When assistant professor of history Brianna Nofil talks about immigration detention in the United States, she begins in the place where she first learned that the carceral landscape extended far beyond the bounds of the criminal legal system: a detention center on the edge of the Florida Everglades, where she grew up.
Growing up in south Florida, Nofil lived near the Krome Detention Center, a facility she describes as “strange, isolated and undefined,” reachable by a single road that cut through the swamps of her hometown. When she was young, she noticed the protests that occasionally erupted there, often led by Haitian community members demanding answers about why Haitian asylum seekers were detained while Cuban migrants received drastically different treatment.
“It was this weird space on the edge of my community that I didn’t fully understand,” Nofil said. “People asked these questions — is it a prison? Is it not a prison? Did people commit a crime, or did they just cross a border? Even people living nearby weren’t sure.”
Years later, trying to make sense of this place that had loomed large but unknowable in her childhood, Nofil enrolled in an immigration history class as an undergraduate. She expected clarity. Instead, she found a field full of unanswered questions and an archival trail of contradictions and erasures that would shape the next 14 years of her scholarly life.
“I became completely obsessed,” she said. “It was opened by Reagan in the ’80s at a moment when so many people were coming from the Caribbean. Once I understood how Krome was part of this broader system — one that tried to deter asylum seekers by making the process miserable — that became the motivating question of my work.”
Today, as a scholar of immigration detention, incarceration and the legal architecture connecting the two, Nofil started teaching courses on the history of policing and carceral institutions at the College of William and Mary in 2020. Her book, “The Migrant’s Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration,” built from over a decade of research starting with her undergraduate thesis, argues that detention centers like Krome are only one small part of a vast, largely invisible machinery.
When Nofil first set out to research immigration detention as a student, she assumed she would find a network of official detention centers. What she discovered was a system hiding in plain sight.
“I assumed immigration detention happened in places that were called immigration detention sites,” she said. “But the vast majority historically happened in local jails.”
From the late 19th century to today, migrants in detention have been confined not only in federal facilities but in thousands of local jails, places the public rarely associates with immigration enforcement and whose records are often incomplete or destroyed.
“Your local jail does a lot more than people imagine,” Nofil said. “It holds pre-trial detainees, people serving short sentences and people detained by the federal government, including ICE. But that means immigrants can be moved constantly, often without their families even being notified.”
The archival trail is equally unstable. In her own research process, even when she located documentation, it often disappeared upon request. Records from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the predecessor to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, frequently exist only in fragments or in odd places.
“The main index to INS records is a card catalog from the 1950s that’s only viewable on Ancestry.com,” she said. “You look up a subject, request the files and then the archivist tells you half of them don’t exist. They’re just … gone.”
Jail records are often worse. Counties rarely preserve jail logs or correspondence; fires, mishandling and neglect erase what little survives. The effect, Nofil says, is not always obvious suppression, but it is a kind of structural disappearance.
“It’s not always a conspiracy,” she said. “But the result is the same: these histories are incredibly hard to reconstruct.”
Even the records that do survive can be ethically fraught. Nofil has uncovered extensive documentation on the detention of migrant children in the 1980s and 1990s, material she has largely chosen not to publish.
“You have to go through a fairly intensive process to use these records sometimes because there are major concerns about privacy,” she said. “I have records on children’s detention that I mostly didn’t include in the book because I still have big questions about what the responsible way to handle that is. These children could still be in the United States, possibly undocumented. I feel a big responsibility to handle this carefully. Some stories need more time before they can be told safely.”
When teaching these sensitive subjects, Nofil noticed that part of what makes immigration detention so difficult for students to grasp is that the system is newer and legally stranger than many assume.
“People don’t always understand that the entire legal foundation of immigration detention comes from the Chinese exclusion era,” she said.
A pivotal 19th-century U.S. Supreme Court decision in Fong Yue Ting v. United States declared deportation not a punishment, but merely a civil process of returning someone to their country of origin. It was a conclusion steeped in the racism of the era and one that still governs immigration law today.
“That ruling means people in immigration detention don’t have the same due process rights as someone accused of a crime,” Nofil said. “You do not have a right to an attorney, you do not have a right to a trial with a jury and you do not have the right to a trial with a judge as we typically understand it. And yet people are detained for months or years in facilities that look exactly like prisons.”
For Nofil, history forces students to confront a contradiction that has shaped U.S. policy for more than a century.
“It has always made Americans uneasy, even in the 1890s,” she said. “People asked, ‘Is this really justifiable? Is this Christian? Should our community be making money off this?’ Those questions haven’t gone away.”
