Title: 100 Years of 100 Things: Immigrant Detention

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Brian Lehrer: It's the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. We continue our WNYC centennial series, 100 Years of 100 Things. Now it's 100 years of immigrant detention this time, because as much as we tend to think of the Trump administration as uniquely harsh on immigrants, he's actually continuing a storyline of American history, not inventing one from scratch. The guest we're about to meet writes, for example, "Trump's policy of using family separation as a deterrence method simply extended a strategy that had been the norm for decades."

"Even the latest news stories about some US citizen children being removed from the country or the fundamental rule of law questions about defying court orders in immigration cases. These things have been seen in periods of American history that don't get discussed in the news or taught in schools very much." That's why our guest wrote a book called In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States. The author is Stanford History Professor Ana Raquel Minian. You may have seen their related op-ed in the New York Times in January. Professor Minian, thanks for getting up early, Stanford, California time, to join us for this. Welcome to WNYC.

Professor Minian: Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.

Brian: Let's start more than 100 years ago. In your op-ed, you note that until the 1870s, there were no federal laws enforced to restrict immigration. No laws on the books or not laws that were enforced?

Professor Minian: No laws that were enforced. The government had tried to implement laws to bar Haitian migration, but hadn't really done it. The first real law that we see that truly enforces immigration restriction for the first time occurs around Chinese migration. There's a series of laws, the Page Act and others, but ultimately, what we see is the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882. Before that, pretty much anyone who wanted could come into the country without restriction at a federal level.

Brian: As the news today includes the stories of these US citizen children removed by or with their mothers in recent days, you remind us of the story of Wong Kim Ark, born in San Francisco in 1873, as these anti-Chinese immigrant laws were beginning to be passed. Would you tell us what happened to Wong Kim Ark?

Professor Minian: Yes. Basically, his Supreme Court case was the one that established that he had the right to birthright citizenship. Up until then, even the concept of birthright citizenship hadn't been decided. It was his case that reached the Supreme Court and mandated that people born in the United States had the right to stay here. His case questioned it because he was of Chinese ancestry. The government said, "He's not really American," and it was his case that determined, yes, he is American. He was born here.

Brian: You remind us that the Supreme Court got that case and affirmed that the 14th Amendment guaranteed birthright citizenship and that that did apply to him. I'm curious, were either of his parents here illegally? Do you know? I think that's where Trump is trying to draw the line on birthright citizenship today. Was that an issue in that Supreme Court case way back then?

Professor Minian: More than that, I think it was his ancestry, what people were debating about. The question about people's legal status became much more prominent later on in history. At that point, what really mattered was his ancestry, because what the law said was people who are Chinese, basically it was a way to keep Chinese people outside of the United States, cannot come into the country. If the idea was to keep Chinese people out, they said, "Anyone of Chinese ancestry can be kept out as well." That was more the issue than whether his parents were in the country legally or not.

Brian: Now, listeners, as we do in these 100-year history segments, we're inviting your oral history calls if anybody has a story. Professor Minian did a lot of oral history interviews for their book. We can take some of your stories here on the show. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, here in 100 Years of 100 Things. Thing number 88, 100 Years of Immigrant Detention. Do you have a story from your family or anyone else you know from the past generation of immigrant detention, especially if it echoes some of what is so controversial regarding Trump policies right now?

Family separation, detention, or deportation without due process or in the legal limbo that immigrants sometimes find themselves in. US citizens and legal residents being deported to or otherwise caught up in law enforcement, supposedly, intended for people who are not. Also, detention in horrific conditions that wouldn't be allowed for non-immigrant convicted criminals or Americans awaiting trial. The executive branch defying court orders protecting specific immigrant individuals.

Those are some of the categories of controversy today, as most of you know. They basically all come up in the book, In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States, by our guest, Stanford history professor, Ana Raquel Minian, in this episode 88 of our series, 100 Years of 100 Things. It's 100 years and more of immigrant detention. Does anyone have an oral history story? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text.

Moving ahead in time, Professor Minian, you write that in the Great Depression of the 1930s, Mexican migrants became scapegoats for the nation's economic struggles and throughout the South and Midwest, officials apprehended people of Mexican descent indiscriminately, you write, including legal residents and US citizens. As many as 2 million people were expelled. Approximately 60%, you say, are believed to have been said citizens. Can you tell us more about that? Was there anything we would call due process, or how did the courts allow the expulsion of US citizens after they had set a precedent in the Wong Kim Ark case?

