Migrant detention at the US border is not new. While it’s become common in 2020 to hear of the incarceration of men, women, and children at the border attached to the current administration, these policies have been in development for the past 40 years. Over time we’ve seen the shifting legal, political and cultural definitions for people who arrive from Central America and Cuba. We’ve seen the transformation of the asylum seeker to criminal, begging the question: is “prison” a more suitable term?

Alexander Stephens and Gerson Rosales didn’t expect for their research to align quite so closely. One works on the arrival of Cubans on the Mariel boatlift, the other on Salvadoran migration. But when they both stumbled across the same detention center in a surprising place, they sat down together to talk about these intertwined histories, from one small-town detention center to the largest system of immigrant prisons in the world.