a view of “criminal aliens”: they were predators who should “prey” on their own kind rather than pose a danger to the United States’ presumptively virtuous citizens.

Some deportees elicited a combination of disdain and pity. Stanley went into detail about a fourteen-year-old boy from Belgium. Germans had killed his parents during the Great War, and he survived by following different armies as a hanger-on—the French, the English, the Americans—finally traveling to the United States with returning troops. He eventually arrived in San Antonio, where a childless immigration official named Mr. Smith took him in. He was due to have his tonsils removed but apparently fled the night before the surgery. He cut his ties with the Smith family and traveled west to Los Angeles. There, in Stanley’s telling, he managed to “secure a home with some kindly disposed people, who like the Smiths had wanted to give this unfortunate boy a chance to make something of himself.” Yet the boy took to crime and would later be arrested for minor theft. Despite offers of aid from well-meaning benefactors, “his habits had already been too strongly formed, and because of his inability to stay out of trouble, it was necessary to report him to the Immigration officials. Deportation was the only disposition that could be made of his case at that time.”77 Stanley’s pity was freighted with stern moralization: he felt the boy had spurned the generosity of kindly immigration agents and citizens by turning to crime and had thus forsaken the opportunity to remain. As a result, he was to be transferred in the prison car, with thieves, murderers, and others of real or imagined danger.

Stanley also described the deportees who, when numbers required, might travel with guards in an ordinary tourist car. They included families or individuals who were sick or disabled. Stanley saw them as pathetic and unlikely to become actively disruptive. Stanley nearly gushed over Alicia, a two-and-a-half year-old Portuguese girl who wandered through the train befriending deportees and deportation agents alike. “One could not help liking the child,” he mused, as she climbed on tables and through the aisles. Nevertheless, her father had “accepted charity” by receiving treatment for trachoma at a county hospital, a damnable offense of poverty and illness. Alicia, her mother, and father were therefore deemed to be public charges, as the family breadwinner suffered from a loathsome and excludable disease.78

Equally tragic in Stanley’s telling, and similarly undeserving to remain, were single mothers, who would be deported with their children. A Mexican woman and her three children were taken aboard the train in Los Angeles. She had recently been widowed and was therefore taken to be a public charge. Her sons were four and six years old, and her daughter was two. Still wearing her black mourning garb, the mother was “train sick most of the time” and “laid curled up in one of the seats.” Her youngest son was very concerned and every so often pulled aside the mantilla over her face to kiss her.79

The ill were equally pitiable. Stanley took a liking to Valentine Raeder, a forty-year-old Hungarian man imprisoned for murder in Washington State. Despite this criminal conviction, Raeder was permitted to travel in the tourist car, because he suffered from severe epilepsy. Attendants at the hospital or prison (it is unclear which) where he was kept prior to deportation believed that his “fits” were worse when he ate. According to Stanley, they “apparently … had used starvation as a means for keeping down his spells.” Stanley called Raeder “the thinnest, scrawniest, and most forlorn object” and estimated that he weighed no more than eighty pounds.80 Over the course of the trip, Stanley insisted that Raeder be given more food and, in Stanley’s telling, Raeder’s health improved dramatically. Stanley even helped Raeder write a letter to his sister, informing her that he was being deported.

When it was financially cheaper to do so, and depending on how the deportation agent planned the itinerary, deportees could be brought from New Orleans to New York, or vice versa, by steamship. Stanley described how deportees were offloaded from the Southern Pacific train car in New Orleans and brought aboard the Southern Pacific’s S.S. Comus. According to Stanley, deportees enjoyed a considerable degree of freedom on the ships. The train car could get crowded and the air stuffy, and most assuredly the ship’s steerage cabin could, too. But once under way, deportees were able to roam the deck, mingle with other passengers, and even, apparently, play a rousing game of quoits. “They all appreciated this very much, for after their five days in the cars, the fresh air on the water, was indeed very refreshing.”81

Alicia could crawl through the aisles; the Korean children could romp and play; “Hooligan” could be generally disruptive, within limits; and two young men could scheme about how they might reenter the United States after they had been deported. To a remarkable extent, the very nature of the deportees’ train- and shipboard mobility created conditions of control, as well as the opportunities for their radically circumscribed freedoms. Indeed, the very forces of speed and movement, the scale of travel, and the nature of their conveyance became mechanisms of control for any who might want to escape.

Trains and steamships in and of themselves were effective spatial containers that prevented the deportees’ self-willed movement. Aboard trains (and especially on trains that had been modified for these purposes), deportees were moved toward the edge of the national territory. Their inability to move themselves laterally—that is, in a direction other than toward the port or border and eventual deportation—was radically circumscribed. Ordinary travelers could come and go from ordinary trains, of course, though, as many a hobo learned, it was difficult and dangerous to board or leave a moving train. But deportation trains, these literal prison cars, served as very efficient containers of deportees’ self-willed mobility. It was not just that the closed nature of the trains limited their movement, though that was important. In some sense, it was the very scale and the speed of the technology that rendered the transportation dangerous. When the train was under way, anyone who sought escape would have to reckon with the dynamics of movement and inertia. Jumping from a moving train required that a deportee’s body would contend not just with armed guards and barred windows but also with the effects of radical deceleration, from travel at high velocity to landing in whatever site they might find: a grassy slope, jagged rocks, cliffs or trees or cacti, or getting tangled in the train itself. A human body will be bruised if it is run over by a bicycle, injured if it is stepped on by a horse. A human body may even survive being struck or run over by an automobile. Trains are less forgiving. It is not entirely clear what happened in the case of Leung Kai Main, who may have attempted to escape from a westbound train in 1919. In any case, officers from the Nickel Plate Railroad discovered his body near Sandusky, Ohio. In his report, Deportation Agent Leo Russell claimed, “Every safeguard possible was tried to prevent the escape of this man.” Russell continued, “I do not think he had any idea in getting safely away but am of the opinion that he committed suicide rather than face prosecution in San Francisco.… I sincerely deplore this incident but inasmuch as the car was not entirely safeguarded against escapes I cannot blame anyone for the incident as I had men as attendants who had handled aliens for years. I will take up in a separate communication recommendations for fixing the car to prevent any possible chance of aliens escaping.”82 Russell’s solution was, of course, familiar to liberal penologists: fix the architecture of the car; seal it to prevent movement that differed from the state’s desire. More perfect design would lead to more perfect control.

