‘In the Shadow of Liberty’ shines light on American immigration history

Episode Notes

Transcript

Lee Rawles:

Welcome to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host, the ABA Journal’s Lee Rawles. And today I’m joined by Ana Raquel Minian, author of the new book In The Shadow of Liberty, the Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States. Ana, thanks so much for joining us.

Ana Raquel Minian:

Thanks for having me here.

Lee Rawles:

Can you tell us first a little bit about your own background and how you came to be interested in this area of history and law?

Ana Raquel Minian:

Yeah, so I was born in Mexico and I arrived to the United States just a few days after nine 11 when I arrived to the United States. In some ways it was absolutely wonderful. I met such a diverse community, I made a lot of friends. I received a fabulous education. But as time went by, what was happening in Guantanamo really started to hit me, and it was always in the back of my mind. And still my primary concern as someone who was born in Mexico was what was happening with Mexican immigrants. Right before nine 11, president Bush had tried to negotiate and was about to establish a way for undocumented migrants living in the United States to become legalized when the towers collapsed. So did this agreement, and so I became extremely interested in what we could do to help unauthorized migrants living in the United States. And that’s how I decided to go to grad school to study this, and that is how I came to write my first book.

After that, I continued to research migration, but I realized that we didn’t know much about detention, about the history of immigrant detention. And as I began to research it a little bit more, I realized that it was actually very much intertwined with the history of Guantanamo, which is what I had first learned about when I arrived in the United States. It turns out that before being a site to hold enemy combatants, George HW Bush, as in George w Bush’s father had used the naval base to hold Haitian refugees. Then came 2018 when the Trump administration truly came out in favor of detention, and not only that, but announced the zero tolerance policy, which would separate children from their parents while in detention. It was then that I knew that I had to write this book on immigrant detention. I wanted to understand how it was that separating children from their parents was not only imaginable, but actually possible. And what did this tell us about America and its history as a whole?

Lee Rawles:

I consider myself to know a fair amount about immigration, the court system. I grew up in central Illinois where there were a lot of migrant workers, not just for farm, but also for local companies and factories. I helped tutor English in college and high school for migrant workers, things like this. There was so much in the shadow of liberty that I had no idea about. This was a tremendous read for me to educate myself. And I remember vividly when it was disclosed that the family separations in 2018 where happening, I actually had heard rumblings about it from, there’s an a BA project, we’ll talk a little bit more about later, called the South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project. They had been sending up alerts basically that this was happening before it was announced publicly. And I was like, oh, but surely not. What your book taught me was what happened in 2018 did not in any way start in 2018. So for readers who are thinking, oh, I’m going to pick up the invisible history of immigrant detention in the United States, and it’s going to start maybe in the Obama years, probably in the Trump years, no, not at all. Immigrant detention has been happening for so much longer. And the way you decided to lay out your book was by following stories of some of the people, the real people who were impacted. So I would love to get into that. Who’s the first story you tell starting in 1900?

Ana Raquel Minian:

So I wanted when writing this book, yes, to trace the legal history of immigration detention, the policies that had come about to created, but also to tell the intimate lives of those who had been held behind bars. And I chose the four people on whom to follow based on the fact that through their stories, I could tell the major transformations that had occurred in the immigrant detention system. So the first person that I follow is Fuji, how arrives in the United States in 1901, he comes from China. Before arriving, he had fought in the Boxer Rebellion against boxers. So what was happening in China was that Chinese people were sick of imperialism and decided to fight against it, but the way they went about it was by attacking missionaries. That was one of the most important ways they went about it. And Chi, how was a Christian risked his life to save American missionaries.

So to thank him, Oberlin College invited him to come as a student. Now, at the time, the Chinese Exclusion Act had prevented the vast majority of Chinese migrants to come to the United States, but it allowed a few exempt groups to come, and one of them was students. So Chiao had the right to come to study in Oberlin, their legal right to come. And yet, as soon as he arrived to the United States, he was incarcerated first on the vessel on which Chi had arrived, and then in a shed in San Francisco that was owned by one of the vessel companies. Through his story, I’m able to show the inception of the immigrant detention system, which really starts after a law passed in 1891, but also how those detain detention is not linked so much to people’s actions or to the legality of their entrance, but to people’s race, Al had the right to come to the United States legal, right, his actions, he had risked his life for American citizens, and yet he was detained. So those are the two main points that I want to show. One is the importance of race and detention. And second, through his story, I tell how immigration detention came about.

