“Alligator Alcatraz,” as a grotesquely flippant nickname for a Florida incarceration camp, makes light of what will happen to the people there. It’s really an inaccurate comparison as well, since Alcatraz was a max-security prison for America’s most violent, already-convicted criminals. The more accurate comparison would be with Alcatraz’s neighbor in San Francisco Bay, Angel Island, just two miles away. Like Alcatraz, Angel Island is surrounded by cold, shark-infested waters. Unlike Alcatraz, it was, from 1910-1940, a federal immigration station that processed 550,000 travelers to the U.S.

Around 300,000 of these – men, women, and children, predominantly of Chinese origin at first – were herded into crowded rooms and kept under guard for weeks, months, and even years. The inmates were subjected to long, highly detailed, and repeated interrogations through a translator by government officials, who would compare their testimony with that of others, looking for discrepancies. The main purpose of it was to ensure that Asian travelers, especially Chinese ones, could not enter the country. Federal law had banned most Chinese from setting foot in the U.S., beginning in 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act; this was expanded by the 1920s to include all Asians. Unless you were a returning natural-born U.S. citizen, or the spouse or child of one, you were out of luck. It didn’t matter if you were fleeing China’s rampant poverty, the Communist-Nationalist Chinese civil war, or the brutal Imperial Japanese conquest of Eastern China. You had to go back.

Some Chinese travelers with falsified papers got through the screening through carefully memorized, fake family histories. Some with legitimate documents were deported, unable to reunite with husbands and fathers already in the U.S.

Hundreds of poems by Chinese inmates, carved into the walls of the long-defunct facility, are preserved. Here is one, translated, with the image showing the words laid over the carvings:

America has power, but not justice.

In prison, we were victimized as if we were guilty.

Given no opportunity to explain, it was really brutal.

I bow my head in reflection, but there is nothing I can do.

By Chan

Images taken from the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation.