The Shadow of El Centro

A History of Migrant Incarceration and Solidarity

Jessica Ordaz

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469662480
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política de inmigración

Bounded by desert and mountains, El Centro, California, is isolated and difficult to reach. However, its location close to the border between San Diego and Yuma, Arizona, has made it an important place for Mexican migrants attracted to the valley's agricultural economy. In 1945, it also became home to the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp. The Shadow of El Centro tells the story of how that camp evolved into the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Service Processing Center of the 2000s and became a national model for detaining migrants—a place where the policing of migration, the racialization of labor, and detainee resistance coalesced. Using government correspondence, photographs, oral histories, and private documents, Jessica Ordaz reveals the rise and transformation of migrant detention through this groundbreaking history of one detention camp. The story shows how the U.S. detention system was built to extract labor, to discipline, and to control migration, and it helps us understand the long and shadowy history of how immigration officials went from detaining a few thousand unauthorized migrants during the 1940s to confining hundreds of thousands of people by the end of the twentieth century. Ordaz also uncovers how these detained migrants have worked together to create transnational solidarities and innovative forms of resistance.

PART I | Hauntings

CHAPTER ONE

The Camp’s Skeleton

A Prehistory

The past is a haunting presence, one that intrudes into and dramatically alters … lives in the present.

—JOANNE LIPSON FREED, 2017

Immigration officials opened the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp in 1945 as an administrative holding center for unauthorized Mexican migrants.¹ Local patrol inspectors used this incarcerated population to maintain the detention camp and to assist on work projects throughout the Imperial Valley. For instance, on March 2, 1954, Walter I. Walden, secretary of the Imperial Valley Central Labor Council, discovered that a Border Patrol agent was supervising eight Mexican migrants laying concrete blocks for a building in the Border Patrol and Immigration Service at El Centro.² Although agents had been investigated by the FBI for these labor practices in the past, this was not an isolated incident. Just one day later Ernesto Galarza, a Mexican American scholar and activist, wrote a letter to the Mexican consulate in Calexico, informing them that INS authorities were using the labor of eight unpaid detained migrants at the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp to reconstruct the facility.³ After receiving Galarza’s letter the Mexican consulate sent Eugénio V. Pesquería to visit the detention camp in El Centro, where he was told that the INS would stop using the labor of detained Mexicans in reconstructing the camp.⁴

The history of the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp is part of wider scholarship that argues that racialized punishment and carceral spaces existed in the plantation, the boarding school, and the prison.⁵ This chapter, however, identifies the wartime roots of migrant detention and the use of Mexican migrants as an exploitable labor force. Disguised as a system of voluntary work by local INS officials, this labor regime proved coercive at best. This story of incarcerated Mexican men is part of the larger history of forced labor in the United States.⁶ From indentured servitude, chattel slavery, Native American enslavement, convict leasing, and the chain gang to the coerced labor of Mexican migrants, forced labor has played a central role in institutionalizing white supremacy.⁷ Local immigration officials used the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp as a holding pen for an incarcerated labor force.

The federal government opened the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp as World War II was coming to an end. By 1945 the INS had abundant experience in confining people classified as enemy aliens. The El Centro Immigration Detention Camp was created by repurposing the carcass of a former camp. The structures that the federal government used to construct the camp in El Centro were originally part of the Fort Stanton Internment Camp in New Mexico, a place that held Germans and, for a brief period, Japanese Americans. After the Fort Stanton Camp closed, INS authorities hauled its tools, buildings (including the victory huts, prefabricated buildings used during war to house soldiers), and kitchen equipment such as pots, pans, and cutlery to El Centro.⁸ This transfer of materials from one carceral space to another speaks to the legacy of confinement in the United States. The prehistory and expansion of the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp was based on a model of war and forced labor.

The SS Columbus

On September 1, 1939, the SS Columbus, a luxury ship from northern Germany, adorned with the red and black swastika flag, began its voyage home after a cruise along the Caribbean. In addition to a fervidly pro-Nazi crew, about half of whom belonged to the National Socialist Organization, the ship contained 745 passengers.⁹ At the very same time, Germany invaded Poland, sparking war throughout Europe and then most of the globe.

The Columbus’s route back to Germany suddenly became all but impossible. A British naval blockade prevented the Columbus from returning by sea. The Cuban government allowed the ship’s passengers to disembark in Havana, allowing the crew to figure out an alternate means of returning to Germany. They attempted an alternate sea route, this time without passengers, by sailing the ship north from Cuba, but on December 19, 1939, the British tracked the ship near New York. Hitler had ordered that the ship should not fall into the hands of the Allies, and so, rather than surrendering to the British, the crew set the Columbus ablaze and abandoned ship.¹⁰

The crew was rescued and transported to the U.S. mainland on the USS Tuscaloosa on December 20, 1939. Immigration agents took the men to Ellis Island because they were considered “excluded alien seamen” without valid immigration visas.¹¹ British and U.S. government authorities allowed German women, children, and men over fifty-two to return to Germany. The remaining crewmen were transported to Angel Island on a train and then a ship because officials believed they could return to Germany on a Japanese steamer from the West Coast.¹² But this did not come to pass. Instead, immigration services were charged with accommodating 512 Germans at the Angel Island Immigration and Quarantine Stations.¹³ There were so many people that the guards held several men at the Alameda County Jail owing to lack of space.

