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In January I watched Nasra Ahmed, a twenty-three-year-old U.S. citizen of Somali heritage, testify about her experience at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents in Minneapolis a few weeks prior, when the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), then under the command of Kristi Noem, ordered a massive raid on the city. Wearing a hijab that partly covered the fresh bandages on her forehead, Ahmed recounted how agents called her the N-word, pinned her to the floor with such force she got a concussion, and shackled her hands and ankles before whisking her off to a detention center, where she would be held for two days without charge. She was only one of many Somali Minnesotans who were terrorized during the raid; even as community organizers led mobilizations to protect their neighborhoods, a host of Somalis reported being afraid to leave their homes, and Black women and girls in hijab described being chased down the streets by border agents.
The siege of Minneapolis, DHS’s largest immigration operation to date, was justified through a crackdown on fraud supposedly linked to Somalis, whom Trump had described as “bandits” and “pirates”—a characterization that reveals much of the new ICE regime’s ideology. Certainly, in his first term, Trump singled out Black immigrants, claiming that Haitians and Africans came from “shithole countries” and passing a series of travel restrictions that targeted African countries so disproportionately that critics dubbed it the “Muslim and African Ban.” But in his second term the administration has doubled down on its rhetoric, turning Africans into the paradigmatic examples of what they deem a civilization-level “crisis” facing Western society. Today, an expanded “Muslim and African Ban” subjects citizens of twenty-six African countries to full or partial visa restrictions on travel to the United States. Meanwhile, Trump is waging a campaign against Black immigrants living within U.S. borders. Bearing the brunt are Haitians and Somalis, denigrated as “low IQ” and “garbage,” a drain on and a threat to the American way of life.
From the seventeenth century onward, an array of laws and practices emerged to police Black mobility domestically and transnationally.
While African so-called criminals have become ICE and DHS’s most visible targets, the agencies have stretched their dragnet across racial and national lines. Under the second Trump administration, immigrants of all backgrounds and legal statuses face unique forms of terror: not just deportations, but growing prohibitions on visas and refugee status, threats of denaturalization, the end of Temporary Protected Status and birthright citizenship, and the removal of detainees to “third countries,” most of which are in Africa. These moves are taking place against the backdrop of a growing chorus of white nationalist calls for “remigration”—the deportation of nonwhite migrants regardless of citizenship—and mass ethnic cleansing, demands that are rapidly becoming normalized in policy across North America and Europe.
It is clear that border regimes—state institutions designated with the sole authority to deport and restrict entry—have today become a central mechanism for white supremacist worldmaking. What set of forces gave rise to these regimes, though, and how did they attain such wide-reaching, brutal strength? There is no shortage of historical antecedents. For the United States, many have noted the links between the Trump administration’s practices and those of Nazi and neo-Nazi movements (as well as, the second administration has made clear, those of apartheid-era South Africa). Others have connected Trump’s approach to border policing to the anti-Mexican crackdowns of the mid-twentieth century, when military-style operations rounded up and deported millions of residents of Mexican origin without due process (including a significant number of U.S. citizens) in the name of stemming an “invasion” of undocumented migrants.
But grasping the full scale and scope of today’s border controls requires us to look at the history of the carceral governance of Black people, a project that started with trans-Atlantic slavery and continued through colonial rule in Africa and the Americas and Jim Crow in the United States (a set of practices, in fact, that would influence the Nazis’ own legal codes). Anti-Black governance alone did not shape border policing, but it is an important, yet often elided, element of border policing’s complex genealogy. And if the crises of our present are inseparable from those of our past, then the efforts to resist ICE’s abuses must be part of a larger political project—one that requires us to move toward abolition, not reform.
For colonial powers in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, writes anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot in Silencing the Past, Black people’s desire for freedom was simply “unthinkable,” even as the liberatory efforts of rebels and revolutionaries in Haiti and the wider Caribbean sent shockwaves through the Atlantic world. The prevailing white supremacist logic held that enslaved people were fundamentally content with their condition—a belief that would help facilitate the forced relocation of over twelve million Africans to the Americas and, to a lesser extent, continental Europe. Yet paradoxically, even though Black people were defined by the condition of transportability—the idea that it was their lot to be moved at will—their independent movement was nonetheless threatening, something to be avoided at all costs.
If mobility was the means through which Black people could attain their freedom, controlling mobility became paramount for those who sought to deny it. From the seventeenth century onward, an array of laws (often specific “slave codes”) and practices emerged to police Black mobility domestically and transnationally. Slaveowners and anxious state officials developed complex legal systems to prevent both marronage (escaping the plantation) and Black rebellion. Despite geopolitical rivalries, the Spanish, French, English, and Dutch frequently made agreements to return lost “property” throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Some of the earliest passports were designed as forms of colonial governance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, used to restrict movement across slave-trading empires. Passports both prevented enslaved Black people from seeking freedom and restricted the migration of free Black people. In the Caribbean, enslaved people were required to have “tickets” signed by the master or his agent that would allow them to move off the plantation. In Curaçao, observes historian Linda M. Rupert, the Dutch West India Company enacted a series of laws between 1710 and 1766 meant to “limit opportunities for maritime marronage,” including “a standardised passport system for all people of African descent.”
