UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, IRVINE “Nobody Wants These People”: Reagan’s Immigration Crisis and America’s First Private Prisons DISSERTATION submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in History by Kristina K. Shull Dissertation Committee: Professor Emily S. Rosenberg, Chair Professor Jon Wiener Professor Rubén G. Rumbaut 2014 © 2014 Kristina K. Shull DEDICATION To Andis and those still on the inside we promised never to forget. ~ i have been locked by the lawless. Handcuffed by the haters. Gagged by the greedy. And, if i know anything at all, it’s that a wall is just a wall and nothing more at all. It can be broken down. i believe in living, i believe in birth. i believe in the sweat of love and in the fire of truth. And i believe that a lost ship steered by tired, seasick sailors, can still be guided home to port. Assata Shakur ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv CURRICULUM VITAE v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION vi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1: “Nobody Wants These People”: Reagan’s Immigration Crisis and the Detention of Mariel Cubans at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas 13 CHAPTER 2: “We Have Been Unable to Find Any Precedent for Such an Operation”: The Extension of Executive Authority through Haitian Interdiction and Detention 41 CHAPTER 3: “The Emergency Nature of the Problem”: Contingency Planning Along the U.S.-Mexico Border 81 CHAPTER 4: “Give Us Liberty, or We Will Tear the Place Apart”: Resistance and Control in Immigration Detention 123 CHAPTER 5: “Thirty Years of Service to America”: The Corrections Corporation of America and the Birth of the Neoliberal Security State 166 CONCLUSION 219 BIBLIOGRAPHY 223 iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My deepest appreciation and gratitude goes to my committee chair, Professor Emily S. Rosenberg, whose dedication to teaching and scholarship never ceases to inspire me. While others believed my proposed work was too contemporary, she enthusiastically asserted that history includes everything up to yesterday. Without her expertise, encouragement, and persistent help this dissertation would not have been possible. I would like to thank my committee members, Professor Jon Wiener, whose work has taught me to always interrogate the dominant narrative, and Professor Rubén Rumbaut, who has shown me that history provides an essential bridge to other disciplines and must be actionable in the present. I am grateful for the members of the Detention Watch Network and American Families United whose work for social justice continues to inspire and remind me of the work still ahead. I am also incredibly grateful for the constant support of my parents, Joseph and Jodie Shull, family, and friends, especially Dean and Craig. I thank Duke University Press for permission to include Chapter One of my dissertation, which was originally published in part in Body and Nation: The Global Realm of U.S. Body Politics in the Twentieth Century, edited by Emily S. Rosenberg and Shanon Fitzpatrick. Financial support was provided by UC Irvine’s School of Humanities, History Department, and Associated Graduate Students; the UC-Cuba Academic Initiative, the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the Organization of American Historians, and the Immigration and Ethnic History Society. Finally, a special thank you to the University of Miami’s Cuban Heritage Collection for granting me a graduate fellowship in residence and offering continued support and opportunities for collaboration. iv CURRICULUM VITAE Kristina K. Shull 2014 Ph.D. History, U.S. and the World, University of California, Irvine. Dissertation: “Nobody Wants These People”: Reagan’s Immigration Crisis and America’s First Private Prisons. Advisor: Dr. Emily S. Rosenberg. 2013 M.A. History, University of California, Irvine. 2006 M.A. John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master’s Program in Humanities and Social Thought, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, New York University. Thesis: Positive Peace: The Clinton Administration’s Involvement in the Northern Ireland Peace Process as a Case Study in Positive Peace Diplomacy. Advisor: Dr. Riaz Khan. 2003 B.A. History, Minor in Political Science, summa cum laude and History Departmental Honors, University of California, Los Angeles. PUBLICATIONS “‘Nobody Wants These People’: Reagan’s Immigration Crisis and the Containment of Foreign Bodies,” in Emily S. Rosenberg and Shanon Fitzpatrick, eds., Body/Nation: The Global Realm of U.S. Body Politics in the Twentieth Century, Duke University Press, 2014. “Heritage Foundation,” “Peter Brimelow,” “Population Control Groups,” “Save Our State,” “War on Drugs,” and “War on Terror.” Anti-Immigration in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia, Greenwood Press, 2011. “About