Vehicles leave the Port Isabel Detention Center, which holds detainees of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Los Fresnos, Tex. By Sonia C. Gomez Sonia C. Gomez is a historian of gender and immigration in the 20th century United States, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard University. March 22 at 6:00 AM On Feb.
This death created hardly a ripple in the press, a sign of shifting winds in American immigration policy. Targeting women, particularly of Asian descent, as “public charges” was already commonplace. Its roots were in the Page Law of 1875, which barred contract laborers and prostitutes from “any Oriental country” from entering the United States. The Page Law created a system of immigration control that targeted women’s sexual practices.
But Yamataya refused to give up the fight. She retained legal counsel, who argued that the 1891 Immigration Act was unconstitutional because it had deprived her of due process of law. Her attorney argued that Fisher whose “inspection” of Yamataya and subsequent investigation was “garbled, incomplete, misleading, and in many respects untrue” detained her unlawfully.
In 1994, fears that migrants taking advantage of this provision could dramatically alter the racial and ethnic composition of America spurred the passage of California Proposition 187, dubbed the Save our State initiative, which sought to bar undocumented immigrants from accessing education, welfare and health-care services. This measure targeted migrant women and children, particularly those of Mexican and Central American origins.
Easiest target after children.
GOP War on Women