By signing the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act into law, Johnson thought he was correcting “a cruel and enduring wrong.” Subsequent administrations were open to the influx of foreign workers and certain refugees (especially those fleeing leftist regimes), even if they could be tough on illegal border crossings. But the tide would shift, and after 9/11, xenophobia reappeared in the guise of patriotism: George W. Bush created the Department of Homeland Security to enforce the aggressively restrictive policies that since have characterized immigration to the US. Now the third largest cabinet department after Defense and Veterans Affairs, Homeland Security couples antiterrorist missions with the overseeing of customs and immigration through Immigration and Customs Enforcement (or ICE). Need one say more? The Reagan administration had already linked undocumented immigrants to criminal activity during the drug wars, but after 9/11, porous borders were deemed a threat to national security: the “catch and release” approach to border crossers who had been apprehended and then released while they awaited immigration hearings was seen as the very laxness that had allowed for the terrorist attacks to happen in the first place. Measures to handle illegal immigration gradually led to its criminalization.
To be fair, this process toward full criminalization had its roots in Clinton’s presidency. His strategy (not unlike Obama’s later on) was to present his administration as tough on immigration and he passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) in 1996, which allowed for undocumented immigrants who committed misdemeanors or felonies to be deported, without due process, through “expedited removal.” These cases were being processed, however, at a rate that rendered prisons and county jails insufficient, and private detention centers arose to fill the need.
But it was undoubtedly 9/11 that paved the way for the surging number of for-profit detention centers across the US since. Today, the nation’s apparatus is the largest in the world, and the numbers reached during Trump’s administration are staggering. At the end of the 1970s, on any given day, 3,000 undocumented immigrants and illegal border crossers would find themselves in a detention facility temporarily. In the fall of 2019, on average, there were 52,000 men, women, and children confined in them separately on a daily basis, often for more than a month, and sometimes even for years. And to ruthlessly separate families escaping destitution and civil war (on the alleged grounds of protecting minors who cannot be detained as offenders) is as unimaginable as the number of immigrant children held in US custody in 2019: 69,550.
In comparison, Obama’s policy allowing families to be detained together, in warehouses sectioned off by chain-link fencing, almost seems humanitarian. He had sought comprehensive immigration reform but congress blocked it every step of the way, and though he tried to streamline the legal immigration system and minimize the time that migrants spent at detention centers, he was saddled with the sobriquet Deporter-in-Chief. If reliance on these facilities was in the process of being phased out at the end of his second term, Trump, as with all things Obama, reversed their closure and doubled down with his “Zero Tolerance” approach. Although it was rescinded in the summer of 2018, it separated over 2,500 children from their families; as of late 2020, reunification is still incomplete, and the parents of 545 of them have yet to be found. In the fall of 2019, Trump ended the catch-and-release policy, sending ever more taxpayer dollars to the pockets of the private corporations running the detention centers: the largest being CoreCivic and the GEO Group.