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Background

Brianna Nofil is a historian of the modern United States, with a focus on migration, incarceration, and law; she is the Provost’s Distinguished Associate Professor for 2025-2026. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University. Her first book, , was published by Princeton University Press in 2024. The Migrant's Jail demonstrates how a century of political, economic, and ideological exchange between the immigration bureaucracy and the criminal justice system gave rise to the U.S.’ vast immigration detention system, and how the federal government relied on sheriffs, police, and local governments to make mass deportations possible. 

 The Migrant’s Jail has received the Frederick Jackson Turner Award and the Ellis Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historians, and the First Book Prize and the Theodore Saloutos Book Award from the Immigration & Ethnic History Society. It was a finalist for the Order of the Coif Award and the Center for Presidential History Book Prize.

 Brianna regularly speaks with reporters and lawyers on topics related to immigration law enforcement. Her work has been featured in publications including the New Yorker, El País, The Financial Times, The Independent, The Marshall Project, and Vox, and has been covered on . Her public-facing writing on immigration detention can be found . She is currently working on projects about the history of ICE and the evolution of immigration raids over the 20th century, as well as essays on the immigration service’s data sharing practices and rural Louisiana as a laboratory for mass deportations.