Giving Compass' Take:

• Emily Kassie follows this history of immigrant detention in the United States as it has grown over the past four decades. 

• How can understanding this history inform current efforts to address the problems of immigrant detention in the United States? 

• Learn how to divest from immigrant detention. 

Children sleeping on floors, changing other children’s diapers. Families torn apart at the border. Migrants crammed into fetid detention centers. These have become familiar sights as people fleeing gang violence, domestic abuse and poverty arrive on the southern border of the United States. Many will join more than 52,000 immigrants confined in jails, prisons, tents and other forms of detention—most of them for profit.

The United States' reliance on immigrant detention is not a new phenomenon, nor did it emerge with President Donald Trump (though its growth under his administration is staggering). Over the last four decades, a series of emergency stopgaps and bipartisan deals has created a new multi-billion dollar industry built on the incarceration of immigrants.

Immigrants, including asylum seekers and legal migrants, wait an average of more than four weeks to be released, though some have been held inside for years or even decades. Up to 2,500 are children and parents fleeing war and violence in their home countries. Thousands have alleged sexual and physical abuse inside the facilities.

Forty years ago, this system did not exist.

A modest system holding fewer than 3,000 migrants a day at the end of the 1970s, detention has now morphed into a sprawling machinery ensnaring immigrants across the country. And facilities operated under both Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Border Patrol continue to come under fire for holding people in squalid conditions with minimal access to hygiene and medical care.

The number of people held on an average day by ICE and its predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, has grown more than twentyfold since 1979.

Read the full article about immigrant detention in the U.S. by Emily Kassie at The Marshall Project.