Professor Minian: By this period, Mexicans and people of Mexican descent were already seen as "illegal aliens." Whether they were citizens or not, they were seen as perpetual outsiders who could come and work here when they were needed, but then did not really belong in the country. What happened was Mexicans had been coming. In fact, they had been recruited to come by many employers. The government had allowed this. Then when the Great Depression occurred, suddenly there was mass unemployment and the government and welfare organizations and citizens said, "You know what, we don't want these Mexicans."

They implemented two forms of getting them out of the country. One of them was through official sort of deportations, but mostly just getting them outside of the United States throughout the official means. The way that they did that was by saying, "We will pay for your trip back to Mexico." They would basically go outside of people's work outside schools, and they would apprehend Mexican migrants or residents and deport or take them without officially calling it deportation to the Mexican border.

They also made conditions so hard that Mexicans basically voluntarily departed what's called the repatriations. What happened was the children of many of the people who were deported were citizens. The deportations occurred. Some were officially adults who were citizens, but primarily, the citizens who were deported were the children of immigrants who were being deported. The courts did nothing about it.

Brian: That sounds maybe even worse than what a lot of Trump is doing from a rule of law perspective than some of what he's doing. Would you compare these periods that way so far?

Professor Minian: I would say it is worse in terms of the amount of people who were deported under these measures, the conditions that were established, just how massive the system was comparatively to now. Yes, I would say it was a bigger system. The amount of fear that the Trump administration is causing in communities is terrible.

I cannot say that people back then feared more than they do now because people right now are truly scared, including citizens of Mexican descent and including citizens who are not of Latin American descent. People are just scared. In some ways, yes, it was worse, we can say in terms of numbers up to now, but in terms of the fear and the problems that that fear causes for communities and for families, I'm not 100% sure.

Brian: You talked earlier about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and the anti-Chinese immigrant sentiment that was rampant, especially back then. I think Victor in Chinatown has a family oral history story relevant to some of that. Victor, you're on WNYC. Thank you for calling in.

Victor: Hello? Can you hear me? Hello?

Brian: Yes, we got you. I can hear you.

Victor: Oh, okay. Great. My father came in the 1930s under what is now known as the paper son way of getting around the Chinese Exclusion Act. Matter of fact, most of the Chinese who came to this country after 1906, because of the San Francisco fire that burned all the records down, created a system called paper sons because they can say that they were born in America and there was no way to prove or unprove and created a whole new system of being able to emigrate under the Chinese Exclusion Act.

A lot of the people who came, like my father, were men who came to work because China was going through civil wars and world wars and invasions. They were basically illegal aliens who had some kind of legal status. Many of them, like my father, when World War II broke out, joined the US military, even though they were not allowed to be citizens or not allowed to vote, not allowed to own land. They basically joined the Army or Navy, and after the war, they were promised they would get citizenship until the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943.

After 1943, a lot of the men after the war, went back to China to marry women because women were banned under the Chinese Exclusion Act. It was mostly men who lived in the Chinatowns. Now, all these 130,000, 140,000 Chinese men who were paper sons were able to go back and bring back a wife, but there was a problem. Women were still banned. Until they passed the War Brides Act in 1946, they were able to actually bring a wife and actually have-- I am a product of that first generation of children. I was born in 1950. My sister was born in China in 1948. He wasn't able to bring my mother to America until they passed the War Brides Act.

Brian: Victor, what an important and fascinating family story. Thank you for sharing that oral history. Listeners, who else has one about your parents, grandparents, anyone else from any other immigrant group in the context of the segment that we're doing? Victor, thank you very, very much. Professor Minian, what a story. I assume you know about these things, paper son status, the War Brides Act. What are you thinking as you listen to Victor?

Professor Minian: First, I want to thank Victor for sharing that story. It was fascinating. He's absolutely right. Chinese people couldn't come under the Chinese Exclusion Act, and one way to do so was through the paper son method. Thousands of Chinese came in this way, where someone would say, "Look, this is my son," and there was no way to prove it. Part of the story of paper sons is also the story of detention. I'm not sure if Victor's father was detained, but most people of Chinese descent, when they arrived in the San Francisco Bay Area after 1910, were detained in Angel Island, because officials tried to see, "Look, is this person a real citizen? Is he really the son of someone who was born in the United States?"

While they did so, they detained people. These detentions proved to be highly ineffective. In fact, most Chinese people who were detained in Angel Island ended up entering the country, just showing that people were being detained for no reason at all. Whether they were paper sons, they did have the right to enter or not, basically, they were allowed in, but only after extended periods of horrible detention.