Once aboard steamships—be they domestic ships from New York to New Orleans or transoceanic liners—the scale and the nature of deportees’ confinement was made starker still. Steaming across the open seas, the ship was the sole means of survival. There was little chance of escape, for where would one go? The quandary was made clear by the suicidal Italian man from Washington State, who time and again declared his desire to die. He had been confined to the steerage cabin for most of the voyage, but when he was finally allowed to come onto the deck of the S.S. Comus, officials tied a rope around his waist, lest he throw himself overboard.83 Those were the main options for “agency” that such travel defined: stay aboard and make headway toward eventual deportation, or risk death. Even near port, escape from a moving ship was dangerous. In August 1956, Mexican deportees rioted on the S.S. Mercurio. When the ship approached the docks in Tampico, thirty-six jumped overboard. Even this close to shore, five of them drowned.84

If speed, travel, and the enclosed means of movement proved to be elements of the deportation regime’s control, stasis provided opportunities for deportees’ resistance. The deportation regime sought a smooth flow for removal, but deportees’ actions (whether or not they might be understood as “resistance” in a political or even infrapolitical manner) could impart turbulence in that system. The disruptions caused by mad deportees like Hooligan or the supposedly suicidal Italian man, or even the physical illness of the amoebic German, threatened to delay (but not derail) the train. These delays, interruptions, and turbulences caused by cognitively different and disabled peoples, or those with radical physical illnesses or disabilities, called the deportation system, as well as the broader polity, into crisis. According to the work of Crip theorist Robert McRuer, Hooligan and the others might be considered “crip actors who … exacerbate in more productive ways, the crisis of authority that currently besets heterosexual/able-bodied norms.”85 Liat Ben-Moshe similarly conceptualizes severe disability as a kind of queer ferocity and defiance, a position from which to “reenter the margins and point to the inadequacies of straight and non-disabled assumptions.”86 Moreover, interruptions in the flow of deportation created opportunities for deportees’ disruption. Rail travel was increasingly reliable across the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as the transcontinental railway companies standardized, merged, or became interlinked, but travelers could be subject to seemingly inexplicable interruptions and frustrating delays. Passengers had to wait for freight trains to pass in the rail network’s extensive interlinking of goods, people, and commodities, crisscrossing the land and regulated by someone far distant, to whom trains were nothing more than a detail to be managed on a timesheet. Willing travelers might fidget and fuss in their seats, and the waiting was unquestionably worse for unwilling passengers and those who guarded them. Stanley complained that on one particularly hot and humid night on an eastbound trip, the car sat, “apparently abandoned for three quarters of an hour.” The deportees were getting aggravated, and two, an “Irishman and a Scotchman [sic], paced up and down the aisles somewhat as caged animals do in a zoo. They were both bad men having been paroled for deportation from one of the northern penitentiaries. Their crimes had been robbery and murder.” Guards at either end opened the doors to let a breeze through, hoping that the moving air might cut the tension. But Kline, the chief deportation agent, ordered the doors closed tight. Kline thought “there was a great danger in losing some of our men. The Irishman and the Scotchman did not look good to him.”87 Neither attempted to escape, but while the train stayed still, the possibility remained.

Stopping at stations also provided opportunities for disruption in the flow of removal. These stops were inevitable, as new deportees were added to the train as it journeyed across the continent, and as the train was forced to accommodate itself to the national circulation of commodities and passengers. Nevertheless, a February 1919 deportation journey dubbed the “Red Special” for the radicals it carried, was rerouted away from Butte, Montana, because immigration officials feared that some thousand striking miners and IWW members (Wobblies) would free the prisoners or slow the train’s progress.88

Stanley related the difficulties his colleagues faced when the deportation train arrived in Chicago. As a central node within North America’s industrial and agricultural economy, the density and complexity of Chicago’s rail (and social) networks impeded the deportation train’s motion. Agents would need to keep special watch.

On arrival in Chicago, the train to which they were attached was broken up. Passengers and commodities in other cars would be directed elsewhere, while the barricaded car crossed the “maze of railroad tracks” that allowed the circulation of goods and people through the metropole. When they reached the LaSalle Street station, they changed onto the C.C.C. & St. Louis road and waited. Stanley added color and narrative tension to his journals, indicating the sense of boredom, and of unease, that stasis in Chicago provoked. “Not a breath of air was stirring,” and “the engine smoke hung heavy,” compounding the already bad humidity.89

The guards’ job was made harder still because of the Chicago station’s dense social networks. The station became an interface between the Windy City’s metropolitan worlds and the deportation regime’s attempted closed circulatory system. Indeed, at points like this the deportation network was not hermetically sealed, and a large number of newly loaded deportees’ families came to bid their loved ones farewell. Some entered the cars to spend a few last minutes with their exiled kin. Stanley had little sympathy and saw security threats; the systemic porousness and trains’ general disarray “necessitated close vigilance on our part, to see that there were no escapes.”90

Transfer between the modes of transport was another weak point in the logistics of deportation. When deportees on the southern route were moved from the train car to the S.S. Comus in New Orleans, the whole of the party was divided into groups of ten—for closer surveillance—in this human-scale movement between stationary vehicles. The pitiable deportees in the tourist car were transferred first. Under guard by Southern Pacific as well as Immigration Service keepers, the deportees were taken from the train and loaded aboard the ship. According to Stanley, the Portuguese family and an insane woman were among those brought across first and led to staterooms. Next, and still in groups of ten, the remaining deportees were unloaded from the prison car. They were “marched up the gangplank, along the deck, to the forecastle,” where they were put into steerage class cabin, which he thought was “comfortable but a little crowded.” Beds were stacked one above the other, and Stanley judged them “clean and satisfactory.”91 That pitiable deportees slept in staterooms, and contemptible ones in steerage, revealed another spatial distinction among them.

