How can a self-proclaimed nation of immigrants,’ asks Brianna Nofil, the author of The Migrant’s Jail, ‘also be a place that imprisons tens of thousands of immigrants, exiles, and refugees?’ In answering that question, Nofil, an assistant professor of history at William and Mary, researches the history of the crucial role of local county jails and their widespread deployment by the federal government to build the largest migrant detention and deportation system in the world. Incarceration was the prelude to deportation.