Constructing the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp: Policing, Forced Labor, and State Violence in 1940s California

This paper examines the origins of the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp in El Centro, California. In 1945, immigration officers opened the camp by repurposing the carcass of a former internment camp and with the unpaid labor of Mexican migrants. Summer in the Imperial Valley was hard to withstand as the heat reached dangerous levels. Yet, local Patrol Inspectors used detained Mexican migrant men as an unpaid workforce. They used this confined population to maintain the detention camp and to assist in work projects throughout the Imperial Valley. Examining the origins of the El Centro Immigration Detention Camp situates the history of immigrant detention alongside scholarship that argues that racialized punishment and carceral spaces existed in the plantation, the boarding school, and the prison. Following their lead, this paper investigates the use of Mexican migrants as an exploitable labor force. Disguised as a system of voluntary work by local INS officers, this labor regime was coercive at best. My focus on the unfreedom of Mexican men is part of the larger story of forced labor in the United States. From indentured servitude, chattel slavery, Native American enslavement, convict leasing, and the chain gang, to the confinement of Mexican migrants, forced labor has played a central role in the development of white supremacy, colonialism, and gendered racial capitalism.