Administrators for Southern Pacific did not schedule the Comus to leave until the following morning. As with the earlier delay—when the train car had been left on the tracks without an engine—deportation officials were at the mercy of Southern Pacific’s schedule. Even though stasis allowed opportunity for deportees to disrupt their expulsion, officials were confident that the locked steerage cabin, with just one entrance, and the design of the ship itself would contain whatever turbulence or disruption deportees might provoke. Moreover, guards were arranged at two choke points, through which they anticipated any deportee attempting to escape would have to pass. One stood watch at the top of the companionway, and another was posted at the foot of the gangplank on the wharf. The rest of the guards, public and private, would enjoy the evening in New Orleans.92

But later that night, the aforementioned Irishman and the Scotchman made a break. Stanley and the others had thought that the steerage cabin was an enclosed space with just one entrance and exit, and he “took it for granted that the place had been properly inspected by the railroad and immigration officials and found secure.” But the men had found a thin wooden door between the forecastle and the hold. According to Stanley, “It was no trick at all for experienced criminals like these two, to get out of such a place.” They broke the lock, overpowered the guard on the gangplank, and ran through the warehouse district to the rail yards beyond. The chief steward—a Southern Pacific employee—shot at the escaping men but missed. The guard at the companionway remained at his post, unaware until he heard the shots. Two other guards were sent out to search for the escapees, and the New Orleans police were notified. Kline feared that finding them in the midst of the city was a “hopeless task.” Rather than disrupting the schedule and spending more time frozen in space, the remaining deportees left New Orleans on the Comus the next day.93 The two men’s escape revealed the communicative as well as carceral gaps between state agents and the private firms on which they relied.

Additional procedures and personnel were necessary on the final legs of the journey: transfer from trains or steamships in Hoboken or San Francisco, to the ferries that would convey deportees to the detention centers at Ellis Island or Angel Island. When deportees were not enclosed in specific, mobile structures, agents relied on human guarding and a show of force. Such procedures aimed to prevent deportee escapes but also were instituted so that the deportees, who were themselves a visual spectacle, would not disrupt the flow of peoples and goods who also used these transportation hubs. When the eastbound train finally arrived at the rail station in Hoboken, Kline and the guards led the deportees—whom Stanley now dubbed “the prisoners”—onto the station platform. Additional guards from Ellis Island awaited them, along with two uniformed police officers. The deportees were lined up in pairs, while commuters gawked at these strange and oddly dressed peoples. The man Stanley called Hooligan had by this point torn away all of his clothes and was draped in a sheet taken from a sleeping berth. Carl, the young German, had no coat and wore only a sleeveless sweater. Deportees arrived in whatever clothing they had, which was often insufficient for New York, let alone the weather they might find on the overseas journey, or where they would land. According to Stanley, “Tony the Italian endeavored to hang back a little,” which he took as Tony’s effort to weigh a chance to run. He found none. Police, immigration officials, and the train’s guards flanked them and marched them to the waiting Ellis Island tugboat.94 Particularly ill deportees might be transferred on a litter, while others might be transferred in chains.95 Once aboard the tugboat, with twenty minutes to Ellis Island, there seemed little enough chance of escape. The deportees nonetheless remained under close guard. After processing on Ellis Island, or on Angel Island for westbound deportees, they would await the next steamship and the final, overseas leg of a journey they did not choose.

Conclusion

In the early twentieth century, the American deportation regime sought to master carceral mobility at a planetary scale, developing a punitive regulatory infrastructure that served as doppelganger to the commodity and migrant flows of global racial capitalism. As it did, it benefited from the technical and material capacities of large, private transportation firms, whose infrastructural networks spanned the globe. Deportable aliens, akin to incarcerated and convicted criminals, were fundamentally unfree; they were spatially, racially, politically, and conceptually opposed to desirable citizens.96

In contrast to those held in fixed carceral institutions—whose contemporary innovations involved forced labor, architectural controls, classificatory segregation, biomedical control, and physical violence—the characteristics of deportees’ unfreedom was unique due to the fact of mobility and the means of transit. Within the deportation journey, rapid motion limited the possibilities of escape or disruption, while spatial stability enhanced its potential. Moreover, the means of transport, in the relatively closed train or steamship, allowed greater individual bodily movement and relative corporal freedom, as long as movements at the bodily level did not interfere with the linear motion of the train. In this context, speed rather than stasis was the source of the deportation state’s control. Delay became evidence of turbulence as well as an opportunity for disruption.

