Anti-Immigrant Violence as an Extension of Anti-Black Carceral Warfare

My family and I crossed the border when I was five years old. We are from a state located on the Gulf of Mexico with one of the largest Afro-descendant populations in the country. Like millions of others, the entire time I have lived in this country I have been legally, economically, and socially confined to the status of deportable non-citizen. My parents work in the hospitality industry, earning poverty wages. I earned a PhD, and am currently a professor of Black Studies. Our lives would be completely undone if any of us got detained. The threat of state violence is constant.

I am also a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient. Although so-called “Dreamers” are supposedly granted relief from deportation, ICE is now detaining DACA recipients without charges or criminal recordsThe Trump administration has marked us as criminals subject to kidnapping and deportation. Likewise, 70 percent of those detained as of September 2025 have no criminal convictiona continuing trend according to the latest data This absolute power to decide what constitutes a crime and who gets labelled a criminal is derived from the racial dimensions of criminalization and incarceration historically used in the American criminal legal systemPrisons and policing originated as tools to exercise this template of white control over enslaved Black bodies, later refashioned in the post-emancipation invention of vagrancy laws that criminalized Black people and made them available for involuntary labor.

Today, this country is witnessing the detention of immigrants in revolting and unsafe conditions, the denial of due process, and widespread family separation. Masked ICE forces kidnap immigrants off the streets on a daily basis, including “collateral arrests” of anyone in the vicinity suspected of being In recent weeks, hunger and labor strikes have erupted at Delaney Hall, New Jersey, in addition to multiple immigration detention facilities across the country, to protest systematic medical neglect and spoiled food, amongst many other dehumanizing In late September 2025, heavily armed agents in a Black Hawk helicopter stormed an apartment building in a majority-Black neighborhood in They went door to door zip-tying residents, including children according to witnesses. Elsewhere, they have been recorded assaulting people, pointing guns at bystanders, and crashing into vehicles In January, ICE agents fatally shot US citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti during Trump and other officials justified this operation by referring to Somali immigrants as welfare-dependent criminals and other anti-Black

Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and border czar Tom Homan implement this strategy of targeted mass deportations as they openly disparage I am one of those millions targeted for deportation. Top officials describe us as “terrorists,” “invaders,” and spew menacing depictions of the non-white Other. All of this is carried out with approval of a Commander-in-Chief who recently stated that these tactics “haven’t gone far enough”, and who explicitly campaigned on policies aimed at attacking immigrants who he claimed are “poisoning the blood of our country.

The late Assata Shakur powerfully theorized how prisons and policing discipline Black, Indigenous, and other oppressed populations into She explained how they benefit the ruling class and preserve the white supremacist social order by crushing dissent and protecting private Far from creating safety, Assata and others have helped us understand how policing is part of a carceral continuum where the state outright murders us, but also kills us slowly through confinement in intergenerational poverty, predatory housing, and underfunded It is no accident that a country built from stolen bodies on stolen land became a prison state, leading the world in the number of prisoners and military spending.

As Orisanmi Burton has meticulously explained in his book Tip of the Spear, prisons are central to the ordering logic of US white democracy. “Prisons…,” Burton explains, “...are war. They are state strategies of race war, class war, colonization, and Similarly, Assata Shakur wrote: “Prisons are part of this government’s genocidal war against Black and Third World ICE raids and the proliferation of private detention centers can be understood as the latest manifestation of this perpetual carceral war. It is all predicated on decades of repression. In the 1960s, the state waged war against Black Liberation, most infamously through COINTELPRO. In the 1980s, the War on Drugs targeted Black neighborhoods, eviscerated millions of lives, and further entrenched patterns of anti-Black policing. Years later, the War on Terror expanded the state’s carceral reach to target immigrants by further militarizing an already massive repressive apparatus. And today, the Pro-Palestinian protesters regularly attending anti-ICE demonstrations remind us that the domestic carceral apparatus cannot be disentangled from US-supported genocide in Gaza. The use of Israeli spyware by ICE highlights the tightly woven relationship between settler-colonialism and white More of us are beginning to understand this moment as a convergence of anti-Blackness, warfare, and racial capitalism.

