"Elegantly written and amasses a monumental amount of research. . . . Ethan Blue’s book urges immigration activists and scholars to continue to embrace an abolitionist framework, tracing and disrupting the way that the immigration- and border-industrial complex are interwoven with and integral to the US settler-colonial, carceral state."—Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books
"A valuable contribution to several growing fields. . . . Blue uncovers…the underlying vision of this “deportation regime” and its evolving historical entanglement with race and ethnicity in the era of U.S. immigration restriction."—California History
"The Deportation Express presents a compelling and interesting history of American immigration enforcement. . . . a critical addition to many fields of inquiry including American history and studies as well as immigration studies."—Society for U.S. Intellectual History
"Ethan Blue’s Deportation Express helps us to understand the role the railroad played in deporting thousands of migrants."—Reviews in American History
"Exciting and original, this book is a significant contribution at the forefront of US history and immigration history. It examines the displacement and erasure of people of color in the nation-building project of white Americans beyond the colonial period. Using never-before-seen immigration officials' communications and correspondence, the memoirs of a physician hired on the deportation trains, employee records, train itineraries, and passenger lists, this book even opens up the experience of deportees as well as those of the middle managers and agents who made the state real."—Torrie Hester, author of
Deportation: The Origins of U.S. Policy "This sprawling, beautifully written, and copiously researched book illuminates the experience of deportation across space and time. Organized into two cross-continental train journeys, Blue's account synthesizes world histories of revolution and economic exigency with the evolution of the deportation process. Important scholarship and great reading!"—Rachel Ida Buff, author of
Immigration and the Political Economy of Home "This book describes one of the first—but little known—steps taken by the federal government to systematize the deportation of immigrants who violated the rules governing their lives and work in the United States. This first step illustrates how and on what grounds the criminalization and incarceration of immigrants began. I know of no other competing works. This is, I believe, the first study of deportation trains, and it's very important and original as such."—Donna Gabaccia, coauthor of
Gender and International Migration: From the Slavery Era to the Global Age
"The Deportation Express is one of the best books on the history of migration I have ever read. It is fascinating, powerful, important, and highly original. Examining more than the history of deportation, Ethan Blue uses the device of the deportation train's stops on its circular route around the United States to get at the history of race, state formation, immigration, citizenship, and sexuality in the Progressive Era."—Cindy Hahamovitch, author of
No Man's Land: Jamaican Guestworkers in America and the Global History of Deportable Labor "A harrowing chronicle of the rise of the US deportation machine fired by Pullman car prison trains and telegraph wires that braided the continent, revealing the intimate distress of migrants from across the globe who sought to remain but instead were rounded up and expelled." –– Nayan Shah, author of
Refusal to Eat,
Stranger Intimacy, and
Contagious Divides "This evocative story of deportation trains and some of the nearly one million people forced to board them in the early twentieth century provides a detailed account of the importance of the railroad for the emergence of the United States as a key player in the global capitalist economy. The insights gleaned from these analyses will be useful to all students and scholars of racial capitalism, settler colonialism, and global migration." –– Tanya Golash-Boza, author of
Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor, and Global Capitalism "Ethan Blue reveals how deportation infrastructures, especially the train, enabled the conjoined growth and consolidation of the deportation state and carceral state, knitting together different scales of government and connecting vast spatial expanses. As it follows the tendrils of movement and social control,
The Deportation Express brings forward the histories of the state and corporate agents who made deportations possible and the immigrants ensnared in the trains' cages and deemed undesirable for their race, political beliefs, poverty, neurodiversity, disability, and more. A stirring achievement that should be required reading." ––A. Naomi Paik, author of
Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary and
Rightlessness