The deportation journey was the opposite of the narrative of American immigration history. Rather than arriving at Ellis Island, Angel Island, or even crossing the Southwestern land border and finding new opportunities, tribulations, and landscapes before them, theirs was a journey of constricting options, of spaces closing. Once captured and marked by disciplinary institutions, the grounds of American freedom, whatever they may have been, eroded beneath their feet, just as their right to have rights withered. The wide-open spaces of the West were visible only as they rushed by through the prison car’s barred window. Chinese experience set the template after the Exclusion Acts, legally and materially, due to the material design of Southern Pacific’s prison cars. Twenty-first-century critics decry the public unaccountability of proliferating privately operated immigration detention facilities, but when we examine the foundations in the early twentieth century, we realize that the roots of for-profit detention are deeper than neoliberalism’s generalized privatization and are at the heart of the modern immigration infrastructure.97

The United States deportation regime would transform over the 1930s and across the rest of the century. Chinese migrants, along with undesirable Europeans and others from the Atlantic world, had been deported along a looping east–west circuit early in the century. In the 1930s, deportation increasingly followed a southerly vector. Filipinos would be excluded, and Mexicans were deported in massive numbers early in the depression years. U.S. racial formations came to privilege European migrants and their children, championed as assimilating nicely into the polity and shedding ethnic identification for less differentiated whiteness. As white ethnic organizations mobilized and garnered political power within the New Deal order, deportable Europeans whose families might be torn by removal could make claims based on administrative pity and were increasingly allowed to remain.98 With the geopolitical imperatives of World War II, Chinese migrants would slowly and unevenly shed the confines of racial ineligibility for citizenship, but as immigration officials came to focus attention on the U.S.–Mexico border, Mexican nationals would be treated with mounting disdain. Mexican “illegal aliens” became the most frequently deported peoples, and because Mexicans could cross the lengthy if hazily defined land border at many places, the newer deportation regime would rely on different modes of transport. As the age of the rail drew to a close and the era of the automobile dawned, buses, jeeps, and trucks came to the fore in the deportation regime, though they would be augmented by airplanes. Automotive deportation required less centralized administrative planning than trains had and allowed more local discretion among border patrol officers in removing Mexican nationals.99 Moreover, the INS would develop its own transportation fleet, diminishing somewhat its reliance on private firms to convey the deportees beyond the bounds of the nation, though evidence of a relationship between the INS and the Greyhound bus lines remains.100 Each mode of transport would create new opportunities for disruptions in the flow of removal. In October 2013, protestors in Tucson and San Francisco used their bodies to physically block deportation buses’ movement through space and turned them back. In Australia, passengers protesting removals on commercial flights have refused to be seated before takeoff, and deportees (and protestors) were offloaded from the plane.101

For all of the procedures that the U.S. deportation regime refined, the administrative devices it developed, and technologies to either prevent or facilitate mobility it oversaw in the first half of the century, migrants who suffered deportation would return with great frequency. Legal mechanisms would make it more painful and costly to do so, and migrants would suffer mounting consequences if they were caught. But they nonetheless looped back, developing newer means to evade detection, to return, and to attempt to reterritorialize the polity itself.

Notes

1. Erika Lee, At America’s Gates: Chinese Immigration during the Exclusion Era, 1882–1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), esp. chap. 6.

2. Scholars have begun to link the histories of deportation and incarceration in the broader field of carceral studies. See especially David Manuel Hernández, “Pursuant to Deportation: Latinos and Immigrant Detention,” Latino Studies 6, no. 1–2 (2008): 35–63; and Hernández, this volume. See also Kelly Lytle Hernández, “Amnesty or Abolition? Felons, Illegals, and the Case for a New Abolition Movement,” Boom: A Journal of California 1, no. 4 (2011): 54–68; Juliet Stumpf, “The Crimmigration Crisis: Immigrants, Crime, and Sovereign Power,” American University Law Review 56, no. 2 (2006): 367–419; Tanya Golash-Boza, Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor, and Global Capitalism (New York: New York University Press, 2015); Mary Bosworth and Emma Kaufman, “Foreigners in a Carceral Age: Immigration and Imprisonment in the United States,” Stanford Law and Policy Review 22, no. 2 (2011): 429–54; Torrie Hester, “Deportability and the Carceral State,” Journal of American History 102, no. 1 (2015): 141–51; Ethan Blue, “Strange Passages: Carceral Mobility and the Liminal in the Catastrophic History of American Deportation,” National Identities 17, no. 2 (2015): 175–94; Ethan Blue, “National Vitality, Migrant Abjection, and Coercive Mobility: The Biopolitical History of American Deportation,” Leonardo 48, no. 2/3 (2015): 268–69; Ethan Blue, “From Lynch Mobs to the Deportation State,” Law, Culture, and the Humanities (online publication, 2017), https://doi.org/10.1177/1743872117734168.

3. Amy G. Richter, Home on the Rails: Women, the Railroad, and the Rise of Public Domesticity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 5; Chandan Reddy, Freedom with Violence: Race, Sexuality, and the U.S. State (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 93–103.

4. Brian Larkin, “The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure,” Annual Review of Anthropology, 42 (2013): 327–43, esp. 329. My thinking here is also indebted to William Walters, “Aviation as Deportation Infrastructure: Airports, Planes, and Expulsion,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 44, no. 16 (2017): 2796–817.

5. Kristian Hvidt, “Emigration Agents: The Development of a Business and Its Methods,” Scandinavian Journal of History 3 (1978): 179–203; Richard J. Orsi, Sunset Limited: The Southern Pacific Railroad and the Development of the American West, 1850–1930 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 134–35, 149–65; Lawrence Douglas Taylor Hansen, “The Chinese Six Companies of San Francisco and the Smuggling of Chinese Immigrants across the U.S.–Mexico Border, 1882–1930,” Journal of the Southwest 48, no. 1 (2006): 37–61; Adam McKeown, “Ritualization of Regulation: The Enforcement of Chinese Exclusion in the United States and China,” American Historical Review 108, no. 2 (2003): 377–403; Lisa Rose Mar, Brokering Belonging: Chinese in Canada’s Exclusion Era, 1885–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

6. Najia Aarim-Heriot, Chinese Immigrants. African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United States, 1848–82 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003); Hidetaka Hirota, “The Moment of Transition: State Officials, the Federal Government, and the Formation of American Immigration Policy,” Journal of American History 99, no. 4 (2013): 1092–108.