Lee Rawles:

And when it comes to finding out these details about Chi, how’s story, how did you find that out? What were your research methods?

Ana Raquel Minian:

So I followed four different people in total. The last two people I followed were still alive when I was conducting the research. So I could conduct very lengthy oral history interviews with them. I couldn’t do so with Fujio or with Ellen Nuf who arrived in 1948 because by the time I began the research, they were already dead, but they had left very detailed autobiographies about their experiences. So I read these autobiographies. They were very detailed. I was able to tell through them not only their life in detention, but also what happened to them that led them to come, what happened to them when they arrived and their life in detention, and also the effects of that detention had on them afterwards. And this was extremely important for me because I wanted to show the full life of those who are being held because of the immigrant detention system, that they’re not just detainees, they have intimate lives, they have sorrows, they have family members who are outside of this detention system. Now, I didn’t just want to, I wanted to tell a broader story through the experiences of Fuji Hao and Ellen N. So I complimented these autobiographies by using legal records, newspaper articles that were being published at the time of different people who were being incarcerated upon arrival by using not only court hearings, but legislative debates. So all of these records, immigration and naturalization records allow me to paint a broader picture through the limited sources that do exist about immigration detention during that earlier period before the beginning of the Cold War.

Lee Rawles:

Ana, I think that Ellen’s story is a perfect opportunity to talk about Ellis Island. I am a white American. The most recent immigrants from my family were in my great grandparents’ generation. The way that I grew up hearing about Ellis Island was, oh, well, this is where people coming to the East Coast stopped off. You had a medical exam and that could be fairly traumatic, but it was all part of, oh, well, this is your first step in the new country and you’re processed through it. And Ellis Island was a lot more than just a processing station. I did not realize how many people were detained on Ellis Island, especially during the World War ii, post World War ii Red Scare years. So could you tell us a little bit about Ellen and how she found herself at Ellis Island?

Ana Raquel Minian:

So Ellen’s story is absolutely astounding. She was a German Jewish holocaust survivor who had fought against the Nazis through the organizations that she partook during the war, and then she had escaped Germany. And after the war, she returned to find out what had happened with her family. It turns out that all her family had been killed by the Nazis, so she joined the US Army in occupation that was occupying parts of Germany during that period. So she was very much helping the United States Through her work while working, while being in Germany, she meets a man, she falls madly in love with him. They soon marry. This man was an American gi, so they decide that they’re eventually going to move to the United States and that Ellen should to America to become a citizen through the War Brides Act. So Ellen travels to the United States when she arrives.

She’s about to see the statute of Liberty. She’s extremely happy about it, and instead, an immigration official announces that she is not going to be able to go on land. She is going to be detained, and she is sent to Ellis Island. Like you said, Ellis Island is generally thought of as this place that welcomed the poor huddle masses into America. But Ellis Island was also a prison. Ella North is held for three years in Ellis Island. She is not told why she is being held, when she will be released, or if she will be released. She is being detained without being accused of a crime and without the possibility of countering the evidence in a hearing.

Lee Rawles:

And her husband, Kurt, is still in Germany for most of this time, so he can’t even help her.

Ana Raquel Minian:

That’s right. He comes and he tries to help her during brief periods of time, but he can’t leave his job in Germany for longer periods of time because he has to support Ellen’s legal struggles and legal battles in the United States. This happened because eventually it comes out that the reason why Ellen was being detained was because Kurt, her husband’s ex-girlfriend had spread the rumor that Ellen was a spy. So it was all the jealousy of the ex-girlfriend that lands Ellen in this prison that was Ellis Island. Ellen’s story demonstrates the absurdity of our immigration laws, how they’re not based on actual factual evidence, but they can be based simply on rumors. It also shows the history of Ellis Island. In fact, although during the Second World War and during the Reds scare, as you mentioned, an increasing number of people were held in Ellis Island before being deported.

Even during Ellis Island’s earlier years, about 15% of people were detained for some period of time there. For example, if you were a woman and you arrived without a man, you had to prove that you wouldn’t become a public charge, that the state wouldn’t have to take care of you. So you needed a man to show that, and it took a while for that to happen. So 15% is quite a bit of people that we don’t know about, and as you said, during periods of hysteria around, for example, communism, anarchism, fascism, even more people were held on this island.