Brian: Moving ahead in time, you note that the context of the Cold War, say roughly 1945 to 1990, gave rise to better treatment of immigrants because of our competition for image with the Soviet Union. People have said, I'm sure you know this, that that was the main impetus for the civil rights laws that finally got passed in the 1960s. How do the Cold War and immigration or immigrant detention connect with each other?

Professor Minian: One of the cases that truly came to change how immigration detention changed during the Cold War was one of a woman called Ellen Knauff. Ellen Knauff had arrived to the United States. She had been a German-Jewish war bride. She had married an American GI. She had managed to survive the Holocaust, even though she was Jewish, while her parents and her brother had died. She had arrived to the United States as a war bride, just like Victor was saying, so she had the legal right to enter, but the government detained her nonetheless in Ellis Island. Ellis Island, of course, we now consider it the land of opportunity. They detained her in Ellis Island.

Later, it was seen that it was because her husband's ex-girlfriend had decided that she was a spy, had accused her of being a spy out of pure jealousy. Ellen's case caused massive commotion. A, because she was detained of being a spy, precisely, because of the Cold War fears that had arisen. Everyone could be a spy during that period. B, it showed how ridiculous and how overused detention was. From 1954, shortly after Ellen had been detained, until 1980, the government decided to turn away from immigrant detention to try to curtail it and spoke very much against it, saying it was not necessary.

In part, it was because of this type of Cold War story. In part, it was because fewer immigrants were actually coming, because the United States had made it so hard for Europeans also to start coming into the country. Immigration had reduced dramatically. The Attorney General had decided, "You know what, we're detaining people. It's causing--" Ellen's case garnered so much attention, and it was so rebuked in the media that the Attorney General said, "It's not good press." Yes, especially during the Cold War period, this was important.

Brian: You note in that context that the phrase, "a nation of immigrants," which is widely used today, didn't gain widespread recognition until President John F. Kennedy wrote a book by that title. Why did JFK write that book or emphasize that view of the United States at that time?

Professor Minian: He very much believed that the United States had become a better country, thanks to its diversity, thanks to having immigrants come and the hard work of immigrants. It was at a time when this was being highly debated. Should we pass a law that would allow more immigrants to come? Should exclusion continue to allow-- Should quotas continue to be allowed? Should certain groups, in other words, not be allowed to come in certain numbers, or should some ethnic groups be allowed to come in more numbers than other nationalities? This was all being debated. Kennedy believed, "You know what, immigrants are good for this nation, and they have really helped build it." That's what he said.

Brian: We're going to take a step back in the timeline, because you were describing before how Mexican workers were used as scapegoats to some degree during the Depression in the 1930s, and deported en masse. I think Cynthia in Newark has a family story that relates to that. Cynthia, thanks for calling in. You're on WNYC.

Cynthia: Hi. Thanks for taking my call. Yes, my family, with my grandmother and my father, maybe one more kid, they came into the US. It used to be in the old days, apparently, you could put a $25 down and come in. Then at one point, my grandmother went back to Mexico and picked up her $25. They kept coming and going. I know that my father himself was very traumatized. The people at the end of the '30s, they were really deporting people, picking them up, like you all referred to. I've had trouble actually finding research to verify that stuff.

I know that they made a mistake of my family's name, and they hid behind that for a long time. I even found a census document of my grandmother where she called herself something that isn't her name, but I know it's her. That fear remained with a lot of people for a long time, and there's a lot of shame around it. People don't talk about it in the same way they also don't talk about the level of segregation that Mexican people experienced in California during that time, which was overt. That was just what I wanted to share. I felt glad to hear someone refer to that on your show. Thank you.

Brian: Cynthia, thank you very much. We get to Mexican exclusion again after Kennedy in the 1960s as we move through the timeline. In fact, one of the really fascinating things to me about your writing, Professor Minian, is that you point out that there are two periods and two laws that we tend to think of as pro-immigration, but you wrote that they had both positive and negative impacts.

One was the big Immigration Act of 1965, which opened the door to almost all the major immigrant groups of the last 60 years. I think we can say the 1965 Immigration Act gave us the New York City that we have today, with people coming in in numbers that were not previously allowed from Asia, all over Latin America, mostly, and the Caribbean, but closed the doors in a specific way to Mexicans, launching the modern era of undocumented border crossings. How so?

