Sidewalk Apprehensions: Unmasking Migrant Detention Histories in the United States
A couple of weeks ago, my sister called me in tears, listening to the radio on her way to work. “Do you know what is happening in LA?” About two weeks earlier, her husband had sent an unpublished video to our immediate family, “You need to see what is happening two blocks from our apartment.” The radio my sister listened to and the video her husband sent described and documented what we all have heard about: masked men and women arresting people on sidewalks and putting them in unmarked cars: “It is a terror campaign.”
For twenty years I have been researching how US-Mexico migration affects places and architecture. I have traveled to various Mexican states for research—Michoacán, Guanajuato, Jalisco, San Luis Potosí, Oaxaca, Querétaro, Hidalgo, Tamaulipas, Nuevo León—and in each, I have met people whose lives are entangled with cities and places in the United States. I have tried to understand how the pulse of a town, its DNA, is hued to the specific cadence of back-and-forth movements across the boundary line, mirrored by the movement of dollars, objects, desires, and memories. One hundred and seventy-seven years of migration between the two countries—since the boundary line was hardened to expropriate northern Mexico in 1848—has created a complex, sometimes beautiful and sometimes tragic, social and spatial history that carries mystery and meaning. Scores of scholars for decades have tried to fathom this mystery, to view it through the lens of immigration policy, urban change, political machinations, as well as the stories of individuals, families, and communities who share fragmented lives across geographies. I have tried to view it, to hold it, by examining what remittances have been used to build in Mexico since the Bracero Program ended; what I call “the remittance house” is, in my view, not only the crystallization of dreams, often deferred, but also the very motivation for emigration in the first place. Building a home of one’s own is why many people leave, even if it never comes to pass. Through memoir, scholarship, and field research, I have seen how Mexicans demonstrate resilience, courage, humor, and intelligence. The ties that bind places in Mexico to places in the US through the lives lived that cross and connect places are stronger, I have argued, than the ebb and flow of punitive immigration policy and practices meant to curtail, weaken, and even break them.
Detention Centers
While the ties that bind people and places together are strong, in 2015 I was faced with the stark reality of places designed to rob people of basic freedoms and diminish their sense of self-worth. During the Obama presidency, I worked with graduate students on a national project called States of Incarceration. We documented the history and experience of immigrant detention in Texas, which took us to Pearsall and La Salle detention centers and involved interviewing people who had been released from detention. Through ICE (Immigration and Custom’s Enforcement) websites, leaked ICE facility lists, regional newspapers, cold calls to facilities, and congressional reports, we were able to map the rise of detention infrastructure in Texas from the 1960s to the 2010s, charting how the building of facilities cohered with changing border and detention policies, increased congressional funding, and the rise of private prison corporations like CoreCivic and The GEO Group. Technically and legally, the detention centers these corporations run are not places of punishment. This legal status is curious: it was established in 1892 with the Geary Act, an extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which forced Chinese laborers to carry internal resident permits. Failure to carry these permits could lead to immigrant proceedings and detention, a transaction that was categorized as administrative. Kelly Lytle-Hernandez explains in City of Inmates that detaining and deporting was defined as administrative so that the rights and punishments associated with criminal prosecution would not apply to migrants. Detaining and deporting would be easier to carry out if everybody in charge agreed that it was merely a technical issue about one’s legal status. More than 100 years later, in 2009, then ICE administrator Dora Schriro wrote: “Immigration proceedings and civil proceedings and immigrant detention is not punishment.”[1]
In Texas and across the United States, “not punishment” means this: people are stripped and forced to wear uniforms, people’s names are replaced by their bed number, people are marched together in small groups to relieve themselves without privacy from one another, or from the guards. In one story, a man who was detained explained that every time he would start to feel a bit more comfortable or secure in his pod with ninety-nine other men, the guards would reshuffle the men to different pods. He would experience the terror of being doubly alone once again: removed as he was from family and community in a remote facility, and removed again inside the facility from a newly familiar or even friendly face. In another, a middle-aged woman was transferred from one border facility in Texas to another in Houston by bus for over ten hours in handcuffs which meant she could not drink water, eat food, use the bathroom, or take her blood pressure medication. People are placed in facilities in remote rural locations and outside of their places of residence so that family cannot easily visit or visit at all, and so that immigration judges will more likely share ICE deportation agendas. The management of detention facilities is masterful: an experience of depravity, insecurity, and dehumanization is seemingly achieved at every scale inside an architecture of violence. Every single aspect of a person’s lived experience is recalibrated to make them feel less than human (Figure 1).