Lee Rawles:

In reading about Ellen’s story, it was heartening that when a variety of Americans found out about her story, were made aware, there was a lot of public media attention. Ellen herself had to kind of come to terms with that, not just being a person, but realizing, oh, I am the face of something for the American public and I need to use this platform. So loved reading about that for her, but even with a huge number of American legislators on her side, the court system was so convoluted that it really, my heart kind of picked up. No spoilers I suppose, but there was a lot there for readers who want to know more pick up in the shadow of liberty. We’re going to take a quick break to hear from our advertisers. Welcome back to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host, Lee Rawles here with Ana Minan, author of In The Shadow of Liberty, the Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States. I wanted to take now some time to talk about the next person in line chronologically. Herardo Mansour was part of the Mariel Cuban wave of immigration, and I’m going to be honest with you, I had zero idea this happened. It occurred essentially within a year of my birth, but I knew nothing about the Mariel Cubans. Can you talk about the Mariel boat lift and give us a little more information on this period of history?

Ana Raquel Minian:

Yes, but first, let me link your two questions or your two comments. Like you said, Ellen’s case received so much attention from the press. She lost her Supreme Court case as well as other legal cases, but eventually the pressure that the Attorney General was getting from the media meant that she was released. And after she was released, soon thereafter, the government decided that the publicity against detention was just not worth it. So in 1954, the Attorney General a announces that the government is going to move away from detention and instead of holding people upon arrival, the government is going to release the vast majority of them on parole. This happens in part, the actions are often different than the words, but the government was very much in favor. Politicians, the courts were very much in favor of reducing the number of people who were being detained of letting them out on parole.

In fact, the Supreme Court said that this practice, certainly this policy reflects the human qualities of an enlightened civilization. Now, let’s go back to your question about Marielle. This dwindling and turn against immigration detention continues for the most part all the way until 1980. In 1980, Fidel Castro announces that Cubans who want to leave the island can do so. Up to then most Cubans didn’t come to the United States, not because they were not welcome here, but because Fidel Castro and his government didn’t allow that to happen. Immigration was prohibited in 1980 because of a variety of protests. Fidel Castro allows people to leave. And in the summer of 1980, approximately 125,000 people come sail from the port of Marial in Cuba to Florida. Now, as they’re traveling in the Florida streets, Castro announces that he had opened the jails, the prisons of Cuba, and many of those who were heading to the United States were criminals.

Of course, this cost so much commotion in America, and even though President Carter had said that he would welcome all Cubans who were fleeing with open arms, he quickly turned At first, many Marielle Cubans were held in Navo bases. President Reagan decided to use this fear against the Cubans who had arrived in the Marielle boat lift to turn against this move against immigration detention and immigration detention returned full force. But not only did it return, which moved away from what the Supreme Court had called an enlightened civilization, and instead it returned in a different way. While previously migrants had been held, while the government decided whether they had a right to enter the country after the early 1980s, immigration detention came to be used as a means of deterrence. The Reagan administration concluded that if detention was harsh enough, potential migrants would think twice and would not come to the United States out of fear that they would be detained. So it was a dual turn, one in the return of detention. And second on this change of ideas of why detention should be used.

Lee Rawles:

There’s a term that you talk about in the book and I think will help people who while listening to this may think there are protections not only for American citizens, but for anyone who’s on American shores, that some of what people like Herardo went through. How could this be allowed to happen? And this term is entry fiction. Could you talk about entry fiction?

Ana Raquel Minian:

Yes. Up until 1891, most migrants who arrived to the United States and the government didn’t know whether they had the right to enter or not. For example, Chinese migrants, we’ve talked about them, came to the United States, some claimed to be students. While the government decided and tried to find out whether they were really entering the country as students, it detained them. Now, up until then, immigration detention took place on the vessels on which the migrants arrived. They were not allowed for the most part to come on land. But this cost a huge problem for the companies that brought these migrants. Sometimes they needed to depart before decisions were made. And so in 1891, Congress passes a law that says, okay, they don’t need to be held in the vessels on which they arrive. They can actually be held on land. But it added a caveat, even though they are detained in the United States proper in the mainland, we’re going to legally imagine that they’re not here, that they never arrived. And since they never arrived, of course, since they’re not here, they don’t deserve basic constitutional rights. They can be detained, incarcerated without trial. They can be held for indefinite periods of time. They don’t know when they’re going to be released or even if they’re going to be released at all. They don’t have the right to a hearing.