States also wielded the power to send people away at will: the power to deport was a transnational form of colonial governance used to protect the institution of slavery, punish or deter Black rebellion, and shore up white nativism. As early as 1596, Queen Elizabeth I enacted what historian Emily Bartels calls the first race-based deportation in modern Britain: casting both enslaved Black people and servants as “infidels,” the queen had a number of them deported after expressing alarm at the growing numbers of “divers blackamoores brought into this realme, of which kinde of people there are already here to manie.” Later deportations took aim at Black people believed to hold dangerous visions of racial equality. In mid-eighteenth-century France, where the Black population never surpassed 0.025 percent of the overall population, enslaved Black people were seen as a threat as they took up ideas of independence. The 1777 Déclaration pour la police des noirs, France’s first domestic legislation based entirely on race, required all Black residents, free or enslaved, “to register with the office of the Admiralty” and led to the first wave of deportations of African residents, which increased in the next decade. The legislation also established port-side depots—essentially prison camps—where those enslaved by traveling colonists were held until they could be sent back to the colonies.
Government-mandated removals under the Fugitive Slave Act created “the first systematic international deportation regime in the United States.”
In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jamaica, the British, despite their superior military force, could not defeat and re-enslave the thousands of Maroons who had escaped slavery and created their own semi-autonomous communities. In a series of battles known as the Maroon Wars, British forces found themselves frequently outmaneuvered. Maroons often led incursions into plantations, where they liberated slaves held in forts and barracks through guerrilla warfare. At the close of the second Maroon War, rather than continue to grant them land and other concessions derived from the previous war, the British passed a law to remove Maroons from the island and permanently bar them from returning, deporting almost 600 of them to Nova Scotia, Canada, in 1796.
A similar effort was undertaken by the French government, which in 1802 hatched a (failed) plan to deport Black revolutionaries from Haiti and replace them with a “docile” population of newly arrived enslaved Africans. In Upper Canada, the government passed an 1833 law meant to control the migration of Black runaways from the United States that enabled the extradition of “fugitive offenders”; those found guilty of “murder, forgery, larceny,” or other crimes could be arrested, detained, and returned to their U.S. masters. In practice, the legislation endangered all freedom seekers and criminalized many Black escapees—fleeing often required the theft of horses and clothing, and slaveowners also regularly mounted false charges.
In the antebellum United States, a historical period otherwise defined by relatively open borders, deportation remained a key mode of disciplining Black people’s movement. In 1793, whites in Charleston, South Carolina, panicked that the arrival of Black people from Ayiti (then called St. Domingue) at the start of the Haitian Revolution would lead to insurrection, issued an order requiring all free Black people who had arrived from anywhere in the past twelve months to depart within ten days. Following Nat Turner’s Rebellion in 1831, the state of Maryland created a “government sponsored, well-organized deportation plan” for all emancipated slaves and free Black people; those who chose not to leave had to make a court appeal, which, if they lost, would result in forcible removal from the state.
In the following years, as slavery’s end loomed, deportation was used as punishment for Black people who dared to believe themselves free. Many Southern slave states took to removing both enslaved and free Black folks, while other states, like Virginia, ruled that all Black people living in their borders could be “transported and banished beyond the limits of the United States” following their incarceration. Forced removal was entrenched as a national practice with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which mandated the transport of Black people merely suspected of having run away from their enslavers back to forced servitude in slave states. As migration scholar Daniel Kanstroom explains in Deportation Nation (2007), because of some legislators’ concerns about the abuse of the law to punish free Black people as well as the enslaved, its final form required the involvement of the federal government to enforce legal standards for the protection of deportees’ rights and due process. Such protections, it turned out, were so flimsy as to be largely nonexistent—the increased national scope only made the new system more efficient. Black folks across the North were now permanently vulnerable to being hunted, kidnapped, and forced into bondage by both private slave catchers and federal officials. “In effect,” Kanstroom writes, these government-mandated removals created “the first systematic international deportation regime in the United States.” (Of course, Indigenous dispossession also played a vital role in establishing the state’s power to deport: both slave laws and the Indian Removal Act of 1830, Kanstroom notes, were legal and conceptual antecedents to the federalization of immigration law in the late nineteenth century.)
Just as deportation practices took shape along racial lines in the Atlantic world, so too did entry bans. In the United States, news of slave rebellions in the Caribbean—particularly the fervor of the Haitian Revolution—led to fears of slave insurrections at home. Even though most slave rebellions in the United States were local in character, states began to pass laws barring Black people’s entry into a number of states, including South Carolina, Virginia, and New Jersey. Among these regulations were the Negro Seamen Acts,first passed in South Carolina in 1802 before spreading to other coastal slave states, which aimed to prevent “foreign negroes” from “infecting” the domestic slave population with visions of liberation by incarcerating both free and enslaved Black people arriving on sea vessels for the duration of the vessels’ stay. The federal government supported these state laws by way of an 1803 statute banning the entry of foreign-born free Black folks into states that prohibited their entry, with “foreign” constituting those born outside the country or outside the state.