Figure 1. Cognitive drawing by Miguel of a pod in the South Texas ICE Processing Center, Pearsall, Texas, 2015.
Unmasking Detention Strategies and Histories
When my sister called to talk about apprehensions in Los Angeles, it hit me: the masked men and women with automatic rifles flung over their chests and wearing vests emblazoned with the letters I, C, and E, are now exposing to the public the violence of detention that has been hidden for decades in the hinterlands of our cities and towns.
The once atomized and mostly private terror of detention is now a public terror of arrest. Once shrouded in secrecy (facilities are not readily accessible to the public, their architectural plans are unavailable, their audits are redacted or unavailable) ICE now broadcasts their treatment of men and women who migrate, representing them as lecherous criminals. Arrest, handcuffs, lack of due process, and the enforcement of immediate separation from children and partners are existential threats. No longer confined to extraordinary “ICE raids,” nor to the cover of night, the punitive nature of immigrant detention is now seemingly everywhere and for everyone.
But it is not just that ICE is unmasked, bringing out into the light of day their terror tactics, it is also that in so doing they attempt to mask the truth of how and why we got here in the first place. In Oaxaca, the May after Donald Trump was inaugurated, I met a man who had lived in my home city of Los Angeles for twenty years. He explained that his children were born in LA and currently live there: “You know, we go there to work. We are not doing anything wrong. We go there to work, and we work hard, and we do jobs that other people don’t want to do. We are not criminals.” I have heard this argument before and it pains me, born as it is from the fiction that people who migrate make decisions to leave in a vacuum, as if history plays no role, as if the burdens and risks of their decision are theirs to bear alone.
In the nineteenth century, US capitalists such as William Cornell Greene and William Rockefeller invested in oil, mines, and agriculture across Mexico, causing internal migrations that employed Mexicans in American businesses south of the border. Mexico’s resources of both the land and its people were so desirable that US capitalists invested in the Mexican Central Railway to more easily transport goods and bodies north, owning some 644 million dollars in Mexican railway stocks and bonds by 1910. After the Mexican Revolution of 1917, when Mexico nationalized businesses and railways, and when many Mexicans in the border region fled north, US capitalists recruited Mexican laborers to build US railways and as laborers in industry, sometimes as scabs that broke steel and meat packing union picket lines as far north as Chicago. That same year, in 1917, a formal guest worker recruitment program began to bring Mexican men to sugar beet farms. During World War II labor recruiting centers were dispatched throughout Mexican cities and towns in places like Monterrey, Guadalajara, Chihuahua, León, and Mexico City to issue millions of U.S. contracts for twenty-two years. The Bracero Program allowed mostly men to temporarily work what would otherwise become fallow fields (Figure 2). Why doesn’t this history matter?
“The once atomized and mostly private terror of detention is now a public terror of arrest.”
Figure 2. Migrant workers from Mexico who have been accepted to do farm labor in the U.S. through the Bracero Program, ca. 1942-ca.1945. Source: National Archives; Identifier 7452192.
These ICE mavericks with their bloated muscles and guilty aura are showing us all who we have allowed ourselves in the United States to become as they work to distract us from the truth of our shared history with Mexico. It is this history—with businessmen, politicians, voters, and consumers all implicated—that is largely responsible for the five million people from Mexico who live in the United States without authorization, not Mexican poverty alone or migrant criminality. And Mexico/Mexicans are no exception—how many countries and whose histories are masked by the swift brutality of ICE and the U.S. President, a public display of malevolence so loud that we can hardly hear anything else?
Citation
Sarah Lopez, “Sidewalk Apprehensions: Unmasking Migrant Detention Histories in the United States,” PLATFORM, July 7, 2025.
Notes
[1] Dora Schriro, Immigrant Detention Overview and Recommendations, Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, October 6, 2009, 2.