Lee Rawles:

Yeah, that is incredible. And getting back to Hedos story, he arrived in the United States and there’s a lot to his story, so obviously I would recommend you picking up the book. But for a while things seemed to be going fairly well for him. Once he was released, he met a woman, they fell in love. They were building a family. And it would’ve been one of the classic stories that, for instance, the American Press loves telling about, you came to the country and you were able to make a life here and it all got interrupted. Could you talk about what happened next for him and for Julia, his wife?

Ana Raquel Minian:

Yeah. So Herardo arrived, like you said, in the Marial boat lift of 1980, and he was originally held in Fort Chaffee, which was a naval base. And there he met this woman, Julia. Eventually they’re released and they head to Las Vegas. In Las Vegas, they have this utterly successful life. Gerardo gets a wonderful job. So does Julia. They’re living the American dream. They have a child who was born in the United States, and soon thereafter, they have another one. Now in 1983, soon after the second baby was born, police officers come to Herardo and his wives jus house. The reasons why they come are not fully known. There’s different interpretations. The newspapers had different ideas, and Julia told me something different. The most cited reason why they came was because of a noise complaint. But anyway, these police officers arrive and enter the house without a warrant and find in Caro’s house less than an ounce of marijuana.

They immediately arrest Herardo and Julia, and they send them to jail. Their children are sent to the foster care system. After a day, the two are released and their lawyer, they managed to acquire. A pro bono lawyer says, you know what? You just need to claim that you’re guilty. And Cardo says, yeah, but we’re not guilty. That ounce of marijuana didn’t belong to us. It belonged to someone who is living in their house. And the lawyer says, don’t even worry about it. It’s less than an ounce. You’re just going to get probation. And in fact, when they go to court, the judge declares that they just need to be held under probation. So they’re released. Their children, their two children, American born, come back to them and once again, Julian Herardo begin to build this successful American dream story. They get even better jobs. They’re happy, they have friends, and then Herardo has to show to appear before his probation officer.

So he goes to the office. Julia decides to come with them, and when they arrive, the probation officer tells them to wait a minute, not an hour had passed that immigration officers barge into the probation office and arrest Hido and Julia. They are not told why they’re being arrested. They had just been given probation. We wouldn’t have assumed that they’re arrested. Hido is sent again for a crime that deserved just probation, less than an ounce of marijuana. He is sent to a federal maximum security penitentiary in Atlanta. Julia is sent to a prison in Lexington from 1983 to 1987. The two are held behind bars. Their children are sent to the foster care system. During the time that they’re incarcerated, they receive letters saying, you should just give up your children’s for adoption. They refuse to do so. They become extremely depressed. They want to reunite with their children.

They don’t understand why they’re being detained, why they’re being held. No one gives them the right to a trial. Again, no one tells them if they’re going to ever be released, they’re being held indefinitely. In 1987, folks like them, other Marielle Cubans who had broken the law even in very small ways, who had been incarcerated also in Atlanta and in a prison in Oakdale, Louisiana stage, a massive riot. Imagine they had no hope anymore. No one told them why they were arrested. No one told them if they’d ever be let out. So they staged this massive rebellion. Eventually, most Mariel Cubans who were being held in federal prisons are released. That includes Hio. This again shows us the problems of parole. Hio had committed a very small infraction similar to that of Fuji, how he should not have been in prison. The judge determined that he shouldn’t have been in prison, and yet he was. And that is because while you’re on parole, you cannot break any laws.

Lee Rawles:

Ana, one of the things I found so striking was when you talk about the role that prison privatization played throughout the eighties and then into today, I’ve been very aware of the private prison system, partially living in the Midwest. A lot of small towns that lost previous industries looked at private prisons as a financial savior for an area that was now financially disadvantaged. So there are a lot of far-flung rural place places that were hoping for these private prisons to be built. And some of the first private prisons built were specifically to hold immigrants. I feel like we need to talk about that when we talk about immigrant detention. Were you surprised to find out the role that immigrant detention had in this prison privatization?

