In the Shadow of Liberty

February 19, 2024
In this harrowing account of immigrants’ experiences in American detention centers, Stanford historian Minian (Undocumented Lives) outlines the central role incarceration has played in the past century of U.S. immigration policy. In 2018, furor over Donald Trump’s family separation policy led to a wellspring of outrage over the punitive conditions of immigrant detention, but Minian demonstrates that “Guantánamo-like facilities have arisen in towns and cities across America since the nineteenth century” and that the U.S. has long been “crisscrossed by a vast network of facilities where people are detained without basic rights.” She tells this history through profiles of four immigrants, among them Fu Chi Hao, who in 1901 fled Christian repression in China and, after a monthslong detention in unsanitary conditions upon entering the U.S., endured a costly, burdensome, and years-long parole process, and Ellen Knauff, the German wife of a U.S. soldier, who arrived in 1948 and was incarcerated on Ellis Island for nearly two years. Minian’s up-close narration of her subjects’ lives brings home the intimate and unbearable human suffering of incarceration, and her analysis is fueled by anger at both the hypocrisy of a country that denies freedom-seeking immigrants their liberty and the fickleness of protestors who no longer care about immigrant detention (in 2022, America detained approximately 307,000 immigrants). It’s a must-read for anyone invested in U.S. immigration policy.

September 13, 2024

Historian Minian (Stanford Univ.; Undocumented Lives) explores the history of immigrant detention through the lives of four migrants who came to the United States from different countries at different points in history. These individuals include Fu Chi Hao, who fled Christian persecution in 1901 China; Ellen Knauff, the German bride of a U.S. serviceman who was detained on Ellis Island for three years, starting in 1947; Gerardo Mansur, a Cuban asylum seeker who landed in the U.S. in 1980 after the Mariel boatlift; and, most recently, Fernando Arredondo, who, in 2017, fled gang violence and death threats in his native Guatemala. Six narrators join their voices to tell these individuals' harrowing stories, describing how they were subjected to arbitrary and often contradictory enforcement practices as they contended with multigenerational trauma and were forcibly removed from family and community. The narrators affectingly communicate Minian's thoroughly researched account, revealing the escalation of racism, abuse, and inhumane treatment under Donald Trump's presidency and the desperate need for reform. VERDICT A horrific and galvanizing look into the hidden side of immigrant incarceration, highly recommended for listeners interested in social activism, politics, and immigration policy.--Joanna M. Burkhardt

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