San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
America’s harsh history of immigration laid bare
Ana Raquel Minian’s new book focuses on four refugees who arrived in America and were immediately plunged into terrifying legal netherworlds, separated from family members, held for lengthy periods in prisonlike conditions and deprived of opportunities to plead their cases.
“In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States” takes a long view, covering 125 years, and Minian, a Stanford University history professor, presents detailed depictions of the hardships that confronted her subjects, lending moral force to the book’s arguments.
Minian’s thesis couldn’t be more direct: “Immigrant detention does not make us safer.” Many lawmakers disagree.
Digging into government reports, Minian calculates that “there were at least 14 million foreign nationals held behind bars” from the early 1940s to the 2020s. But instead of detention centers, Minian argues, it’s cheaper and more humane to release foreign-born arrivals on no-cash bonds “and allow them to reside with friends, family, or community members in the United States while it examines their cases.”
This is already happening with many undocumented immigrants — but certainly not all. An ongoing Syracuse University study found that as of February 2024, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement was holding more than 39,000 would-be immigrants “in detention,” 67% of whom have no criminal records.
Minian doesn’t claim that every person stopped at the U.S.-Mexico border is a lawabiding asylum seeker. But evidence suggests most are rule followers. Over the past 20 years, “multiple studies have shown that approximately 88% of all nondetained individuals attended their court hearings,” Minian writes.
The plights of Minian’s subjects — Fu Chi Hao, Ellen Knauff, Gerardo Mansur and Fernando Arredondo — show that American immigration policy has long wavered between stringency and openness.
Though Fu, a Christian, was fleeing religious persecution in China when he arrived by ship in San Francisco in 1901, his application for admittance was waylaid by bigotry.
Fu was an incoming college
student, due to begin classes at Oberlin College in Ohio — and therefore exempt from the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. But government officials ignored his exemption, jailing him under what scholars call the “entry fiction,” a legal designation that allows the U.S. to detain foreign nationals while denying them basic rights.
In this way, Minian writes, “the detention site was simply an extension of the border, a kind of extraterritorial limbo that existed inside the United States in a literal sense but outside it for legal purposes.” Fu was briefly jailed in San Francisco and prevented from attending Oberlin until 1903, when the federal government affirmed his right to stay.
For her part, Knauff, born in Germany but married to an American citizen in 1948, was eligible to live in the U.S. under the recently adopted War Brides Act. Instead, she was confined for long periods in squalid New York holding cells until the government finally dropped unreliable allegations that she was a Communist spy.
Coverage of Knauff ’s troubles spurred Washington to find a new approach, Minian writes, and by 1958, “physical detention of aliens is now the exception, not the rule,” a Supreme Court ruling stated. This lasted until the 1980s. Then, in reaction to the arrival of thousands of Cuban refugees during the socalled Mariel boatlift, Washington installed more punitive policies.
Minian’s portrait of one Cuban illustrates the American system’s harsh whims.
Mansur was among those Cuban arrivals with criminal records, but after being released from long stays in American detention centers in the 1980s, he forged a quiet life in the States. Mansur had been in the U.S. for 33 years when in 2017 he was arrested for an old marijuana offense. He was deported to Cuba, where in 2020 he died, “far from his loved ones” in Las Vegas, Minian writes.
In 2018, the book’s fourth subject — Arredondo, a Guatemalan whose son had been murdered by a gang — arrived at the Texas-Mexico border with his 12-year-old daughter. There, immigration officials separated them under a Trump administration policy designed to cause “pain and chaos,” Minian writes.
“In the Shadow of Liberty” isn’t always persuasive. For instance, while it’s probably true that detaining noncitizens in “legal black sites” where they have no rights “endangers the freedoms of all American citizens,” Minian offers skimpy evidence.
But this is a book with gravitas and a hopeful spirit. In looking to the past, Minian sees that progress is possible. “Americans turned against detention once before,” writes Minian, demonstrating that on this issue, there’s reason to be nostalgic for the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, when refugees and undocumented immigrants were treated with far more sympathy.