7. See Michelle Nickerson and Darren Dochuk, “Introduction,” in Sunbelt Rising: The Politics of Space, Place, and Region, ed. Michelle Nickerson and Darren Dochuk (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011): 1–28, as well as the other chapters in that volume.

8. Linda Bosniak, The Citizen and the Alien: Dilemmas of Contemporary Membership (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 9. Daniel Kanstroom describes this as a process of “post-entry social control.” Daniel Kanstroom, Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).

9. Reddy, Freedom with Violence, 17.

10. George J. Sánchez, “Working at the Crossroads: American Studies for the Twenty-First Century; Presidential Address to the American Studies Association,” American Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2002): 1–23; Lisabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Rick Halpern, Down on the Killing Floor: Black and White Workers in Chicago’s Packinghouses, 1904–54 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); Mary Ting Yi Lui, The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder Miscegenation, and Other Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005); Nayan Shah, Stranger Intimacy: Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011); Ethan Blue, Doing Time in the Depression: Everyday Life in Texas and California Prisons (New York: New York University Press, 2012).

11. Nicholas P. De Genova, “Migrant ‘Illegality’ and Deportability in Everyday Life,” Annual Review of Anthropology 31 (2002): 419–47.

12. Salient work in American political development here includes Louis Galambos, “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History,” Business History Review 44, no. 3 (1970): 279–90; Brian Balogh, “The State of the State among Historians,” Social Science History 27, no. 3 (2003): 445–63; William J. Novak, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (2008): 752–72; Elisabeth S. Clemens, “Lineages of the Rube Goldberg State: Building and Blurring Public Programs, 1900–1940,” in Rethinking Political Institutions: The Art of the State, ed. Ian Shapiro, Stephen Skowroneck, and Daniel Galvin (New York: New York University Press), 187–215; Margot Canaday, The Straight State: Sexuality and Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Desmond King and Robert C. Lieberman, “Ironies of State Building: A Comparative Perspective on the American State,” World Politics 61, no. 3 (2009): 547–88.

13. Mae M. Ngai, Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Kelly Lytle Hernández, Migra! A History of the U.S. Border Patrol (Berkeley: University of California, 2010); Ira Katznelson, When Affirmative Action Was White: An Untold History of Racial Inequality in Twentieth-Century America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006); Blue, Doing Time in the Depression; Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in 20th-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

14. Ethan Blue, “Finding Margins on Borders: Shipping Firms and Immigration Control Across Settler Space,” Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities 5 (2013), http://occasion.stanford.edu/node/125.

15. Nick Gill, “Mobility versus Liberty? The Punitive Uses of Movement within and outside Carceral Environments,” in Carceral Spaces: Mobility and Agency in Imprisonment and Migrant Detention, ed. Dominique Moran, Nick Gill, and Deirdre Conlon (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2013), 23.

16. On mobility studies and multiple scales, see Tim Cresswell, “Towards a Politics of Mobility,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28 (2010): 17–31. Moreover, bodily effect of discomfort and, indeed, illness appear to be a nonlinguistic, corporal response and attempted rejection of forced movement. This may be one reason why illness was so central to the experience of the Middle Passage, Nazi deportation of Jews, and in recounting of U.S. deportation, such as Theodore Irwin’s novel Strange Passage (New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1935). See Sowande M. Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016); Simone Gigliotti, The Train Journey: Transit Captivity, and Witnessing in the Holocaust (New York: Berghahn, 2009); Blue, “Strange Passages.” The presence or absence of doctors in each system differed. The Nazis’ genocidal, necropolitical regime sought to produce death and so had no use for medical care, other than to mine Jewish bodies for research. In the Middle Passage, slavers sought to keep slaves healthy enough to sell for profit, and thus physicians had a role. Aboard the U.S. deportation train, physicians like Leo Stanley needed to keep deportees healthy enough to prevent their impeding the circulatory flow of deportation traffic.

17. The chapter analyzes mobility at a number of scales: first, at the level of national and international travel; and second, at the level of individual bodies, and the kinds of movement they make in the spaces that contain them. My thinking here is influenced by Tim Cresswell, On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World (New York: Routledge, 2006); Cresswell, “Towards a Politics of Mobility”; Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics: An Essay on Dromology, trans. Marc Polizzotti (New York: Semiotext(e), 2007 [1977]); Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson, and Vassilis Tsianos, Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century (London: Pluto Press, 2008). It parallels Kimberley Peters and Jennifer Turner’s call to examine movement within mobile spaces. “Between Crime and Colony: Interrogating (Im)mobilities aboard the Convict Ship,” Social & Cultural Geography 16, no. 7 (2015): 848–49.

18. Most studies in the history of punishment have paid inadequate attention to the significance of mobilities. In the emergent field of carceral geography, see Dominique Moran, Laura Piacentini, and Judith Pallot, “Disciplined Mobility and Carceral Geography: Prisoner Transport in Russia,” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, published online November 28, 2011, doi:10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00483.x; Nick Gill, “Mobility versus Liberty?”; Alison Mountz, “Specters at the Port of Entry: Understanding State Mobilities through an Ontology of Exclusion,” Mobilities 6, no. 3 (2011): 317–34; Nancy Hiemstra, “ ‘You Don’t Even Know Where You Are’: Chaotic Geographies of U.S. Migrant Detention and Deportation,” in Moran, Gill, and Conlan, Carceral Spaces, 57–75; Susan Bibler Coutin, “Deportation Studies: Origins, Themes, and Directions,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 41, no. 4 (2015): 671–81; Nancy Hiemstra, “Deportation and Detention: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Multi-Scalar Approaches, and New Methodological Tools,” Migration Studies 4, no. 2 (2016): 433–46.

