This article was originally published by the Texas Observer, a nonprofit investigative news outlet and magazine. Sign up for their weekly newsletter, or follow them on Facebook and X. In 1926, the Galveston League of Women Voters wrote to their U.S. senator to express concern over the “dreadful conditions which exist in regard to the detention of deportees in this part of the world.” The women referred to the Galveston County Jail — a squalid, perpetually louse-infested local lockup that received federal money for each migrant they held.