In The Lies They Told, eugenics appears as a close, destructive force rather than a distant idea. Officials present it as scientific progress and social hygiene, yet it becomes a state-backed weapon used against immigrants and marginalized citizens. Through the experiences of the Conti and Wolfe families, the novel shows how this ideology reduces people to supposed genetic flaws. Government offices use it to police borders, justify social cleansing, and undermine personal autonomy and family stability. The novel reveals how words such as purity and fitness function as bureaucratic language that masks cruelty.

Ellis Island reveals this dehumanizing power first. Immigration officers make quick, arbitrary judgments that determine whether an immigrant can stay. Fourteen-year-old Enzo Conti tries to answer confusing questions and receives the label “feebleminded” from an officer (19). That single claim blocks his entry into the United States and sends him back across the ocean. Another officer explains the process by saying that “the only way to keep America pure is by checking immigrants for poor stock” (19). In this moment, eugenics functions as an official gatekeeping system, and Enzo shifts in the officers’ eyes from a boy with a future to a perceived genetic threat. His family breaks apart because of that designation.

The novel then shows how similar judgments fall on American citizens. Penelope Rodgers, a field worker from the Eugenics Records Office, visits the mountain community and describes its residents as a “lost tribe” of “mongrel descendants” who are “mentally defective and feebleminded” (173). Her language, which pathologizes the entire group, repeats the same logic used at Ellis Island. Silas Wolfe later explains that government agents have studied the families in the area and called them “backward, inbred, uneducated hillbillies” (165) to justify taking their land for a national park. Eugenics becomes the framework officials use to remove long-established communities by redefining them as a hereditary liability.

This ideology reaches its most invasive point when the state claims authority over Lena’s body. After others accuse her of promiscuity and immorality without evidence, officials send her to the Virginia State Colony. Dr. Bell and a review board label her “feebleminded,” cite a supposed “mental age of nine years,” and describe her as a “probable potential parent of socially inadequate offspring” (299-300). They give her an impossible choice between lifelong confinement and sterilization. Through this decision, the state moves from classification to biological control, asserting the power to determine who may reproduce. The novel traces a consistent pattern: The state begins by labeling individuals and ends by restricting their ability to create a future, completing their dehumanization.