the U.S. Detention and Deportation System” and “The History of Immigration Detention in the U.S.” Web pages, Detention Watch Network, January 2009. http://www.detentionwatchnetwork.org/resources “In Limbo: Illegal immigrants should be given a way to come out of the shadows.” Chicago Tribune, Featured Article, sec. 2, July 8, 2007. “License to Kill: Breaking the Cycle of Violence in South Central Los Angeles.” Anamesa: An Interdisciplinary Journal, New York University, Spring 2006. http://anamesajournal.wordpress.com/issues-2/spring-2006/ “The Challenge We Face: Rape and Domestic Violence Are Human Rights Violations.” Humanus: Journal of Human Rights, New York University, Spring 2006. “Is the Magic Gone?: Weber’s ‘Disenchantment of the World’ and its Implications for Art in Today’s World.” Anamesa: An Interdisciplinary Journal, New York University, Fall 2005. http://anamesajournal.wordpress.com/issues-2/fall-2005/ v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION “Nobody Wants These People”: Reagan’s Immigration Crisis and America’s First Private Prisons By Kristina K. Shull Doctor of Philosophy in History University of California, Irvine, 2014 Professor Emily Rosenberg, Chair In 2013, the United States detained approximately 400,000 people in immigration custody in a network of 250 local, federal, and private jails across the country as they awaited deportation or release, at a cost of over $1.7 billion. This dissertation situates the rise of the current U.S. immigration detention system in the early 1980s within the broader context of Ronald Reagan’s Cold War foreign policies and growing public xenophobia after the Vietnam War. When President Reagan entered office, he sought new ways to curtail a perceived “mass immigration emergency” caused by an increasing flow of Cubans, Haitians, and Central Americans to the United States. As the American public continued to express “compassion fatigue” towards new migrant populations, the Reagan Administration established a new security state that included the building of immigrant detention centers throughout the United States, Puerto Rico, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; the interdiction of migrants on the high seas; heightened border security under the “War on Drugs”; and the first uses of private prison contracting. This work traces the narratives surrounding these new enforcement measures by using Reagan Administration files, media portrayals of migrant groups, and evidence of vi community and public support for and against the practice of immigration detention in order to demonstrate how an ongoing fear of future mass migrations continued to justify more permanent structures of immigration detention—trends that persist to the current day. vii INTRODUCTION They are getting the worst ready to leave—the prostitutes and homosexuals, and the crazy people, too…like Castro taking out his garbage. They took everyone straight from the prison to the boat. -“Freedom Flotilla” boat crew member, June 6, 19801 Between April 21 and September 29, 1980, 125,266 Cuban refugees arrived in Key West, Florida, transported on American vessels from Mariel Harbor, Cuba, in what is now known as the Mariel Boatlift. This exodus, sparked by many factors, including economic and political strife in Cuba and U.S.-Cuban negotiations for family reunification, began under assumptions that the United States would accept 3,500 refugees. But shortly after Fidel Castro announced the opening of Mariel Harbor to American vessels wishing to pick up family members, the operation spiraled out of control and five months of mass migration ensued. Shortly after the first arrivals in the United States, reports of Castro purposefully infiltrating the boatlift with criminals and other social “undesirables” began to circulate in the media. Overwhelmed, President Jimmy Carter’s administration declared a state of emergency in South Florida. While roughly half of the arrivals were reunited with family members or resettled in the Miami area in a relatively timely manner, the other half were sent to one of four military bases across the country that served as temporary camps for processing.2 On the night of May 26, 1980, two hundred of the eighteen thousand Cuban refugees housed at Fort Chaffee, Arkansas, walked out of an unlocked gate in protest against their 1 “Carter Says Illegal Boatlift Must Stop, Orders Prosecutions,” Los Angeles Times, June 6, 1980, p. A9. 2 The four military bases were Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, Fort Chaffee in Arkansas, Fort Indiantown Gap in Pennsylvania, and Fort McCoy in Wisconsin. See Alex Larzelere, The 1980 Cuban Boatlift: Castro’s Ploy—America’s Dilemma (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1988) for boatlift statistics. 1 detainment by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and the slow resettlement process. As they entered the