Railroaded: How Trains Made Mass Immigrant Expulsion Possible

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• Railroaded: How Trains Made Mass Immigrant Expulsion Possible
• Elliott Young (bio)

Ethan Blue, The Deportation Express: A History of America through Forced Removal. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. xiii + 448 pp. Figures, maps, notes, bibliography and index. $39.95.

“Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye, Rosalita,

Adios mis amigos, Jesus y Maria;

You won’t have your names when you ride the big airplane,

All they will call you will be ‘deportees’”

—Maryin Hoffman and Woody Guthrie, “Deportee”

A few years back, as I was waiting to board a flight to Mexico from San Francisco International airport, I noticed some government agents escorting handcuffed migrants onto my commercial flight. I wanted to say something, to scream, to denounce ICE, to lay my body down on the gears of the deportation machine, but I didn’t. The passengers on my flight that day got a glimpse of the mass expulsion industry that mostly remains hidden from view, but nobody said a word. It was routine. Another day in America.

In December 2018, the University of Washington Center for Human Rights received a database of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Alien Repatriation Tracking System (ARTS) following a Freedom of Information Act request. Although journalists have reported on the activities of ICE Air, as it is colloquially known, this network of chartered deportation flights operates in the shadows. Nobody had an idea of the size and shape of this aerial expulsion machine. The ARTS dataset revealed that there were 1.73 million passengers on almost 15,000 ICE Air Operations flights between 2010 and 2018. Almost three-quarters of these flights brought deportees back to their home countries, mostly Mexico, while just over one-quarter were internal transfers in which migrants were shuffled between detention centers in the United States. 150,000–250,000 migrants were boarded onto ICE Air each year, making it one of the largest mass removal strategies in U.S. history.¹ We know that under presidents Obama and Trump, the system reached unprecedented levels of deportation, removing more than half a million migrants annually at [End Page 236] its height. But understanding the mechanism for how those mass deportations actually happened remains fuzzy.

When something like mass incarceration or mass deportation becomes routine, it can happen before our very eyes without our understanding the intricacies of how the complex system operates. While today airplanes and busses are used to ferry migrants around the country and expel them to other countries, in the beginning of the twentieth century, the primary mode of transport was the railroad. Ethan Blue’s Deportation Express helps us to understand the role the railroad played in deporting thousands of migrants. This focus on railroads points our attention to the cogs and wheels of the deportation machine, allowing us to get a view from inside the belly of the iron horse. As Blue writes, “Thanks to the train, American nativists’ long-standing fantasies of immigrant exclusion and mass deportation finally appeared within reach” (p. 5). Maybe.

Although trains certainly facilitated expulsion in the past, just as airplanes do today, the nativists’ fantasies have never entirely come to fruition because the technologies of control and elimination are just too expensive to fulfill their dreams. When Donald Trump threated to expel all 11 million undocumented immigrants during one of the 2016 primary debates, few people believed he could actually do it; like many of Trump’s claims, the bark was worse than the bite.² The public act of arrest, detention, and deportation, however, served a different purpose: terrorizing the migrant population to effectively keep them in the shadows and easily exploited. The system isn’t broken. It’s functioning as designed.

The size of the population removed in the first half of the twentieth century pales in comparison to the twenty-first century, when hundreds of thousands are expelled from the United States each year. In 1914, fewer than 5,000 people were expelled, but between 1914 and 1931, nearly 130,000 were removed (p. 5). The railroad was central to that system of removal, especially from the interior, but just how many people were transported by rail versus other means of transit is...