19. Mae M. Ngai, “The Strange Career of the Illegal Alien: Immigration Restriction and Deportation Policy in the United States, 1921–1965,” Law and History Review 21, no. 1 (2003): 74; Lucy E. Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers: Chinese Immigrants and the Shaping of Modern Immigration Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 132.

20. The ethnoracial bases of much immigration law, its evolution in legal practice, and transformation from a judicial to an administrative realm of control, has been well explored in recent scholarship. But few scholars have investigated the actual mechanisms of deportation or how they affected law and the possibilities of American life. The law would declare differences between citizens and aliens, but through America’s nascent deportation regime, the word of law was made flesh and steel. Law is meaningless without policy; policy can do nothing without physical enforcement. Early scholars and critics included Jane Clark Perry and William Van Vleck. Since then, there had been a roughly seventy-year break in scholarship on deportation. The literature of the effect of the railroad is vast, but consider Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977).

21. Gary Gerstle, American Crucible: Race and Nation in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 53–55; John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1955), 220–21.

22. Gerstle, American Crucible, 92. According to contemporary critic William Van Vleck, deportation procedures developed “a maximum of powers in the administrative officers, a minimum of checks and safeguards against error and prejudice, and with certainty, care, and due deliberation sacrificed to the desire for speed.” Van Vleck, Administrative Control of Aliens, 224, quoted in Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers, 136.

23. Assistant Commissioner-General, “MEMORANDUM FOR THE ACTING SECRETARY, In re arrangement for deportation parties from the Coast to New York and from the East to San Francisco,” February 1, 1916. National Archives and Records Administration I (hereafter NARA I), RG 85, Entry 9, File 53775-202d; Annual Report of the Commissioner-General of Immigration (hereafter, AR-CGI), Fiscal Year 1921 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1921), 15; AR-CGI (1931), 37. There were 185 deportation parties that followed shorter routes and eighteen transcontinental parties in 1932. AR-CGI (1932), 30.

24. Willis Thornton, “Kline’s Deportation Party Is Grim Affair for Aliens,” Milwaukee Journal, January 11, 1940, 1.

25. Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Immigration scholars have not fully recognized the role of private firms in immigration restriction and in making the deportation state. Stephen H. Norwood has identified the United States as “the only advanced industrial country where corporations wielded coercive military power” in the early twentieth century, and Southern Pacific’s guard force fits very much in this context. Norwood, Strikebreaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 3.

26. Benjamin J. Klebaner, “State and Local Immigration Regulation in the United States before 1882,” International Review of Social History 3, no. 2 (1958): 269–95; E. P. Hutchinson, Legislative History of American Immigration Policy, 1798–1965 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981), 391.

27. A small number of scholars have turned attention to shipping firms’ roles in complex networks of migration and exclusion. See Robert Eric Barde, Immigration at the Golden Gate: Passenger Ships, Exclusion, and Angel Island (Westport, CT: Praeger Press, 2008); Blue, “Finding Margins on Borders”; Yukari Takai, “Circumnavigating Controls: Transborder Migration of Asian-Origin Migrants during the Period of Exclusion,” in Migrants and Migration in Modern North America: Cross-Border Lives, Labor Markets, and Politics, ed. Dirk Hoerder and Nora Faires (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Yukari Takai, “Navigating Transpacific Passages: Steamship Companies, State Regulators, and Transshipment of Japanese in the Early-Twentieth-Century Pacific Northwest,” Journal of American Ethnic History 30, no. 3 (2011): 7–34; Torsten Feys, “Shipping Companies as Carriers and Barriers to Human Mobility: The Atlantic and Pacific Border Regimes of the United States,” World History Connected 11, no. 3 (2014); and Torsten Feys, “Transoceanic Shipping, Mass Migration, and the Rise of Modern Day International Border Controls: A Historiographical Appraisal,” Mobility in History 7 (2016): 151–62. See also Judy Yung and Erika Lee, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

28. Amy G. Richter, Home on the Rails: Women, the Railroad, and the Rise of Public Domesticity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 81–83.

29. Assistant Commissioner-General, “MEMORANDUM FOR THE ACTING SECRETARY,” February 16, 1916, NARA I, RG 85, Entry 9, File 53775-202d.

30. Ethan Blue, “Capillary Power, Rail Vessels, and the Carceral Viapolitics of Early Twentieth-Century American deportation,” in Viapolitics: Migration, Borders, and the Power of Locomotion, ed. William Walters, Charles Heller, and Lorenzo Pezzani (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, forthcoming).

31. The Immigration Bureau conducted earlier experiments with Pullman cars, covering the windows with “chilled steel wire” and securing iron screens across the locked doors. Ten prisoners were conveyed from Seattle to New York and Ellis Island on this experimental run. It was funded by Washington State rather than by federal funds. “Pullman Prison Car for Alien Criminals,” New York Times, June 6, 1913.

32. The United States required Cuba to enforce a version of the U.S. Chinese Exclusion Act after 1899, but by World War I, high demand for Cuban sugar and molasses, coupled with labor shortages on the island, led to temporary exceptions to Chinese exclusion, and Chinese laborers, hired under contract again, entered Cuba. The temporary exceptions on Chinese laborers’ entry remained until the 1930s, when many Chinese in Cuba were forced to leave. Duvon C. Corbitt, “Chinese Immigrants in Cuba,” Far Eastern Survey 13, no. 14 (1942): 130–32; Evelyn Hu-DeHart, “Chinese Coolie Labor in Cuba in the Nineteenth Century: Free Labor of Neoslavery,” Contributions in Black Studies 12, no. 1 (1994): 38–54; Moon-Ho Jung, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006).