It should come as no surprise that the White House has officially activated war-time powers, justifying it as an effort to “protect the American people against invasion.”Congress has funded this war by approving $170 billion to bolster border security and immigration In early June, House Republicans passed a new round of funding that would give ICE and Border Patrol another We are witnessing the multiple functions of carceral warfare in real time. Materially and symbolically dominating a group of racialized Others serves not only to equate freedom and citizenship with whiteness but it makes immigrant bodies available for exploitation, abuse, disappearance, and premature death.

I migrated to this country when Clinton was president. I have been here for more than thirty years. My family and I could lose everything in the blink of an eye. But this moment builds on a trajectory of complicity by powerful actors. It must be made clear that responsibility for this violent eruption is shared by liberals, moderates, and so-called progressives who colluded with, negotiated, and genuflected to the agendas and interests of ruling elites who chose to extend and perpetuate this carceral war. Every single presidential administration since my arrival has perfectly executed the continuation of this carceral buildup. Clinton oversaw the implementation of cuts to welfare and expanded punitive responses to inequality; Bush launched the devastating War on Terror which turbo-charged the prison industrial complex; Obama approved massive budget increases to Homeland Security and earned the moniker “deporter in Biden failed to deliver immigration reform. Trump is therefore building on the massive carceral infrastructure created by his predecessors – detention centers, military gear, private prisons contracts, and so on.

Today, the dominant narrative in the mainstream media is that Democrats represent the polar opposite of MAGA. We are told that Democrats are fighting for an inclusive “nation of immigrants.” But history and the current moment demonstrate that this liberal claim invokes false innocence. It idealizes US empire – masking the historical and ongoing structural violence required to sustain it. Liberals, Harsha Walia explains, take borders and immigration enforcement for granted, thereby reinforcing the very structures harming the communities they supposedly represent. “Racist ethnonationalism and liberal multiculturalism,” Walia observes, “both serve to uphold racial regimes through a social organization of The only winners of this bi-partisan war have been the ultra-wealthy, including Elon Musk—now the world’s first trillionaire—a vehemently anti-government crusader, and ironically, the beneficiary of tax breaks, government contracts, and other forms of corporate welfare The blame for absurd levels of inequality is conveniently fixed upon those of us with the least protections.

The fact that I am not safe as someone who did everything by the book and attained the highest level of education possible speaks to the structuring logic of immigration policy. It is not about how “deserving” you are. It is about how immigration status is used to index whiteness as the only category worthy of human rights. This is clearly evidenced in Trump’s executive order to grant refugee status to white Afrikaners who he claims are being persecuted in South My experience also speaks to the dead-end approach of pushing for immigration reform that only applies to “innocent” migrants like students and victims of abuse. This strategy, favored by liberals, only creates a false dichotomy between “perfect” immigrants and other undocumented people who are equally deserving of respect, safety, and dignity. Moreover, by making the innocent migrant the only legible political subject, this strategy weaponizes reformist immigration policies to reinforce border policing and militarization. In fact, the approval of DACA went hand-in-hand with Obama signing legislation that expanded surveillance along the border and increased the number of border patrol agents. My sister and several other family members were deported under the first and second Obama administrations. I have known this war practically my whole life. It persists, but so do we.

While the use of surplus military gear in local police departments is evidence that the wars abroad come home, Assata’s legacy forces us to recognize that the war has already been here for a long time. ICE assaults, raids, and migrant detention centers are key sites of this carceral war. They create material and ideological borders between citizens seen as deserving of protection (racialized as white) and disposable non-citizens (historically racialized as Black). Although we are definitely living in a time of monsters, it is precisely during times like these when we realize our historical role as shapers of a new world. As Assata put it, “Black revolutionaries do not drop from the moon. We are created by our conditions. Shaped by our oppression. We are being manufactured in droves in the ghetto streets, places like Attica, San Quentin, Bedford Hills, Leavenworth, and Sing Sing. They are turning out thousands of Assata’s vision of Black Liberation is a world without prisons and free of borders. We inherit this vision. Now is the time to put it to practice. “It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to