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We continue our WNYC Centennial series, 100 years of 100 things now.

It's 100 years of immigrant detention this time because as much as we tend to think of the Trump administration as uniquely harsh on immigrants.

He's actually continuing a storyline of American history, not inventing one from scratch.

The guests were about to meet writes, for example, Trump's policy of using family separation

as a deterrence method simply extended a strategy that had been the norm for decades.

Even the latest news stories about some U.S. citizen children being removed from the country

or the fundamental rule of law questions about defying court orders in immigration cases,

these things have been seen in periods of American history that don't get discussed in the

news or taught in schools very much. That's why our guest wrote a book called In the Shadow of

Liberty, the Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States. The author is

Stanford History Professor Ana Raquel Mignon, And you may have seen their related op-ed

in the New York Times in January. Professor Mignon, well, thanks for getting up early Stanford,

California time to join us for this. Welcome to WNYC. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure.

And let's start more than a hundred years ago. In your op-ed, you note that until the 1870s,

there were no federal laws enforced to restrict immigration. No laws on the books or not laws that

were enforced? No laws that were enforced. Um, Haitians had, the government had tried to implement laws to bar Haitian migration, but

it hadn't really done it.

The first real law that we see that truly enforces immigration restriction for the

first time occurs around Chinese migration and ultimately comes to,

there's a series of laws, the Page Act and others, but ultimately what we see is the passage of

...