The U.S. Immigration Station on Angel Island opened in 1910 and, over the next thirty years, processed nearly a million people from more than eighty countries, but unlike Ellis Island it was used largely to exclude immigrants, especially those from China. Most arrivals were processed quickly aboard their ships, and some European and Japanese immigrants were held only a few days, while some Chinese immigrants also moved on quickly but many were detained for several months. During detention, families were separated, women and children sometimes could walk around, men were crowded into barracks or a small fenced area, and conditions were unsafe and unsanitary. Some detainees wrote poems of sorrow, anger, and hope on the walls. This experience grew out of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which barred most Chinese immigrants and led some people to use false papers as “paper sons and daughters” claiming kinship with U.S. citizens; the law remained until its repeal during World War II, when the United States and China became allies. Repeated fire-safety complaints were recorded before the administration building burned in 1940, and the detainees’ poems were nearly lost in the 1970s before their rediscovery helped save the building and its inscriptions.