The Deportation Express: A History of America by Forced Removal
Author: Ethan Blue
Publisher: University of California Press, 2021. 448 pages.
Reviewer: Josue David Cisneros | June 2023
ICE Air Operations is the subset of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that transports migrants during their incarceration and removal. According to the most recent annual report, about half of the 72,177 deportations (“removals”) in FY 2022 (from Oct 2021-Sep 2022) were conducted by air, “including 256 charter flights to Guatemala, 220 to Honduras, 125 to Haiti, and 120 to El Salvador” (ICE Annual Report FY 2022, p. 19). ICE Air Operations also helped expel over 100,000 individuals and families detained at the US-Mexico border. According to a report by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights, ICE contracts these flights through the Florida-based Classic Air Charter, Inc.—a contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars (“Hidden in Plain Sight”).
In the recent book The Deportation Express, Ethan Blue notes that ICE Air is only the most contemporary manifestation of a century-old machine of incarceration and forced removal. Blue’s book begins by comparing the experiences of migrants deported on ICE Air with those who boarded the Deportation Express, a deportation train responsible for forced removals of migrants and refugees during the first half of the twentieth century. The Deportation Express tells the story of the deportation trains, the immigration officials and government bureaucrats that built the system of forced removal, and the migrants and refugees that were swept up in its tracks. By tracing the circuit of the deportation train across the country, The Deportation Express helps us understand the origins, functions, and purpose of this enduring, mobile, and growing carceral apparatus.
True to its title, The Deportation Express: A History of America by Forced Removal tells a truncated history of the United States of America through the forces that gave rise to and developed out of the deportation trains. Blue shows that the Deportation Express was the nexus of forces of US settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and the biopolitical and necropolitical control of the US carceral state. Railroads, more generally, were tools of settler colonialism and racial capitalist accumulation as they facilitated US expansion and suppression of indigenous people and soaked up labor and capital created through the slave economy and US imperialism. When the railroads were used to create a mobile jail to sweep and deport migrants and refugees, this facilitated the cementing of US federal plenary power over immigration as well as biopolitical power over ascriptive US citizenship (race, gender, sexuality, ability) and the development of “a modern US penal-welfare state” (p. 15). In short, “Deportation became a key driver in the making of a coherent, interconnected, modern American carceral state” (p. 17).
Using archival sources, primary documents, and secondary sources, the book tells the history of the Deportation Express and the technologies, infrastructures, logistics, administrative capacities, and intra- and inter-governmental cooperation that developed alongside and through it. But the heart of the book is the “micro-histories,” voices, experiences, and stories of the migrants who were captured and deported through the Deportation Express, as well as the immigrant agents who rode the train alongside them. These are told through case files, personnel records, correspondence, and more. As Blue writes, “the book is animated by a belief that [these] ‘small’ stories offer expansive vistas and deep insights into the structures of the past” (p. 19). This belief is borne out throughout the text.
The Deportation Express is divided into three main parts, which follow the train’s path as it journeyed across the country, sweeping passengers into the US deportation regime. The first part, “Building the Deportation State,” consists of one chapter, “Planning the Journey,” that describes how the Deportation Express was built in the early 20th century and the legal, administrative, and technical processes involved in its journey. The story focuses on immigration officers who administered and staffed the train, as well as government bureaucrats who created policies, procedures, surveillance apparatuses, and intra- and inter-governmental cooperation that literally “conjured the deportation state into existence” (27). Part II follows the Deportation Express eastbound, from Seattle (Ch. 2) to Portland (Ch. 3), San Francisco (Ch. 4), Denver (Ch. 5), Chicago (Ch. 6), Buffalo (Ch. 7), and ending at Ellis Island (Ch. 8), where the primarily European immigrants are incarcerated before they undertake the final leg of their forced journey across the ocean. In Part III, the Deportation Express turns Westbound, stopping at Carbondale (Ch. 9), New Orleans (Ch. 10), San Antonio (Ch. 11), El Paso (Ch. 12), expelling its Mexican and Latin American passengers, and stopping at Angel Island (Ch. 13), where the primarily Asian immigrants are held in inhumane conditions and eventually deported across the Pacific Ocean.
