The Rise of the American Deportation State

Episode 371
with Emily Pope-Obedahosted by Chris Gratien
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In recent decades, the US has come to deport hundreds of thousands of people every year. However, the roots of the laws and institutions that facilitate deportation are much deeper. In this episode, we focus on the period of the 1920s, the era during which the US began to deport thousands of people for the first time in its history. As our guest Emily Pope-Obeda explains, deportation involved the coordination of various levels of the state and reflected social anxieties about morality, poverty, sexuality, and race during a period of insularity and anti-immigrant sentiment in American history.

This episode is recorded in conjunction with our investigative series entitled Deporting Ottoman Americans.
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