Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World's Largest Immigration Detention System by Elliott Young (review)

Elliott Young's Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World's Largest Immigration Detention System is a welcome addition to the histories bridging migration and carceral studies. Detentions throughout the twentieth century, as Young brilliantly shows, came in forms beyond immigration processing centers. These detentions took place in mental health institutions, hospitals, charity houses, prisons, and internment camps. As a result, Young argues, non-citizen detentions throughout the twentieth century were as prevalent as they have been for the last forty years, a striking fact in the face of a contemporary deportation regime created by bipartisan efforts. Forever Prisoners considers these forms of detention to be the de facto method of non-citizen incarceration before the 1980s.

Connecting these forms of incarceration reveals a system rooted in ambiguous legal statuses, which have resulted in migrants spending indeterminate amounts of time held in detention. For Chinese migrants at McNeil Island prison, a small federal institution off the coast of Tacoma, Washington, detention meant years of legal procedures at the request of U.S. immigration officials. Immigration authorities argued that the government could detain all non-citizens while they petitioned for release or were in the process of deportation. The challenge for U.S. immigration officials was to circumvent constitutional guarantees of due process. In the 1880s, the Supreme Court ruled that Chinese migrants had not been imprisoned in a legal sense but detained under immigration law. The ruling guaranteed that Chinese migrants, and other non-citizens, could be detained without recognition of due process rights under the Constitution. The U.S. government legitimized the incarceration of non-citizens by denying basic rights under the Constitution and created a subset of people who were now forever prisoners caged in the immigration system.

At the heart of Forever Prisoners lies this legal fiction and the multiple ways non-citizens are held in perpetual detention without a source of legal recourse. Non-citizens like Nathan Cohen, a Russian immigrant entering the United States from South America, who was labeled an "insane alien," became forever prisoners. Cohen's status would travel with him as he sat in detention on board a ship between New York and Brazil, both countries refusing to accept him. Cohen spent months at sea until the courts approved his petition to stay in a U.S. mental health institution. Cohen was not the only migrant forcibly placed in perpetual detention. In the 1940s, wartime internment policies reached thousands of miles to Peru. The Peruvian government worked with the United States to incarcerate Japanese Peruvian families believed to be a threat during the war, and the United States provided the funding and transportation to ferry Japanese Peruvians thousands of miles north to Crystal City, Texas. Young masterfully weaves the voices of detainees into the narrative.

Forever Prisoners offers a compelling account of the evolving immigration detention system. With thoughtful sources detailing the lives and voices of non-citizen detainees, the book reads like an intimate account of the world of individuals locked in the oppressive U.S. immigration system and the history that developed it. The book offers a small glimpse into the development of the contemporary bipartisan machine that continues to deport hundreds of thousands of non-citizens each year.