Before the station opened in 1910, immigrants coming from the Pacific were housed in unsanitary facilities located at the Pacific Mail Steamship Company docks on the San Francisco waterfront. Angel Island was conceived as an ideal location for detention barracks due to its isolation from the mainland. Amid President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, a new exhibit about the U.S.-Mexico border’s “virtual wall” comes to Angel Island, where detained asylum seekers were processed in the 1900s. (Marisol Medina-Cadena/KQED)
As the Trump administration cracks down on immigration, a new exhibit on Angel Island in the San Francisco Bay draws attention to the “virtual wall” that already looms over the U.S.–Mexico border — and the island’s past as a piece of exclusionary American immigration policy.
In the early 1900s, the Angel Island Immigration Museum was the site of a hospital and processing station for detained asylum seekers, most of them from China or other parts of Asia. Now, posters set out in the airy building display the blimp-like cameras and tall towers that surveil zones on the U.S.’s southern border.
Border communities are keenly aware of the license plate readers that can track their cars and the cameras that can peer into their backyards or at the jungle gyms where their kids play, according to Matthew Guariglia, a senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which installed the Angel Island State Park exhibit.
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The exhibit, which opens Wednesday, “provides a kind of border surveillance 101” for others who might not be aware of the privacy-impeding technology already creating a barrier between the U.S. and its southern neighbor, Guariglia told KQED. “How much surveillance infrastructure there really is on the U.S.–Mexico border, what technology there is, and how it’s being used.”
For the past few years, the EFF has been conducting research along the southern border, identifying where surveillance equipment is and the ways that it can be disguised — like the seismic trail sensors that track movement and often look like rocks or litter scattered throughout the desert.
A visitor observes the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s new exhibit at Angel Island State Park, “Border Surveillance: Places, People and Technology,” the first of its kind in a California State Park. Open through late May, the display examines the U.S. government’s “virtual wall” along the U.S.-Mexico border and its impact on civil rights. (Courtesy of Electronic Frontier Foundation)
Angel Island felt like the perfect place to debut the work the team has done so far because, according to Guariglia, it is a past “product of Chinese exclusion.”
“Here we had right in our own backyard a kind of encapsulation of how the government throws its power around on some of the most vulnerable people there are, which are immigrants,” he said.
“From the time that Angel Island served as an immigration station from 1910 to 1940, where the majority of the immigrants detained and processed there were of Asian immigrant heritage, there have also been concurrent efforts along the southern border,” said Ed Tepporn, the executive director of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation.
Tepporn said that the museum on the island now serves as an educational site for Americans who don’t know as much as they should about the Chinese Exclusion Act — and subsequent expansion of exclusionary efforts to other Asian and Pacific Islander nations.
“They’re not just the things that happened to people from a long time ago, but unfortunately, the same detention, exclusion, racism and xenophobia that immigrants who were held and detained at Angel Island experienced over a hundred years ago in many ways is happening to specific immigrant communities today,” he told KQED.
The exhibit opens as the Trump administration has promised in its first months to carry out mass deportations of illegal immigrants and attempts to narrow legal pathways into the U.S. But the exhibit, and the surveillance it shows, has been in the works for much longer, according to Guariglia.
“Now, this is more important than ever, but really, it kind of doesn’t matter who’s been in office,” he said. “Administrations from both [U.S. political] parties have really kind of increased spending on government surveillance infrastructure at the U.S.–Mexico border over the last 20 years.”
The U.S.-Mexico border wall runs west between the eastern outskirts of Tijuana and the Otay Mountain Wilderness on Sept. 16, 2024. (Zoë Meyers for KQED)
That spans the terms of Democrats Barack Obama, who was infamously labeled the “deporter in chief” by immigrant rights groups, and Joe Biden, whose administration attempted to crack down on the southern border during his — and Kamala Harris’ — campaigns last year.
Guariglia said that since finalizing the exhibit, the EFF has turned to examining legal and policy strategies to combat the “intense” surveillance happening in border towns. In the meantime, he and Tepporn hope more people become cognizant of the U.S.’s presence there.
“Visitors have a chance to reflect on how these histories connect to their own families or their own communities’ experiences and perhaps to imagine together a future that is filled with more welcome and more belonging,” Tepporn told KQED.
After the tenancy at Angel Island, the EFF hopes to display its research across the country, potentially moving to Southern California next.
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