Professor Minian: Let me link what you're asking with what Cynthia was saying about being traumatized in the 1930s, just so that I can continue the story. It is true that people refused to come. They were so scared after the 1930s. Mexicans were so scared of coming. Then in 1942, the government started to recruit Mexicans again. What's interesting is they deported them in the '30s, only to bring them right back to the United States when the Second World War started, and they needed workers. In other words, it again shows us that they treat Mexicans simply as workers.

From 1942 to 1964, the United States brought Mexicans legally as temporary guest workers, where they could come work in the United States for short periods of time in agriculture and return back to Mexico, and most of them came back afterward. Then, as 1964 was coming, civil rights groups, such as the NAACP, started saying, "You know what, these people, these guest workers who are coming are taking our jobs." At the same time, in Congress, other groups were saying, "Quotas are not--"

In 1924, the United States had passed an immigration law that had introduced quotas against certain national groups, saying that people from Southern Europe and Eastern Europe could migrate in fewer numbers than those in Northern Europe. It basically barred all migration from Asia. In 1965, the government passed this law that you were referring to, saying, "You know what, quotas are not fair. We should not give preference to certain nationalities over others." That was, in some ways, a very liberal law.

Like you also mentioned, the law, for the first time, introduced limits to the numbers of people from the Western Hemisphere who could come into the United States. The people who were primarily coming from the Western Hemisphere, which refers to the Americas, were Mexicans. The number of Mexicans who could come legally started to fall dramatically because of the 1965 Act. It was a double-edged sword.

What happened was at the same time that this law that said fewer Mexicans can come legally to the United States, the United States ended the Bracero Program, this guest worker program, which meant that Mexican migrants really who had become accustomed to coming to the United States through the Bracero Program now had no other way to do so than illegally. That's why unauthorized migration really started to grow after 1965.

Brian: Stepping back in time again, as people hear us refer to some of these things, and then they say, "Oh, that sounds like my father, my grandparents," and they call in with a story. We're going to go next to Kay in Monmouth County, in Jersey. You're on WNYC, Kay. Hi.

Kay: Hi, Brian. Thanks for taking my call. I'm always reminded in these discussions of my father's experience. I was 5 years old at the time and now 87. One day in, I guess, around 1943, two gentlemen appeared at the door in suits and fedoras. "We're the FBI," they said, "And we came to look at your home." They proceeded to search the house from top to bottom, including going through the ashes in our coal-burning furnace. Luckily, it was summertime, so they didn't get burned.

Then they told my mother to pack a bag for my father. They would take it down to him at work. She said, "But you don't know where he--" "Yes, we know where he is." My father was a longshoreman at the time. That was it. They didn't tell my mother where they were taking him. It was weeks before she found out where he was. In those days, of course, we didn't have telephones the way we do today with our cell phones. Ultimately, she found that he was being interned in Ellis Island.

From that point on, we were able to visit him. For me, it was a very exciting thing because we took the bus from Brooklyn, the bus and the subway, and then a ferry, which was really exciting. We visited my father while he was in the great room with many, many other interned immigrants. We were able to visit him periodically. It's interesting that just as with many, I guess, war heroes, my father never really wanted to talk about it. I always thought he would maybe submit a FISA request to find out what his records were, but I never have.

Brian: I think people know about the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II a lot more than of German-Americans. Your story is, I'm sure, very instructive for a lot of listeners. Kay, do you know if your father was ever investigated for potentially being a sympathizer of the Nazi Germany regime, or was it just simply, we're rounding up the Germans because you never know?

Kay: We really don't know. We had our suspicions, I think. My mother sometimes mentioned something, but those were just suspicions, and there was never any real formal declaration of this is why we're doing it. Recently, I moved, and in the many papers I have, I found his release papers from Ellis Island, and that didn't give any information either. It was, as I say, many, many years in the past, but I can still remember that day like it happened yesterday.

Brian: So, so good of you to tell that story and share that oral history. Professor Minian, what are you thinking?

Professor Minian: I don't think they were necessarily Nazi sympathizers. Often, German migrants who were working on ships that belonged to Germany or were working then, they were considered "enemy aliens" because they could have been working, and so they were detained in Ellis Island. Yes, we know much less about them than about Japanese internment, their numbers were much lower, but it was terribly tragic. I'm very sorry that this happened to our listener.

Brian: You just referred to a law. Was that the Alien Enemies Act that Trump is now using, I think, for the first time since World War II, correct me if I'm wrong, to try to deport people, trying to argue that they are here as not just gang members for the interest of themselves and of their gang, but somehow being deployed by Venezuela as an invasion of the United States by Venezuela? They haven't presented evidence to prove that, but they're using the Alien Enemies Act and trying to stretch it. There's, I don't even want to say a through line. It sounds like there's a leap from World War II to today in this respect, and what appears to be that stretch.

