A history of the United States' systematic expulsion of
"undesirables" and immigrants, told through the lives of
the passengers who traveled from around the world, only to be locked
up and forced out aboard America's first deportation trains.
The United States,
celebrated as a nation of immigrants and the land of the free, has
developed the most extensive system of imprisonment and deportation
that the world has ever known. The Deportation Express is the first
history of American deportation trains: a network of prison railroad
cars repurposed by the Immigration Bureau to link jails, hospitals,
asylums, and workhouses across the country and allow forced removal
with terrifying efficiency. With this book, historian Ethan Blue
uncovers the origins of the deportation train and finds the roots of
the current moment, as immigrant restriction and mass deportation
once again play critical and troubling roles in contemporary politics
and legislation.
A century ago,
deportation trains made constant circuits around the nation,
gathering so-called "undesirable aliens"—migrants
disdained for their poverty, political radicalism, criminal
conviction, or mental illness—and conveyed them to ports for exile
overseas. Previous deportation procedures had been violent,
expensive, and relatively ad hoc, but the railroad industrialized the
expulsion of the undesirable. Trains provided a powerful technology
to divide "citizens" from "aliens" and displace
people in unprecedented numbers. Drawing on the lives of migrants and
the agents who expelled them, The Deportation Express is history told
from aboard a deportation train. By following the lives of selected
individuals caught within the deportation regime, this book
dramatically reveals how the forces of state exclusion accompanied
epic immigration in early twentieth-century America. These are the
stories of people who traveled from around the globe, only to be
locked up and cast out, deported through systems that bound the
United States together, and in turn, pulled the world apart. Their
journey would be followed by millions more in the years to come.