In 2013, the United States detained approximately 400,000 people in immigration custody in a network of 250 local, federal, and private jails across the country as they awaited deportation or release, at a cost of over $1.7 billion. This dissertation situates the rise of the current U.S. immigration detention system in the early 1980s within the broader context of Ronald Reagan's Cold War foreign policies and growing public xenophobia after the Vietnam War. When President Reagan entered office, he sought new ways to curtail a perceived "mass immigration emergency" caused by an increasing flow of Cubans, Haitians, and Central Americans to the United States. As the American public continued to express "compassion fatigue" towards new migrant populations, the Reagan Administration established a new security state that included the building of immigrant detention centers throughout the United States, Puerto Rico, and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba; the interdiction of migrants on the high seas; heightened border security under the "War on Drugs"; and the first uses of private prison contracting. This work traces the narratives surrounding these new enforcement measures by using Reagan Administration files, media portrayals of migrant groups, and evidence of community and public support for and against the practice of immigration detention in order to demonstrate how an ongoing fear of future mass migrations continued to justify more permanent structures of immigration detention--trends that persist to the current day.

Introduction: The increasing incidence of Neisseria gonorrhoeae infections and emergence of cephalosporin-resistant strains means the threat of disseminated gonococcal infection and endocarditis needs to be reimagined into the differential diagnosis for patients treated in the emergency department (ED) for sexually transmitted infections and for endocarditis itself. Only 70 cases of disseminated gonococcal infection (DGI) with endocarditis had been reported through 2014.1-4 In 2019, however, an outbreak of DGI with one case of endocarditis was reported.5 This case series of three patients with DGI and endocarditis, in addition to the recent outbreak, may represent a warning sign for reemergence of this threat.

Case Report: We describe three cases within a recent three-year period of gonococcal endocarditis as seen and treated at our institution. These cases show divergent presentations of this insidious disease with both classical and atypical features. One case displayed a classic migratory rash with positive urine testing and a remote history of sexually transmitted infections, while another patient developed isolated culture-confirmed endocarditis with negative cervical testing and imaging, and the final case was a male patient who presented to the ED with fulminant endocarditis as the first ED presentation of infection.

Conclusion: Secondary to an overall rise in incidence and possibly due to increasing antibiotic- resistance patterns, gonococcal endocarditis should be included in the differential diagnosis of any case of endocarditis. Reciprocally, increased vigilance should surround the evaluation of any patient for sexually transmitted diseases while in the ED for both the development of DGI and endocarditis.

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We report microscopic mechanisms for an unusual magnetization reversal behavior in Co/Pt multilayers where some of the first-order reversal curves protrude outside of the major loop. Transmission x-ray microscopy reveals a fragmented stripe domain topography when the magnetic field is reversed prior to saturation, in contrast to an interconnected pattern when reversing from a saturated state. The different domain nucleation and propagation behaviors are due to unannihilated domains from the prior field sweep. These residual domains contribute to random dipole fields that impede the subsequent domain growth and prevent domains from growing as closely together as for the interconnected pattern.

Magnetometry and neutron scattering have been used to study the magnetic properties of pressure-graded Co/Pd multilayers. The grading of the multilayer structure was done by varying the deposition pressure during sputtering of the samples. Magnetic depth profiling by polarized neutron reflectometry directly shows that for pressure-graded samples, the magnetization changes significantly from one pressure region to the next, while control samples sputtered at uniform pressure exhibit essentially uniform magnetic depth profiles. Complementary magnetometry results suggest that the observed graded magnetic profiles are due in part to a decrease in saturation magnetization for regions deposited at progressively higher pressure. Increased deposition pressure is shown to increase coercivity, and for graded samples, the absence of discrete steps in the hysteresis loops implies exchange coupling among regions deposited at different pressures.