Professor Minian: Yes, absolutely. It is a stretch in the ways that this law is being applied right now, but what is less of a stretch, which has happened continuously, is seeking different laws and different means to either deny entry or to deport people who are already in the country. Deny entry, including to asylum seekers who legally have a right to come under US law and under international law.

Yes, it is a leap that this particular clause and provision are being used, but that different clauses and provisions that are very far-fetched are sought to exclude people, that is not new. In fact, President Trump did so in his first administration when he used Title 42 to stop asylum seekers from coming into the country, which, again, was a provision that hadn't been used. It was something that also had been introduced to stop people with diseases in the 1940s. These sort of uses and seeking provisions that have not been used, that is not so uncommon.

Brian: It's 100 Years of 100 Things, segment 88: 100 Years of Immigrant Detention, with our guest, Stanford history professor, Ana Raquel Minian, author of the book In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States. Let's hear another family story. Here's Madalena in Queens. Hi, Madalena. Thank you so much for calling in. You're on WNYC.

Madalena: Thank you, Brian. Longtime listener, first time caller. Thank you so much for sharing this book. I had seen that there was a chapter of 1976. Both of my parents were Vietnamese refugees. They were the original boat people. Upon their arrival in the United States, they were stationed or detained at Fort Chaffee in Arkansas, which you also speak about in your book, in regards to the people who came from Cuba were placed in Fort Chaffee as well in the same year.

My parents were-- It was a federal response. They were placed there for months while they got everything figured out. They had their immunizations done, they had their papers drawn up there, and they were not able to be released until they had notified the government that they had a place to go or they were being sponsored by family or they had family members waiting for them in certain states. After a very long time, my parents ended up in New York, and that's how I came to be. [laughs]

Brian: Did you get any story from your parents about the conditions of the detention facility in Arkansas? Your grandparents?

Madalena: They don't speak about it often, but my father was a huge fan of Elvis, and he loved that Elvis had been once stationed there. I think coming from years of warfare in Vietnam and their very tumultuous journey on the boat, they were happy to be on land, but I think that they were also, like many immigrants here, in a state of limbo, and they were really not sure of what was going on. A lot of my extended family members were also there.

Many of the women had suffered miscarriages during the journey and continued to have health issues in Fort Chaffee. I don't think it was very easy, and especially them coming into New York in 1976 without speaking the language. They didn't find their sure footing for years. There was not a lot of support. I think that the only governmental support was them landing in Fort Chaffee. I think that the political situation at that time was not in their favor, so they were not looked at positively. There wasn't a lot of support there for them.

Brian: I love the imagery of the against-the-stereotype story that you just told, or the reference in your story to your grandfather being a big Elvis Presley fan.

Madalena: My father.

Brian: Your father. Vietnamese boat people not being the typical image somebody would conjure up of Elvis Presley fan. That was a wonderful element there. Madalena, thank you so much. Professor Minian, think about the array of callers that we've had, with families who came from China, from Germany, from Mexico, now from Vietnam. I'm sure it plays into the breadth of your research and your book, as we're hearing just from our listeners.

Professor Minian: That's right. I've been impressed by the range of callers as well. It does show that the history of detention and deportation that, right now, we think only in terms of, "Oh, we're deporting criminals, we're deporting Venezuelans." The people who have been cast as "illegal aliens" or as people who need to be detained has been very wide ranging, and it is all our histories. Anyone can fall prey to such stereotyping, and I think it's very important to remember that.

Brian: When we come back from a break, we're going to finish up the timeline. We're going to play a Ronald Reagan clip from the 1980s, and I know you have a very interesting story to tell about that, and we'll get to the present in this 100 Years of 100 Things segment. Stay with us.

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Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Few more minutes in today's 100 Years of 100 Things segment, episode 88, 100 Years of Immigrant Detention, obviously relevant to today with our guest, Stanford history professor, Ana Raquel Minian, who wrote the book, In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States. By the way, just thought you'd like to hear this text that came in. Not everybody listening right now is with us since the beginning of the segment when you talked about the Wong Kim Ark Supreme Court case a long, long time ago that affirmed that birthright citizenship applies to immigrants.

