The Copper Queen Mine helped make Bisbee, Arizona, one of America’s major copper-producing towns, with Phelps Dodge exercising enormous economic influence over the community. During a 1917 labor dispute, more than a thousand striking miners and supporters — many of them immigrants — were rounded up by an armed posse, loaded into railroad cars and deported into the New Mexico desert. Known as the Bisbee Deportation, the event remains one of the most extraordinary episodes in American labor history.

I went to Bisbee in 2018 while photographing the border wall in Nogales, where I had been photographing families reaching through the barrier to touch one another. Bisbee was a side trip. Learning about the 1917 deportation of striking miners turned the old mine from a tourist attraction into another chapter in the long American argument over immigrants, labor and who can be expelled.