In the Shadow of Liberty: The Invisible History of Immigrant Detention in the United States

Historian Minian (Stanford Univ.; Undocumented Lives) explores the history of immigrant detention through the lives of four migrants who came to the United States from different countries at different points in history. These individuals include Fu Chi Hao, who fled Christian persecution in 1901 China; Ellen Knauff, the German bride of a U.S. serviceman who was detained on Ellis Island for three years, starting in 1947; Gerardo Mansur, a Cuban asylum seeker who landed in the U.S. in 1980 after the Mariel boatlift; and, most recently, Fernando Arredondo, who, in 2017, fled gang violence and death threats in his native Guatemala. Six narrators join their voices to tell these individuals’ harrowing stories, describing how they were subjected to arbitrary and often contradictory enforcement practices as they contended with multigenerational trauma and were forcibly removed from family and community. The narrators affectingly communicate Minian’s thoroughly researched account, revealing the escalation of racism, abuse, and inhumane treatment under Donald Trump’s presidency and the desperate need for reform.