Ana Raquel Minian:

Yeah. It was one of the things that surprised me the most when I was doing my research, but it is not surprising. In the 1980s, the Attorney General, the government wanted to imprison, as I said, more immigrants who were arriving who had perhaps broken the law, but even who were just arriving to the United States. At the same time, the Reagan administration was incarcerating a huge number of people because of the war on drugs. Now, the problem was that there were just not enough prisons to do. So in 1983, a man called Tom Beasley suggested to the Attorney General that they build private prisons. And the first private prison in America was an immigration detention system. It opened Tom Beasley’s Corporation. It opened by the corporation itself was called CCA. The name has changed to Core Civic, but now it is one of the two most important private prison companies in the United States. Corporations are making money out of incarceration, and of course are lobbying for the increased detention and incarceration of American citizens to boost their bottom lines.

Lee Rawles:

We’re going to hear about what was next for Herardo and Julia in just a moment. After we hear from our advertisers, welcome back to the Modern Law Library. I’m your host, Lee Rawles here with Ana Raquel Minian, author of the book In The Shadow of Liberty, the Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States. We can’t go forward in Gerardo’s story without talking about trauma and intergenerational trauma that is caused by immigrant detention. I think that we are only at the beginning of reckoning with what has been happening for families recently, but we can look back at the eighties and nineties and see what happened to the families then. So there is a large portion of Al’s story that gets into privatized prisons and definitely pick up the book to see the impact that immigration fears and immigration detention had on creating the private prison system. But again, I would like to talk about the intergenerational trauma that their sons experienced, that the family continued to experience after the parents left prison.

Ana Raquel Minian:

Yeah, so in 1988, quedo is released and so is Julia again. They start to try to build their life. At first, it is really, really hard. Julia only knew Spanish. Their children had grown up in foster care, only speaking English. They were taken basically when they were toddlers and a newborn. They had grown with their foster family and the trauma of the separation from their parents and then returning with their parents and learning what had happened to them and not being able at first to fully communicate with them caused so much trauma. Soon when the kids became teenagers, they started to break the law not in serious often as the years went by and more and more serious ways, and this is not surprising, we know that the children of individuals who have been incarcerated are much more likely to end up in prison themselves. So that’s what happened to these two children. They were so traumatized that they could not acclimate to what had happened to society, and they started breaking the law themselves as a form of rebellion.

Lee Rawles:

Well, let’s talk about the most recent immigrant who you profile in the book Fernando and his story. He is a Guatemalan man. Let’s hear from you because you actually have spoken with him and his family and heard directly from him about his experience. But all of this is kicked off by a very deep family trauma, the death of a child. Could you talk a little bit about Fernando’s story

Ana Raquel Minian:

Up to now? We left with Rado story and how the Marial boatlift turned America’s detention system into a system to deter future migrants into coming. And this is exactly the pits system that Fernando and his family encountered. Fernando had a beautiful family with his wife. They lived in Peron in Guatemala, and the gangs started to take over. Fernando tried to resist them entering into his community, and one day his only son is killed by two gang members. Not long after, basically the next day, the whole family begins to be threatened over and over again. Fernando told that the whole family is going to be killed,

Lee Rawles:

And his middle daughter saw the murder. She was sitting next to her brother. Right.

Ana Raquel Minian:

It was very traumatic talk about trauma. Absolutely. And so in some ways, part of the threats were that this girl remained as a witness, and gang members don’t leave witnesses. So Fernando decides that he needs to take his family away from Peron and away from Guatemala City, which is very close by, and he starts living and hiding with his whole family in Guatemala. He leaves for short periods of time to work and make some money, but him and his three girls and his wife remain in hotel rooms and they move from hotel room to hotel room, and they basically don’t leave. Otherwise, this is not alive. So Fernando and his wife, KLA decide that they need to flee from Guatemala. They sell their house for very little money, and with that, they start their journey to the United States. Mexico has a lot of migratory checkpoints in part in great part because of pressure from the United that Mexico curtail the passage of non-Mexican migrants so that they never even reach the US Mexico border.

And in one of these checkpoints, Fernando and his middle child, Andrea, are separated from the rest of the family. They arrive in 2018. Soon after the Trump administration had announced the zero tolerance policy that was to separate children from their parents, KLA and two of the girls arrive in the Laredo processing station. They are held for a few days, and then they’re sent all together to a detention system, a detention center in Dhi, Texas. There they’re able to get a lawyer, which we know is indispensable for people to win their immigration asylum cases. And after three weeks, they are all released into Los Angeles with very good chances of getting asylum. Their credible fear interview was considered to be real, that they were likely to face persecution if they returned to Guatemala. Three days later, Fernando and Andrea arrived to the same processing center in Laredo.