33. Andrea Geiger, “Caught in the Gap: The Transit Privilege and North America’s Ambiguous Borders,” in Bridging National Borders in North America: Transnational and Comparative Histories, ed. Benjamin H. Johnson and Andrew R. Graybill (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 199–222.

34. A bond signed between the American Surety Company of New York and the Canadian Pacific Railway Company, February 21, 1922, outlined precisely these provisions. It was used to justify Canadian Pacific Railway’s penalty for having lost Chin Kim, near Kamloops, British Columbia. See March 23, 1922, telegram from the Vancouver Immigration Station to Washington, DC, Immigration office; and “Bond: Conditioned for the Passage of Chinese Aliens in Transit through the Ports of Malone, N.Y.; New York City, N.Y.; Boston, Mass.; Richford, V.T.; Jackman, M.E.; and Vanceboro, M.E., in the United States of America,” February 21, 1922. esp. p. 4. Both in University Publications of America Microfilm, Immigration and Naturalization Services, Series A, Supplement to Part 1, Reel 7: 54415-39, 39A, frames 0271, 0272; 0278–0283. States used fines and bonds as legal and financial implements to enforce what immigration law scholar E. P. Hutchinson has termed “imposed liability.” They were the means by which states attempted to compel firms to enforce migration laws. Hutchinson, Legislative History, 593–604. The success of “imposed liability” poses a historiographical and empirical question with no quick answer. Adam McKeown argues that the Chinese Exclusion Act, with requisite consular investigation and liabilities imposed on shippers, generally failed to restrict Chinese migrants, for fraud abounded and Chinese entry continued. In contrast, Aristide Zolberg suggests that new techniques of “remote control” largely succeeded by projecting screening mechanisms overseas. In either case, there is much evidence that transportation firms happily broke immigration laws when they thought they would profit from ticket sales. Adam McKeown, “Ritualization of Regulation: The Enforcement of Chinese Exclusion in the United States and China,” American Historical Review 108, no. 2 (2003): 377–403, esp. 379; Aristide Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), and “The Archaeology of ‘Remote Control,’ ” in Migration Control in the North Atlantic World: The Evolution of State Practices in Europe and the United States from the French Revolution to the Inter-War Period, ed. Andreas Fahrmeir, Olivier Faron, and Patrick Weil (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), 195–222. On shippers’ violations, see Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, 1880–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 304; Lisa Rose Mar, Brokering Belonging: Chinese in Canada’s Exclusion Era, 1885–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 25–38; Takai, “Navigating Transpacific Passages.”

35. Bosniak, Citizen and the Alien, 9.

36. Engin F. Isin and Kim Rygiel, “Abject Spaces: Frontiers, Zones, Camps,” in Logics of Biopower and the War on Terror, ed. E. Dauphinee and C. Masters (Houndsmill, UK: Palgrave, 2007), 181–203. On Chinese legal demands for belonging, see especially Salyer, Laws Harsh as Tigers; Jean Pfaelzer, Driven Out: The Forgotten War against Chinese Americans (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

37. Eithne Luibhéid, Entry Denied: Controlling Sexuality at the Border (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Natalia Molina, Fit to Be Citizens? Public Health and Race in Los Angeles, 1879–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); Erika Lee and Judy Yung, Angel Island: Immigrant Gateway to America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010); Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Anna Pegler-Gordon, In Sight of America: Photography and the Development of U.S. Immigration Policy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America (Berkeley: University of California Press 2005).

38. Vincent J. Cannato, American Passage: The History of Ellis Island (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009); Deirdre M. Moloney, National Insecurities: Immigrants and U.S. Deportation Policy since 1882 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 105–33.

39. On Stanley’s career, see Ethan Blue, “The Strange Career of Leo Stanley: Remaking Manhood and Medicine at San Quentin State Penitentiary, 1913–1951,” Pacific Historical Review 78, no. 2 (2009): 210–41; Ethan Blue, “Abject Correction and Penal Medical Photography in the Early 20th Century,” in The Punitive Turn: Race, Prisons, Justice, and Inequality, ed. Deborah E. McDowell, Claudrena Harold, and Juan Battle (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 108–30; Blue, “Strange Passages.”

40. The quote is Stanley’s from his diary, “Trot, Trot, Trot to Boston,” Leo L. Stanley Diaries, box 1, vol. 3, SC 070, Stanford University Archives, Stanford, CA.

41. Leo Stanley, “Five Weeks Leave,” 2–3, 6; Leo L. Stanley Diaries, box 1, vol. 4, SC 070; Jack Santino, Miles of Smiles, Years of Struggle: Stories of Black Pullman Porters (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 31, 50–51, 126.

42. Stanley, “Five Weeks Leave,” 2–3.

43. Stanley, “Trot, Trot, Trot to Boston,” 3.

44. AR-CGI (1920), 310.

45. Stanley, “Five Weeks Leave,” 45; and “Trot, Trot, Trot to Boston,” 17.

46. A former military nurse named Miss Sech was the matron on an eastbound train in 1922 and was responsible for two insane women deportees. Stanley, “Five Weeks Leave,” 8.

47. Stanley, 40. In 1920, a Boston agent noted the discrepancy in the wages received by unskilled male laborers in the Immigration Bureau and its skilled female matrons: matrons, who occupied “positions of responsibility, serving as deporting officers and in many ways performing duties akin to those of a trained nurse, are entitled to compensation in excess of that paid unskilled laborers. Perhaps this and other discrepancies will be cleared up in the reclassification of the civil service to be considered during the next session of Congress.” AR-CGI (1920), 327, quoted in Torrie Hester, “Deportation: Origins of a National and International Power” (PhD diss., University of Oregon, 2008), 120, fn52.

48. For detail on early twentieth-century scandals over mentally ill deportees, see Moloney, National Insecurities, 121–23.