In each chapter, Blue expertly combines several levels of historical analysis, including the micro-histories of the individual deportees’ lives and journeys, political-economic histories of their native countries, international politics, the local conditions of migrant communities, and each town’s history and role in the deportation circuit. The analysis elegantly weaves these different scales—international, transnational, national, local, and interpersonal. Through the micro-histories, each chapter both provides a window into the experiences of migrants and refugees and, at the same time, explores the ways that the Deportation Express was interwoven with white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, ableism, imperialism, and settler colonialism.
The protagonists of these micro-histories are fascinating and complex characters. For example, Chapter 1, “Planning the Journey,” focuses in part on Henry Weiss, an immigrant from Constantinople who rose through the ranks of the Bureau of Immigration to become the nation’s first deportation agent, helping to track down and apprehend migrants and then riding the rails with them to guarantee their removal. The tragic irony of the immigrant deportation agent is not lost on Blue, and it speaks to how the US recruits migrant subjects in order to legitimate its colonial settler, carceral apparatus.
Chapter 3, “Portland,” tells the story of Germaine Rigolout (an immigrant from France who was a sex worker) and Frank Abbott (a young English man who expressed desire for other young men), who are both criminalized, incarcerated, and issued deportation orders because, in different ways, they are seen as sexual deviants. Their pathologization illustrates the ways that the deportation regime and US citizenship relied on the policing of sex, sexuality, and the enforcement of notions of white heteropatriarchy.
Chapter 5, “Denver,” focuses on the stories of several IWW radicals, in particular Joe Kennedy, who was beaten, abused, jailed, and issued deportation orders because of his organizing in nearby Butte, MT. This chapter illustrates the ways that the deportation machine was used for crushing radical activism and solidarity between native-born and immigrant workers.
Chapter 9, “Carbondale,” tells the story of two Mexican immigrant families, the Vallejos and the Huerto brothers, who are recruited as cheap labor—mostly traqueros, or railroad track workers—and then ensnared in the deportation machine because they are seen as racially inferior and economically threatening to white, native-born workers. Set in the context of Carbondale as a colonial settler town and the economic fluctuations of the early 20th century, the chapter shows how racial capitalism relies upon subjugated and deportable racialized workers.
And, as a final example, Chapter 12, “El Paso,” focuses on three Japanese migrant workers—Kondo Johei, Tarashima Tokizo, and Hirakawa Kizo—who were detained and deported in 1919 trying and failing to cross the US-Mexico border. Their micro-histories show how the border was already hardening into a militarized and carceral space in the early 1900s and how these Japanese migrant workers’ transnational migrant experiences were woven into global imperial and racial conflicts across Japan, the United States, Peru, and Great Brittain.
By the 1950s, the deportation train had primarily been replaced by buses and planes. Even though the railroad industry fought to maintain the economic boon that deportations provided, the Deportation Express would be replaced by other carceral assemblages. Nevertheless, the history of the Deportation Express is vital. As Blue concludes, “The early twentieth-century deportation regime created a punitive governmental infrastructure that swept within and extended beyond the nation’s borders” (290). This deportation regime would only grow, adding cameras, sensors, ankle monitors, drones, artificial intelligence, third-country border enforcement agreements, and ensnaring more people into its circuit of incarceration and forced removal.
The Deportation Express is elegantly written and amasses a monumental amount of research. To tell these micro-histories, Blue has interwoven the intimate details of individuals’ lives and journeys; global histories of imperialism, nationalism, and colonialism; legal histories of immigration and foreign policy, and more. In this way, it models a method of doing critical, transnational history that cuts across scales and spaces. The book provides not only a history of the deportation train but also a history of US immigration and a history of the twentieth-century United States as a growing carceral state. It provides a map of the deportation regime at a specific time and place, allowing us to trace how this machine has evolved and shifted into the present day. The Deportation Express continues and has expanded in the form of ICE Air and other forms of policing and incarceration. In this way, and to conclude, Ethan Blue’s book urges immigration activists and scholars to continue to embrace an abolitionist framework, tracing and disrupting the way that the immigration- and border-industrial complex are interwoven with and integral to the US settler-colonial, carceral state.
References
Hidden in Plain Sight: ICE Air and the Machinery of Mass Deportation, Univ. of Wash. Ctr. for Hum. Rts. (April 13, 2019), https://jsis.washington.edu/humanrights/2019/04/23/ice-air/.
U.S. Immigr. and Customs Enf’t, ICE Annual Report Fiscal Year 2022 (Dec. 2022), https://www.ice.gov/doclib/eoy/iceAnnualReportFY2022.pdf.
Josue David Cisneros is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
