Location: Mergenthaler 431

Join the Chloe Center for an exciting new book discussion, featuring Brianna Nofil (William & Mary College), author of The Migrant’s Jail. Nofil examines how a century of political, ideological, and economic exchange between the U.S. immigration bureaucracy and the criminal justice system gave rise to the world’s largest system of migrant incarceration. Migrant detention is not simply an outgrowth of mass incarceration; rather, it has propelled carceral state–building and fostered intergovernmental policing efforts since the turn of the twentieth century.

Copies of The Migrant’s Jail will be available in advance to students who RSVP by 10/29. Prof. Nofil will also be available for meetings with graduate and undergraduate students before the event. Register at the RSVP link.

Brianna Nofil is a historian of the modern United States, with a focus on migration, incarceration, and law. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her first book, The Migrant’s Jail: An American History of Mass Incarceration, was published by Princeton University Press in 2024. The Migrant’s Jail demonstrates how a century of political, economic, and ideological exchange between the immigration bureaucracy and the criminal justice system gave rise to the U.S.’ vast immigration detention system, and how the federal government relied on sheriffs, police, and local governments to make mass deportations possible. 

The Migrant’s Jail has received multiple prizes including the Frederick Jackson Turner Award and the Ellis Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians, and the First Book Prize and the Theodore Saloutos Book Award from the Immigration & Ethnic History Society.

Her work has also been featured in publications including the New Yorker, El País, The Financial Times, The Independent, and The Marshall Project, and has been covered on NPR.

This event is open to JHU undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff.
Refreshments provided