49. Stanley, “Trot, Trot, Trot to Boston,” 26–27.

50. Stanley, 27.

51. This is a form of what Achiele Mbembe called necropolitics, biopolitics’ racialized, murderous, and seemingly permanent counterpart. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” trans. Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15 (2003): 11–40.

52. Aristide Zolberg highlighted how the closed, container-like quality of steamships facilitated the externalization of immigration inspection, but these qualities were equally applicable to the deportation journey. Zolberg, “Global Movements, Global Walls: Responses to Migration, 1885–1925,” in Global History and Migrations, ed. Wang Gungwu (New York: Routledge, 1996), 298.

53. Joe Welsh, Bill Howes, and Kevin J. Holland, The Cars of Pullman (Minneapolis: Voyageur Press, 2010), 9.

54. Richter, Home on the Rails.

55. April 23, 1934, correspondence and blueprints from J. N. Haynes, Lehigh Valley Railroad Company to P. S. Millspaugh, in File 56193-283, NARA I, RG 85.

56. Richter, Home on the Rails.

57. In his novel Strange Passage, which drew on contemporary reportage, Irwin described a “West Indian Negro” deportee riding alongside Europeans aboard the deportation train. Irwin, Strange Passage (New York: Harrison Smith and Robert Haas, 1935), 20.

58. April 18, 1914, report, from Inspector in Charge (signature illegible) to Commissioner General of Immigration, File 52903/60-B, NARA I, RG 85.

59. Leo Stanley, “To Ellis Island and Back,” 7, Stanley Diaries, box 1, vol. 2, SC 070.

60. These were U.S. citizens, but they were not considered California residents and were expelled from its hospitals. Similar practices existed elsewhere: the Texas State Lunatic Asylum housed a “deportation officer … responsible for the return of non-resident patients to the state of their residence.” From Texas Research League, Fiscal Administration in the Texas Hospital System, Report No. 12 (Austin: Texas Research League), 53, quoted in Sarah C. Sitton, Life at the Texas State Lunatic Asylum, 1857–1997 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999), 83.

61. Stanley, “To Ellis Island and Back,” 18–19.

62. Stanley, 32–33.

63. Stanley, 39.

64. Stanley, “Trot, Trot, Trot to Boston,” 16.

65. Stanley.

66. Stanley,14.

67. Stanley, 16.

68. Stanley, 14–15.

69. Stanley, 19–20.

70. Stanley, 13.

71. Stanley, “To Ellis Island and Back,” 36.

72. Stanley, 38–39, 43–44.

73. Stanley, “Five Weeks Leave,” 3.

74. Clearly, deportation had not been effective in this man’s permanent removal, though his recapture bespoke a tightening network. New penalties and the criminalization of return in 1929 would create an even more punitive system.

75. Stanley, “Five Weeks Leave,” 4–5.

76. Stanley, 4.

77. Stanley, 21–22.

78. Stanley, page number illegible in author’s copy.

79. Stanley, 17.

80. Stanley, 5.

81. Stanley, 45–46.

82. June 23, 1919, Communication from Russell to Commissioner-General, File 54519-3, University Publications of America Microfilm, INS Series A Supplement to Part 1, Reel 9, frames 106–193.

83. Stanley, “Five Weeks Leave,” 66–67.

84. Hernández, Migra!, 143–44.

85. Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 31. Quoted by Liat Ben-Moshe, Che Gossett, Nick Mitchell, and Eric A. Stanley, “Critical Theory, Queer Resistance, and the Ends of Capture,” in Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration, ed. Geoffrey Adelsberg, Lisa Guenther, and Scott Zeman (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 266–369, esp. 273.

86. Ben-Moshe, Gossett, Mitchell, and Stanley, “Critical Theory, Queer Resistance, and the Ends of Capture,” 273.

87. Stanley, “Five Weeks Leave,” page number illegible in author’s copy.

88. Cannato, American Passage, 312.

89. Stanley, “Trot, Trot, Trot to Boston,” 24.

90. Stanley, 25–26.

91. Stanley, “Five Weeks Leave,” 40.

92. Stanley, 40.

93. Stanley, 42–43.

94. Stanley, “To Ellis Island and Back,” 46–47.

95. Stanley, “Trot, Trot, Trot to Boston,” 32–33.

96. Hernández, “Amnesty or Abolition?,” 54–68.

97. In the United States, see Mark Dow, American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); and globally, see Michael Flynn and Cecilia Cannon, “The Privatization of Immigration Detention: Towards a Global View,” Global Detention Project Working Paper, September 2009, http://www.globaldetentionproject.org/fileadmin/docs/GDP_PrivatizationPaper_Final5.pdf; Blue, “Finding Margins on Borders.”

98. Ngai, “The Strange Career of the Illegal Alien,” 101–3. For records of different European American ethnic community mobilization, see the records of the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, Labadie Collection, University of Michigan Special Collections.

99. Hernández, Migra!, 77.

100. Hernández, Migra!, esp. 149, 184. A 1954 photograph shows undocumented Mexicans forced aboard Greyhound busses for deportation. Migra!, 185.

101. “Immigration Rights Activists in Tucson Block Deportation Buses,” Al Jazeera America Steam Blog, October 11, 2013, http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/the-stream/the-stream-officialblog/2013/10/11/activists-in-tucsonblockdeportationbuses.html; “Breaking: San Francisco Blocks Deportation Busses,” #Not1More, October 17, 2013, http://www.notonemoredeportation.com/2013/10/17/sfaction; Max Chalmers, “Dramatic Stand of Three Passengers Enough to Stop Asylum Seeker Removal, for Now,” New Matilda, February 2, 2015, https://newmatilda.com/2015/02/02/dramatic-stand-three-passengers-enough-stop-asylum-seeker-removal-now.