Instead of being sent to a detention center together or released, Fernando is holding Andrea the night that they arrived and an officer rips her apart, takes her away from him. Literally, she’s holding onto him as tight as she can, and this officer pulls her away and tells Fernando that the girl Andrea is going to be held in one facility while Fernando is going to be held in the same facility but in a different part of the facility. At about 3:00 AM Fernando is laying on the floor in the room in which he is being held, and he starts to hear screams. And from the little window in the door, he sees how the children who had been separated are now lined up and being taken away. One of these children was only two years old, so the children are marched away into a bus. Andrea, because she is so young, is taken to a tender age facility.

In contrast, the next day, Fernando is sent to a detention center that is owned by the Geo Group, a private prison corporation. Fernando is moved from facility to facility for four months and then is deported back to Guatemala. Eventually, Andrea is allowed into the country. Now, the stories, the different experiences that Kla and the girls had versus Fernando and Andrea are so notable. The two arrived at the same processing center. They told the same story about why they were fleeing and one was incarcerated, separated from his daughter and then deported while Kla and their two daughters were allowed into the country. It shows the absurdity, the lack of logic, again in our immigrant detention system.

Lee Rawles:

It absolutely did. I want to mention at this point, I think it’s so important, as you said, that KLA was able to speak with an American lawyer who talked her through here’s what a credible fear interview is going to be like. These are the kinds of questions they’re going to ask. Here’s what they will consider as, I guess, counting as credible fear. So she had legal counsel, and Fernando do not. And before we end our talk, because I know there are many lawyers out there listening who would want to help, we’re going to talk about ways in which if you’re an attorney you can do that. You can help provide some pro bono legal services. But wanted to just break in and point out that difference in the success of the asylum claim.

Ana Raquel Minian:

Yeah, it is very hard. There’s very few pro bono lawyers that are working to help asylum seekers, and we know that having a lawyer, having legal counsel is absolutely indispensable for people to win their cases. With legal counsel, they’re more than likely to win Without it, it’s very, very unlikely. So legal counsel is absolutely indispensable. Migrants arrive not knowing. They are fleeing for the reasons that asylum is given, and yet they don’t know how to present their case before officers who are judging whether their fear is credible, and again, who then even if they pass, that cannot truly communicate with their immigration judge. Part of the reason why there’s few pro bono lawyers is because there’s generally a few pro bono lawyers, but also because immigration detention facilities like our nation’s prisons are held so far away from urban hubs that it is hard for lawyers to reach these facilities and help the migrants who need so much help to help the asylum seekers basically.

Lee Rawles:

When you were first made aware of Fernando story, how did you get in touch with him and where in his journey was he? What did you know as you were doing this interview for the books about what would eventually happen to him and his family?

Ana Raquel Minian:

Again, I was very conscious that I didn’t want to hurt people through the histories I told. So I contacted attorneys to make sure that if I told particular person’s story, it wouldn’t cause any harm for them. I thought the immigration system would work in the ways it worked, but my book should not affect the outcome of people’s cases. I met Fernando’s lawyer and she told me, yes, I could interview Fernando and it would not pose a risk. And the reason why was right before Fernando was deported back to Guatemala, a judge, judge Sabra from San Diego had ruled that parents needed to be reunited with their children. Those who had been separated, the government didn’t reunite many children from their parents because they hadn’t kept track of where the children were and where the parents were. But they did know where Fernando was and where Andrea was.

And yet, despite Judge RA’s ruling, and it wasn’t just one ruling, it was two, Fernando was deported instead of reunited. And so the family’s pro bono lawyer who met the family by helping Kian and their two daughters fought alongside the A CLU to ensure that Fernando and a few other migrants could return to the United States because of the exceptional circumstances under which they had been deported. Fernando and the group that were allowed to come in actually arrived during the Trump administration, and they were the first group to be able to do so. By the time that I interviewed him, he was already in the United States and he was fairly safe.

