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Daily Yonder: Q&A: The Making of the Immigrant Detention Business in Rural America
Summary
Brianna Nofil, assistant professor of history, shares her research on how immigrant detention infrastructure has impacted small towns across America.
Full Description
"Brianna Nofil’s historical mission is to uncover how America built the infrastructure it uses to jail people, and who has profited along the way. A professor at William & Mary, Nofil’s research focuses on migration, incarceration, and law in the modern United States. Her 2024 book The Migrant’s Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration chronicles a century of coevolution between America’s immigration and criminal justice systems. She talked about her research in an episode of NPR’s Throughline podcast about the business of migrant detention.
Nofil and I sat down to chat about how, in her view, rural communities have been at the center of the story."