Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Brianna Nofil’s historical mission is to uncover how America built the infrastructure it uses to jail people, and who has profited along the way. A professor at William & Mary, Nofil’s research focuses on migration, incarceration, and law in the modern United States. Her 2024 book The Migrant’s Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration chronicles a century of coevolution between America’s immigration and criminal justice systems. She talked about her research in an episode of NPR’s Throughline podcast about the business of migrant detention.
Nofil and I sat down to chat about how, in her view, rural communities have been at the center of the story.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Daily Yonder: Can you begin by sharing how rural places initially became involved in the conversation of immigrant detention?
Brianna Nofil: From the start, when the Immigration Service starts doing deportation in earnest at the end of the 19th and into the early 20th century, it heavily relies on rural communities. As migrants start to cross over U.S. land borders, Immigration Service realizes that there are migrants in these really small towns along the northern and southern U.S. borders. This is a predicament for the Immigration Service: they have detention space in the big cities, but they don’t have anything in these rural communities.
So they start to develop what becomes a totally pivotal relationship for the Immigration Service as they begin talking to sheriffs. They say to these local sheriffs, ‘listen, immigration law enforcement isn’t your job, but if you are willing to rent us some beds in your local jail, we will pay you for that.’ Many of these rural sheriffs don’t see themselves as deeply ideological in this period on immigration issues, but they see an opportunity to make some money. So some rural communities start renting jail beds to the Immigration Service. This gives the Immigration Service flexibility. Migrant routes are constantly changing – they might need a bunch of space in, say, North Dakota for six months, but then a route shifts and people start coming through New York or Washington. Control of local rural jails allows them to pivot infrastructure as the movement of people changes.
DY: Does immigrant detention change in rural places by the end of the 20th century?
BN: By the 80s, under the Reagan administration, the Immigration Service is looking to make really big investments in detention infrastructure for the first time. They decide to build the first immigration prisons, co-run by the Immigration Service and the Bureau of Prisons, from the ground up. So they’re no longer just borrowing infrastructure: they’re actually building permanent deportation infrastructure.
There are massive internal battles about where they should put the first site because it’s going to set the tone for what this new detention system is going to look like. They talk to communities all over the United States, including a rural community in Oakdale, Louisiana. At the time, the town is reeling from really high unemployment rates after the recent closure of their paper mill. And the town has this really entrepreneurial mayor, who sees the potential detention site as a silver bullet solution to all of the community’s problems.
Internally, the Immigration Service sees the value of placing this site in rural Louisiana. For one, they figure their work would be more distanced from legal aid, even more out of the limelight. They’re quite explicit about the value they see rural space having in terms of limiting both public attention and migrants’ access to assistance. While they worry about the infrastructure they need to build it out, they say, ‘We can build infrastructure. We can build the airfield and roads we need. But what we can’t buy is isolation.’
DY: How did the Oakdale community originally react to the proposal of this detention center?
BN: It’s the mayor’s big idea, but the public buy-in is huge. When the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) shows up to this town, something like 900 people show up to a town hall to greet them. People do crawfish boils for the immigration bureaucrats, and one church hosts an all-night prayer vigil for the detention center. People still have mixed feelings about the notion of immigration detention, which at this point is a fairly new idea to people, but it also at the time has a potential sell that a prison doesn’t. The idea being sold to them was that this isn’t going to bring the same kind of danger to your community that a standard prison might bring. There’s both a narrative of economic potential, but also that this is a prison, but not totally a prison.
DY: Were there examples of resistance to the detention center within the Oakdale community or in other rural communities where this kind of development was happening?
BN: Yeah, tons. There is no community that takes a detention center, even in Oakdale, where no one is raising moral concerns. You see this particularly sharply in rural communities that have large numbers of immigrants and Latino people. In the 80s, people tried to put a detention center in Roswell, New Mexico, a largely Latino community and also a very rural community. People drew that connection really explicitly and were deeply alarmed. It’s not subtle to people what the Immigration Service is doing, and it’s really present in local discussions of morality.
There is also racist and nativist pushback to the detention centers. There is tons of resistance to the idea that putting an immigration detention center could mean demographic change. In some communities, there is a pushback that has to do with economics. Especially in the 80s, this is an unproven business model. Some of the strongest voices against these detention centers are often big landowners who will really have to reevaluate if people are afraid to come to this part of the country, or if their workers are being detained and deported. They often wield a language of humanitarian concern that is worth a little side-eyeing, because this is really integral to their fairly exploitative business model.
