Detention pen at the Ellis Island immigration station, New York, 1902
Courtesy U.S. National Library of Medicine
Steerage passengers who failed medical inspection were held in quarantine before either being deported or allowed to continue on their journeys. Steerage passengers were usually poor and from immigrant groups seen as racially distinctive, such as Italians and Jews.
The Ellis Island quarantine facility was designed to hold 1,800 detainees, but was usually at several hundred over capacity. Overcrowding increased the possibility that contagious disease would spread among detainees.
