Immobilizing Migrants: McNeil Island Prison and Transnational Policing

The US Congress established a jail on McNeil Island in the Puget Sound in 1867 in what was then the Washington Territory.  Five years later, the jail became a federal prison. In 1888, a group of 19 Chinese illegal migrants who were caught in Washington Territory were sent to McNeil Island prison after Canada refused to accept them.  In the end, the court ruled against the migrants and ordered their removal to China in 1890.   This was the first deportation from Washington Territory.  McNeil Island was the largest island penitentiary in the country and served as a key detention center for undocumented migrants and criminal aliens awaiting deportation for the next forty years. In 2011, the prison was shut down because it was too expensive to run.

This paper explores the McNeil island prison as a site for incarcerating migrants awaiting deportation.  The remote location made it an ideal place to hold prisoners and also made it difficult for prisoners to have access to legal counsel or to relatives and friends who could help them.  Using the Bureau of Prisons records at the National Archives in Seattle, the collection of the McNeil Island Historical Society and the archives at the Instituto Nacional de Migración and the Foreign Ministry in Mexico City, I have been able to track individual migrants from their incarceration, through their deportation and repatriation. 

Although the Mexican and Chinese governments occasionally complained about the treatment of their citizens and subjects, archival sources reveal a history of transnational collaboration and cooperation to deport and repatriate migrants.  Rooting transnational migration history in a remote island prison designed to prevent movement reminds us of the centrality of prisons to the circuits of migration.