Lee Rawles:

Yeah, that is good. Well, let’s talk about, for anyone who has been listening and says, yes, immigrant detention clearly causes so much suffering, but what are our alternatives? You’ve mentioned a couple of times during our conversation that parole itself has drawbacks, but there was this period of time, as you brought up from the fifties through the eighties, where parole was how immigrants who needed to come back and interact with the immigration court system were generally handled. So let’s talk about it. I think having read your book that you would say the system of immigration detention we have is immoral and needs to end. What are our alternatives?

Ana Raquel Minian:

Yes. So of course what our country needs is a complete overhaul of our immigration system or of our immigration law. This is not going to happen I believe anytime soon. So let me focus on detention. Detention is accrual system is an arbitrary system, and it is absolutely not needed. From 1954 to 1980, migrants were released on parole, as I said, because we knew that the government knew that they were not going to abscond, that they were going to return. This is still true. Over 90% of all people who are released on parole today appear in immigration court. So yes, I think parole is the solution. Until we change our immigration law more broadly, the parole system needs to be changed as well. Ideally, migrants understand why they would return to prison to detention if they break the law or anything like that, and it wouldn’t be as discriminatory and the bond shouldn’t be high, but whatever parole is better than being held behind bars.

And I have to say, one of the changes that has happened in recent years is that we have moved to alternate to imprisonment and alternate to detention systems. So for example, people are put ankle bracelets to monitor them, and I don’t think that that is the solution. All of these technologies are run by the same for-profit, prison corporations. Then the detention centers. Let’s say you have one of these ankle monitors, sure it’s better than being held behind bars, but you are released into a society and you’re already being discriminated against you. People don’t want to give you a job. It’s hard to be part of a community, and of course it is so much more likely that you will break the law or that you will not be able to incorporate yourself fully into the United States with these predicaments. So that is not something that I advocate for. I think full parole without these technologies or requirements is the way to go. There is no cost for us to do so.

Lee Rawles:

I would agree with you on the technologies. Often people are being asked to also pay for this private corporation to monitor them. I find these technologies, these tracking technologies very problematic as well. So just wanted to mention that. I really loved that at the back of your book, you make sure to have an entire resources section. For anyone who has read this and wants to do more, become active. You don’t have to be a lawyer of course, but for lawyers who want to get involved, you have resources and you have resources for people without law degrees as well. So I just wanted to give you an opportunity now. Would you like to shout out any organizations you’d encourage people to interact with to learn more?

Ana Raquel Minian:

The most famous organization, the one that became a very popular during the Trump administration years is of course s that works in Texas to support people who are in detention, to support children who are being detained with their parents and who work for broader change as well. So that is one of the organizations that I support. But in the book, as you said, in the Shadow of Liberty, I mentioned many other organizations that people can support.

Lee Rawles:

And as someone who works for the A journal, I want to call out the good people at Pro Bar, which is short for South Texas pro Bono asylum representation project. If you want to find out more about them, the website is A-B-A-P-R-O-B-A-R, ABA pro bar.org. Anna, another thing that I just wanted to bring up that helped me learn more about the system was I think that there’s a lot more attention paid to what immigrants coming into the United States from the East Coast experienced. I really appreciated finding out more through FCI House story about what was happening with immigration on the West coast, and I actually independently went and I looked up the Pacific Maille shed that he was held in photographs from it. It’s quite stunning and appalling. So anyone who wants to find out more about what was happening on the West coast, I really do recommend they pick up in the shadow of liberty. If you wanted people to have one takeaway from this book, what would it be?

Ana Raquel Minian:

I think the main takeaway I want people to take is that detention doesn’t protect us. That detention doesn’t ensure that people will appear in their immigration hearing that there is no reason for us to hold people behind bars. It has huge costs to our ethics, to our democracy. Think about the entry fiction to our constitutional rights. There is no reason for detention to exist. That is the main takeaway.

Lee Rawles:

Well, thank you so much. If people wanted to pick up in the Shadow of Liberty, how could they do that?

Ana Raquel Minian:

It is available at many bookstores. It’s available on Amazon. They can request it in their bookstores. So it’s a fairly easy to access book.

Lee Rawles:

It is. And as I mentioned, if you prefer to listen to books, it is available on audiobook. Thank you so much for joining us for this episode of the Modern Law Library. If you enjoyed this episode, please rate review and subscribe to this podcast in your favorite podcast listening service. That’s a huge help to us here at the Modern Law Library. And if you have a book that you would like me to consider for a future episode, feel free to reach out anytime. The email address is books at ABA Journal dot com.