Listener writes, "My mother, Historian Clarissa Atkinson, is the great-granddaughter of J. Hubley Ashton, who defended Wong Kim Ark before the Supreme Court in 1898. She's 91 now and has recently been in contact with Norman Wong, who is himself the great-grandson of Wong Kim Ark and active in what? In defending birthright citizenship. Mom recently wrote about Hubley on her blog, oldestvocation.com. I thought you'd be interested in that."

Moving on to the 1980s, you note that for President Ronald Reagan, who has a pro immigration reputation, spoke romantically of immigration and signed an amnesty law for millions of undocumented immigrants, mostly from Mexico. His legacy or the legacy of that law is not that simple. To set this up, here's Reagan in his farewell address as president in January 1989.

President Ronald Reagan: We lead the world because unique among nations, we draw our people, our strength from every country and every corner of the world. By doing so, we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America, we breathe life into dreams, we create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity. We're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier.

Brian: Reagan on immigration is basically his final presidential message to America and the world. You write his Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, including the amnesty, had a dual impact. Would you explain the downside?

Professor Minian: Yes. First, I have to say that that clip just reminded me how much the Republican Party has changed. Let me go on into the 1986 Act. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act is probably the immigration law that continues to affect us the most. It had two different strands to it. One of it was saying, "Look, we definitely want the people who are here in the United States without papers to be able to be legal so that-- How can we reduce the number of unauthorized migrants in the country when we have so many? Let's legalize them."

Anyone who had been in the country for over 5 years or who was an agricultural worker for more than 90 days could legalize their status and eventually become citizens. It had a path to citizenship. Very importantly, over 2.3 million Mexicans and 3.2 million people legalized their status under this Immigration Reform and Control Act, better known as IRCA. In order to reduce unauthorized migration, the law had another part to it, which was the fortification of the border. What the fortification of the border did was it increased dramatically the number of resources to make it harder for migrants to come illegally, but the law actually had the exact opposite effect than the one it intended.

Before 1986, the vast majority of people who were coming into this country were Mexican, and they were Mexican men. They didn't want to stay in the United States. They wanted to come, work for short periods of time, and then return to be with their families. When they needed money again, come back to the United States in what is known as circular migration, which meant that the vast majority of immigrants did not settle permanently in the United States.

Now, the 1986 Act, part of what it did was it fortified the border, which meant that these men, who used to come and go, now had to risk their lives at the border because it was so dangerous to cross, and had to hire much more expensive smugglers to cross them. They decided that instead of coming and going and risking their lives at the border, they would stay permanently in the United States.

Now, they didn't want to just stay permanently by themselves. They also brought with them their children and their wives, which meant that a population that used to come and go and consist only of men now became a population of unauthorized people who included men, women, and children who remained permanently in the United States. The fortification of the border had the exact opposite effect than the one it intended.

Brian: I guess that brings us to family separation. I want to play a clip of Border Czar Tom Homan on something that's in the news today. We'll get your quick take on it, and then we're going to be out of time. Certainly, many people are up in arms over the story of a few child US citizens being removed from the country with their mothers, who were not here legally. Here's Tom Homan with Margaret Brennan on CBS Face the Nation yesterday on these particular cases.

Border Czar Tom Homan: No US citizen child was deported. Deported means you got to be deported by the immigration judge. We don't deport US citizens.

Margaret Brennan: The mother was deported along with the children.

Border Czar Tom Homan: Children aren't deported. The mother chose to take the children with her. When you enter a country illegally and you know you're here illegally and you choose to have your citizen child, that's on you. That's not on this administration. If you choose to put your family in that position, that's on them. Having a US citizen child after you enter this country illegally, it's not a get out of jail free card. It doesn't make you immune from our laws.

If that's the message we send to the entire world, women are going to keep putting themselves at risk to come to this country. We send a message. You can enter a country illegally, which is a crime. That's okay. You can have due process, great taxpayer expense, get ordered, move. That's okay, don't leave, but have a US citizen child, and you're immune from removal? That's not the way it works.

Brian: Tom Homan saying they're not deporting US citizen children. The parents are taking them voluntarily. We have 15 seconds left in the segment. Does this have echoes in history?

Professor Minian: We were just recently talking about the 1930s, where basically the same thing happened at a much larger extent because the deportations of parents were so much larger, and I do fear that we're heading in that direction. It also has echoes on family separation because the option for this mother was leave the child away from her in a country where they might have family members or community members, but--

Brian: That has to be the last word. Professor Minian, thank you so much for a fascinating conversation in 100 Years of 100 Things series.

Professor Minian: Thank you so much.

 

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