Deportation Express

Ethan Blue's history follows how the United States expelled immigrants and people it deemed "undesirable," told through the experiences of those who rode its first deportation trains. A country that likes to see itself as a refuge for newcomers and a home of liberty built a system of imprisonment and removal unmatched anywhere else in the world.

This is the first account of American deportation to focus on a chain of prison railcars that the Immigration Bureau adapted to connect jails, hospitals, asylums, and workhouses across the country. The cars made forced removal fast and systematic. Blue traces where the deportation train came from and shows how it connects to the present, when restricting immigrants and carrying out mass deportations again shape politics and legislation.

A century ago, these trains ran repeated loops across the nation, collecting "undesirable aliens" (migrants judged for their poverty, political radicalism, criminal convictions, or mental illness) and carrying them to ports for exile overseas. Earlier removal methods had been violent, costly, and improvised. The railroad turned expulsion into an industrial process. The trains gave authorities a powerful way to separate "citizens" from "aliens" and uproot people in numbers never seen before.

Blue draws on the lives of the migrants and the agents who removed them, telling the history from aboard a deportation train. By following several individuals caught in this system, the book shows how state exclusion developed alongside the enormous wave of immigration in early twentieth-century America. These are the stories of people who came from around the world, were confined, and were expelled through the same infrastructure that bound the country together while splitting the wider world apart. Millions more would later make the same journey.