In the following decades, more and more states, fearing the contagion of ideas of Black freedom, began to implement entry restrictions. Florida (1832), Texas (1836), and Oregon (1844) all passed bans on the basis that “vagabond negroes” introduced “disobedience into the brain of the honest and contented slave.” In some Southern states, Black people entering from Northern states were made “foreigners” under the law and imprisoned or enslaved. Alabama allowed “any person to seize and make a slave for life” any Black migrant living illegally in the state. In Mississippi, free Black migrants who failed to leave the state when instructed could be sold at auction. And both Kentucky and Tennessee doled out lengthy prison sentences to Black migrants deemed to have entered illegally.
As abolition became increasingly inevitable in the nineteenth century, deportation and entry bans became solutions to a different problem: that of a free Black population in nations ostensibly governed according to equality. White nativists believed that the looming prospect of multiracial democracy, with Black people living freely among whites with equal rights, was simply untenable. (It’s impossible not to see overlaps here with MAGA’s claims that immigrants from Africa and Asia are “poisoning the blood” of white America.) And if freeBlack people were unassimilable contaminants, a permanent economic burden and yet also a threat to the white worker, the best thing to do was simply to send them away.
By the time border regimes became a function of the modern state in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the tools first used to govern Black mobility had become mapped onto increasingly larger segments of the population and codified into law. Built into the new immigration systems’ very architecture, they could now be used to manage whole swaths of migrants deemed undesirable. The first groups to fall under the purview of that new regime were Chinese and Mexican populations. The Chinese Exclusion laws of the 1880s, for instance, a nativist response to Chinese migration that became foundational to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century deportation law, were rationalized in part through what Kanstroom calls the “conceptual matrices” of previous Black removal schemes and fugitive slave laws.In the early twentieth century, federal immigration laws took on an explicitly white supremacist cast. In the United States, the techniques of anti-Black entry restrictions echoed powerfully through the “national origin” quotas of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Immigration Act, which barred or heavily restricted the immigration of those deemed undesirable (Africans, Asians, and Caribbean people of African descent). In Canada, the head taxes used to restrict Chinese migration in 1885 and 1923 had originally been proposed (though not taken up) as a means to deter the migration of Black Americans to Ontario decades earlier. Anti-Black governance practices traveled: literacy tests, first used to disenfranchise Black voters in Mississippi in 1890, were later used to prevent nonwhite migration in the United States, then South Africa, and other British colonies.
So many Haitians were placed in detention that the Reagan administration acknowledged the situation “could create an appearance of ‘concentration camps’ filled largely by blacks.”
As imperialist expansion and environmental devastation push more and more from their homes, deportation infrastructure has expanded across the Western world, with the border continuing to be a site of violence. Deportees of all backgrounds have been routinely shackled and transported in chains from the United States and UK. Across North America and Europe, asylum-seekers have launched hunger strikes in protest of their inhumane conditions. Those in detention centers have reported being subject to racial slurs, physical and sexual assault, nonconsensual hysterectomies, and forced sterilization. Many lack access to health care, legal supports, and clean food and water. Asylum-seekers routinely describe their experiences in Western detention centers as “torture.” This stands to worsen globally: Canada and the UK have committed to dramatically ramping up deportations while closing routes to asylum, and this February, the EU passed legislation allowing for the deportation of migrants to third states in the Global South.Deportations and entry bans, now as then, serve to assuage white fears, functioning as what Frederick Douglass once called “a safety valve . . . for white racism.” In 1869, writing in the face of a wave of anti-Chinese immigration measures and sentiment, Douglass began to sketch out an alternative, one that opposed both racially targeted immigration provisions and the forced removals of those already in the country:
I want a home here not only for the negro, the mulatto and the Latin races; but I want the Asiatic to find a home here in the United States, and feel at home here, both for his sake and for ours. Right wrongs no man. If respect is had to majorities, the fact that only one fifth of the population of the globe is white, the other four fifths are colored, ought to have some weight and influence in disposing of this and similar questions. It would be a sad reflection upon the laws of nature and upon the idea of justice, to say nothing of a common Creator, if four fifths of mankind were deprived of the rights of migration to make room for the one fifth.
Douglass and his fellow abolitionists saw their project as a rejection of the idea of Black transportability, insisting that freedom of movement was a human inheritance that belonged to all. Today as border policing extends the state’s power to inflict racial violence, abolitionism must reject the denial of that freedom wherever it takes place—from policing and incarceration to forced removal, immigration detention, and entry bans—with a firm insistence that no one be ripped from their community.Independent and nonprofit, Boston Review relies on reader funding. To support work like this, please donate here.
The post Hunted and Banned appeared first on Boston Review.
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