With so many gaps in the archival record, Nofil’s work focuses as much on recovering agency as recording suffering. She emphasizes that migrants, as well as local communities, have long resisted the expansion of detention.
“There are endless ways that migrants themselves are also resisting,” Nofil said. “In some ways, there are really spectacular forms of resistance, we might say. There are stunning uprisings, hunger strikes and episodes that mobilize embassies and activists. But there are also quieter forms of resistance that run through all of these detention sites. There are ways that migrants are using the courts. There are ways that migrants are challenging the power of local officials.”
Whatever the form, she said, the state always responds. In her research, Nofil tries to balance examining both actions of the state and the people.
“Even while we were telling a story about how powerful the state is and how much money is being made, wherever I could, I would focus on the stories of individuals and focus on the ways that the state is having to respond to the actions and activism of the people inside,” she said.
Nofil has been writing about immigration detention since her senior thesis at Duke University, which means she has watched public attention surge and fade in cycles. The first major national reckoning she witnessed came with family separation during the first Trump administration.
“Suddenly, everyone knew about detention,” she said. “People had moral positions. They wanted to know where it came from.”
But like many issues in immigration policy, that awareness has waned, even though the same system persists under both political parties.
“It’s a deeply bipartisan project,” she said. “The outrage rises and falls.”
When she came out with her book, for example, the timing was quite fortuitous.
“This book came out two weeks before the election,” Nofil said. “So it came out in a moment where people really care about immigration detention again.”
This cycle creates an unusual challenge for historians: researching a system as it evolves in real time, knowing that some threads may only become legible decades from now. For Nofil, it’s about balancing care for the present yet understanding her role to uncover the past.
“Historians can never be totally neutral,” Nofil said. “It’s a sort of failing proposition because we are people, right? We exist. We exist in 2025. We are asking questions that are shaped by the world we live in, the things we think are important to study are personal to us, right? They’re shaped by our own lives, our own identities, but they’re also shaped by the political circumstances of our time.”
While acknowledging how opinions can shape historians’ work, Nofil attempts to be objective.
“However, I do really try to be neutral. I am not an analyst at present. I’m not a political commentator,” she said. “My intellectual project is understanding how this system comes to be and how it evolves, how, again, I think people from both parties feed into it and how we build consensus on the idea that incarceration is justified and normal as a part of immigration law enforcement. So I also try to maintain a balance.”
A few years ago, Nofil provided insight for a court case in which ICE sought permission to destroy records documenting abuse and sexual violence inside detention centers. A coalition of historians and advocates testified that such records were essential to the historical record — they won.
“It means historians decades from now will have at least some evidence of this moment,” she said. “But probably not everything.”
Nofil did not always set out to become a historian. She majored in history and public policy “really randomly,” assuming history would be too impractical. But she found that the discipline let her unite two kinds of thinking: structural analysis and narrative.
“You get to ask, ‘How did these systems come to be? What choices created them?’” she said. “But you also get to recover the stories of people with little power, the people the record barely remembers.”
Her training in public policy, especially the economics she once tried to avoid, unexpectedly reshaped her approach. Financialization — the ways counties and companies profit from detention — became central to her research.
“To understand immigration detention, you have to understand money,” she said. “It’s a story of racism and nativism, but also a story of financialization and profit and how communities turn to this as an economic solution.”
As more scholarship emerges on policing, incarceration and immigration, Nofil now teaches the kinds of courses she once wished existed. Next semester, she will offer a history of policing and incarceration course that draws on the field’s rapid growth.
“Historians are asking questions that reflect our contemporary moment,” she said. “There’s so much new work because we’re reckoning with the fact that the U.S. incarcerates people at a scale unlike anywhere else.”
But teaching this material, especially at a time when immigration and detention remain politically charged, can be complicated.
“It’s hard to balance analyzing this system objectively while living in a moment shaped by it,” she said. “But students deserve to understand where these practices come from and what alternatives were possible.”
Ultimately, Nofil believes that studying immigration detention is about more than documenting a system. It is about confronting the silences embedded in the archives and understanding how they were created. Teaching helps her feel more optimistic about the world around her.
“I feel better about the world when I get to work with William and Mary students,” Nofil said. “It’s a real mixed blessing to have research that is timely because I would not choose for this work to be timely. It is timely because a lot of people are deeply, deeply suffering. But it is nice to feel like the work is being read, and I do think the work has something valuable to contribute in this moment. And I think, and I hope that it is helping people contextualize and understand this system of immigration detention they’re seeing today.”