In March 1940 Karl Eduard, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and the visiting head of Germany’s Red Cross, visited the quarters that held the German crewmen. Eduard concluded that the rooms, while crowded, were neat and contained improvised storage boxes on ropes and pulleys.¹⁴ He was impressed by the fishing wharf, smokehouse, and biergarten, although it did not serve alcohol. Since the INS was receiving monthly payments to hold and feed the crew from the German consul, they received various privileges, including salaries and shore leave.¹⁵ The German embassy paid each German crewman $2.50 per week.¹⁶ While confined to Angel Island and unable to return to Germany, the men were not stressed about money. For instance, thirty-one-year-old Kurt Johann Hinsch told INS officials that “by German law” he was “entitled to [his] salary until [he] reached home.” German seamen received the same salary whether at port or sailing. Hinsch, having been trained as a merchant marine and having attended a naval academy, had worked as a seaman since the age of sixteen and had served on the Columbus for about three years. He was married and counted on his father-in-law, an export and import businessmen, to help support him while he was in the United States.¹⁷

The crew’s relative freedom was challenged once the Germans stepped out of line, however. Joseph X. Strand, inspector in charge of the Detention and Deportation Division, Captain Wilhelm Daehne, and First Officer Ruppert debated if the privilege of shore leave should be discontinued after they discovered that several men failed to return to Angel Island at the designated time. Captain Daehne temporarily suspended shore leave privileges and deducted pay from the violators, but he asked the INS commissioner to reinstate shore leave until more “serious misconduct” had taken place. Daehne and Ruppert asserted that they found the entire crew to be “trustworthy and reliable” and felt that they “could virtually guarantee that there [would] be no desertions.”¹⁸ Yet, the crew’s stay at Angel Island would soon come to an end.

Fort Stanton

Holding the men in San Francisco grew challenging as anti-German hostility increased. The Justice Department searched for a new and more remote location and selected the Fort Stanton Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) Camp in New Mexico as the location to hold the German crew.¹⁹ Largely used for cattle raising, this area was chosen because it was in remote mountainous country and few families lived there. Border Patrol agents visited and concluded that it could be well controlled.²⁰ On January 27, 1941, thirty-nine members of the Columbus were transported from San Francisco to New Mexico in a day coach. The media reported that the men were transported in a “prison car with armed guards,” but the INS emphasized that this was not the case, “because this crew [was] a well behaved and well-disciplined body of men.”²¹ Immigration officials were constantly anxious not to present the image that they treated the crew like prisoners. For instance, when officials debated if the new camp should be fenced, Lemuel B. Schofield, special assistant to the attorney general, suggested, that “it might give to some the appearance of a ‘prison’ or ‘concentration’ camp, and it seem[ed] to the Central Office very desirable that this be avoided.”²² The remaining crewmen were transported to New Mexico on a Southern Pacific train, making the total number of Germans at the camp 412.

The crew continued to receive preferential treatment at Fort Stanton. William F. Kelly, Assistant Commissioner for Alien Control, and Captain Daehem administered the camp. The U.S. and the German government funded the camp’s operations.²³ Because of its prefabricated accommodations, Fort Stanton looked similar to an army camp.²⁴ As soon as the crewmen settled into their new residence, they painted a Nazi swastika in the camp and put up several photographs of Hitler. They were allowed to re-create life inside the camp as closely as possible to their lives aboard the Columbus. This included building a library, constructing a sausage smokehouse and a recreational swimming pool, and organizing two music bands who performed in the camp.²⁵ The German government continued to compensate the crew regardless of the labor they performed.²⁶ When the Border Patrol requested help with projects outside of the camp, such as constructing the adobe-walled guardhouse, German laborers earned an additional ten cents an hour.²⁷

As war raged throughout Europe, locals expressed frustration with the government’s preferential treatment of the German crew held at Fort Stanton. One resident wrote, “They should load the whole damn bunch up and ship them back to Hitler.”²⁸ Another person said, “They should run them out beyond the 12-mile limit and sink them.” An ex-serviceman and world war veteran echoed these sentiments when he asserted, “If they [the Border Patrol] would just let a bunch of us legionnaires go up there with our rifles and give them a day off, their problems would be solved.” Another resident went as far as to suggest that, if war were declared, they would immediately kill every German crew member who tried to abandon the camp.²⁹

The FBI also expressed concern with the liberties the men were granted. In a report to the attorney general, the FBI stated that law enforcement officers informed them that Germans were allowed to roam outside the camp and often visited nearby cities. INS officials responded by informing the FBI that the crewmen were not prisoners of war and should not be “deprived of all liberties.”³⁰ The crewmen were allowed to leave the camp and go on hikes as long as they carried passes granting them permission to do so. Local police officers found this troubling because they believed that if the United States entered the war, the Germans would certainly try to escape.

From the perspective of Captain Daehne, granting the men certain privileges kept them content. He was in favor of making small compromises, such as serving beer in the camp’s canteen, “to prevent dissatisfaction or to keep the crewmen’s time occupied.”³¹ These privileges might have kept the crew more relaxed, but they outraged locals. When bids were received for supplying the Fort Stanton Camp with lamb, L. A. McDonald, the local manager of Armour and Company, included his opinion about how the camp was operated. He said, “The German crewmen of the former SS ‘Columbus’ … lived like kings and queens,” and that “it might help to put some arsenic in their food.”³² Soon, conditions in...