Creating the Mechanisms of Expulsion at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

This chapter shows how citizens, immigration authorities, and legislators created and institutionalized the deportation machine's interrelated expulsion mechanisms during the 1900s. It discusses how the deportation machine did not always run efficiently or coherently and how immigrants' active resistance to deportation or officials' executive decisions to halt removals caused breakdowns. It also mentions the new means of expulsion that expanded the fledgling immigration service's authority and instilled low-level and high-level bureaucrats with the power to shape ideas about what it meant to be American. The chapter tries to confirm how far immigration officials' authority extend and whether their considerable discretionary power allow them to act autonomously. It also talks about how immigration officials cared most about maximizing the number of expulsions and how it was done was only of secondary importance.