Across all of these, there are always voices of moral opposition to it as well. I think that the moral opposition is rarely, at least in the 80s, the determining factor, but it is always present.
DY: How have different rural communities been impacted by these detention sites economically?
BN: Every story is really different. Broadly, there tends to be some economic benefit for at least a short period of time. Typically right after the detention center opens, there is often a period where the INS or ICE is very eager to use it – typically they need space in that part of the country. But where ICE needs space is not consistent. They might need a lot of space in the Midwest right now, but in a year, is their energy going to be in the Midwest or are they going to need more detention space in the Northeast? This is not something that any community can reliably bank on because they’re basically being asked to predict future federal behavior and future global migration flows, which is impossible. That makes it a particularly treacherous industry to link a community’s financial future to.
What we see time and time again is that these centers frequently fall by the wayside. There are so many detention centers that are set up and then are no longer needed by the Immigration Service. Or they become really controversial, and the Immigration Service no longer wants to use them. There are so many small towns that have a very high degree of desperation and financial strain. The Immigration Service knows that if your town is not playing ball, they can find someone to take your community’s place fairly easily.
DY: What motivates this pattern of continuously opening and closing immigrant detention centers?
BN: One of the big assets of this incredibly decentralized network is that if you’re trying to understand immigration detention, it feels totally overwhelming. They’re in jails, they’re in holding rooms and office buildings, they’re in federal prisons, they’re in specific migrant prisons, they’re in camps in Texas. There are all of these different types of space, and that creates a moving target. That’s by design.
Nofil’s book, The Migrant’s Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration, was published in 2024. (Courtesy of Brianna Nofil)
So when there are problems, like, for example, at Camp East Montana in El Paso right now, which has had multiple deaths and a tuberculosis outbreak, the Immigration Service can very easily say, ‘yeah, we agree, that site is out of control, that site’s a problem, we’ll close that site.’ And in rural areas, if there are uprisings or allegations of abuse, the Immigration Service will often heavily lean into tropes about rural people being racist and dysfunctional. It is so common that they say, ‘of course, the sheriff and the jail workers in this rural community were abusing these migrants because they’re backwater people.’ It gives the immigration service this out to say, ‘these were the bad apples. It’s not the system that deserves interrogation. We don’t need to totally re-examine how we’re doing immigration detention. We’ll just cut off that rural community because those people are uniquely nativist, uniquely racist, and so they shouldn’t have access to this business. But the system can continue going as designed.’
These closures basically never lead to decarceration. They just move people around. But they have massive economic consequences for the people in the community where that site is located. So immigration detention is actually quite different than incarceration writ large in that it is flexible, constantly moving by design.
DY: In the epilogue of your book you mention the idea of “uncooperative federalism” between local governments and federal immigration officials. Can you expand on what that means, and what role local government officials play in this all?
BN: The short answer is that this collaboration is voluntary. You can do it if you want. You can opt out if you want. I just went to a rural community to talk about this book. It was Butler County, Ohio, which has a super right-wing sheriff and incredible local organizing. There’s a group of almost all women in their 70s who’ve gone to 32 straight county commissioner meetings to fight this sheriff. It was like the most inspiring thing I’ve ever seen in my life. A lot of their questions are like, ‘well, what do you do? Sheriffs stay in power forever, and I don’t think he’s going to change his mind.’
But sheriffs are changing their mind. In Polk County, Florida, which is a rural community in Central Florida, the sheriff just recently decided that mass deportations are actually a distraction from local issues. So there is room for sheriffs to change their mind without having a political conversion or ‘come-to-Jesus’ moral awakening. There is room for sheriffs to say, ‘actually what we do is local, right? This is not our job.’ These are not what I might consider particularly inspiring reasons to curtail your collaboration with ICE. But there is a wider range of possibilities for why a community might decide this isn’t in their interest.
DY: Where did you get information on what was happening in rural communities throughout your research?
BN: Rural news is the thing that makes this kind of historical scholarship possible. My ten years of research for this book would have been impossible without local and rural reporting. The only way that we know these detention sites existed is because of newspapers that are called, like, the ‘Such-and-such Farmer.’ They’re the only ones reporting on this. So I just keep thinking about what it means now that many of these local newsrooms do not exist.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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