To understand the violence of contemporary immigration enforcement, one must trace its lineage directly to the antebellum slave patrols — a system founded on racial terror and complete state control.
The Trump regime’s anti-immigrant program is being carried out by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), and local police in cities like Minneapolis, Austin, and New Orleans, among others. Many of the people recruited by these agencies today are members of the white supremacist militias who were involved in the January 6 attempted insurrection and were later pardoned, who have been deputized en masse by these agencies, that relaxed or eliminated application and acceptance requirements to grow their battalion of race warriors swiftly.
Supporters of these enforcement actions insist they are merely enforcing the law, and dismiss the kidnapped and warehoused individuals as criminals for being "illegally" in the country, for resisting detention, or for trying to disrupt or evade apprehension, regardless of their age, or medical condition, or the location they were abducted from, such as a courthouse at their legal immigration hearing. And many, including children as young as 5, have been detained or deported in violation of court orders prohibiting both. Even when these raids have resulted in the violent death of potential detainees or community members trying to protect others, a significant portion of the MAGA base and nativist forces within even marginalized communities remain steadfast in their support. Although the public execution of Alex Pretti by immigration officials has angered many 2nd Amendment adherents, including the NRA, in the MAGA base to the point that they are calling for a full and independent investigation into it, the rest of Trump’s supporters not only blame the victims for their own deaths but mock them, claiming they deserved to die for not being perfectly and unquestioningly obedient to law enforcement at all times, despite not knowing if they are really legitimate law enforcement officials as they hide their identities as they carry out orders that are far short of allegedly “settled” Constitutional law.
While this seemingly sudden hypocrisy of the MAGA movement specifically, and many others who oppose open or even liberal or moderate immigration policies, shocks many, the reality is that, despite efforts to disconnect the present from the past, there are profound, significant, and thoroughly documented historical and ideological links between slave patrols, modern policing, and DHS/ICE/CBP. If we really knew the history of this country, little of what is happening today would surprise us.
For the nearly 250 years of legalized chattel slavery in the U.S., slave patrols were the first formalized system of law enforcement in much of the South. Mandated to serve as a mechanism of control of enslaved and free Africans, slave patrols existed to protect the economic system and super profits that slavery produced.
Slave patrols operated in the same void between legality and morality that slavery itself existed in, facilitated by established law while also being deeply immoral and grossly inhumane, they enforced the legal but morally reprehensible statutes that severely limited the autonomy, movement, assembly, and education of enslaved people. And, like today’s anti-immigration offensive, they enforced those morally dubious laws in the most violent and morally repugnant ways possible because the focus was not on upholding the law, but legitimizing the racist social hierarchy.
Slave patrols roamed the Southern roads around plantations and where enslaved and free Africans lived (in some cities, the enslaved in urban areas lived in a separate, segregated area rather than on a land-intensive plantation) all day and at night, looking for Black people to stop and demand papers from. These papers proved the free status or the permission to travel of free and enslaved Africans. They broke into and raided free Africans’ homes, stopped Black people on the street in any context and location, and were legally expected to immediately and violently punish those found without papers. But slave patrollers were also known to reject, steal, or destroy papers that were supposed to keep free people from being re-enslaved, and enslaved people from being accused of escaping and being either sold back into slavery for the profit of the slave catcher, or severely punished as a runaway.
The practice of surveilling, over-policing, randomly stopping, and demanding documentation of Black and Brown people suspected of alleged criminality is not a unique feature of modern policing. These are the tactics established by the slave patrols that shape all aspects of policing today.
When the abolition of slavery led to the formal disbanding of slave patrols, their functions and personnel did not vanish. Their mandate to control the enslaved African population evolved as Black Codes, and then Jim Crow laws, established a new system of economic exploitation to replace slavery across the former Confederacy. The post-Civil War police forces in the South enforced these new forms of racialized control over Black labor and movement to protect the property and profits of capitalists still making money off of their exploitation, to provide ideological comfort to white workers–mainly the descendants of poor European immigrants themselves–that their place in the capitalist system was protected from competition with Black workers, and putting clear boundaries on the realization of full citizenship rights for Black people that the 14th Amendment may have held promise for.
Vagrancy laws came to this country with the colonists from English common law, and were used to control the poor, beggars, and those deemed "idle" through the criminalization of their poverty. These laws were applied in the same way in the colonies and then in the expanded United States, criminalizing the poor and destitute. Prohibitions on loitering—wandering around without any apparent lawful purpose—were a part of the program of poverty or “idleness” as a criminal offense, were also enforced against the economically excluded, which led to vaguely worded vagrancy, loitering, and suspicious persons laws that targeted people considered objectionable or “out of place” in some way, rather than any particular conduct. But criminalizing poverty only produced more opportunities for private enterprise to profit off of the punishment of the poor for being poor, which has always been a feature of designating behavior that is not violent, anti-social, or destructive to others in a capitalist society a “crime.”This is similar to the modern private prison corporations that realize massive profits through mass incarceration of working-class and poor Africans who are their primary targets, but also folds in Indigenous Americans, and migrants from imperialism from mostly Global South countries in the U.S. today. Capitalism continues the exploitation that creates the poverty that millions are denied the ability to escape, and imperialism continues to destroy the home countries of people who are forced to leave for their survival, only to be thrown into for-profit concentration camps in the U.S. or one of its vassal countries, like El Salvador and its massive CECOT facility, willing to profit from the gambit as well.
The core historical directive of policing has consistently been the defense of capital, land, and economic status through the brutal control of the working class, poor, and racialized and other marginalized among them, not the universal protection and service of the community. Tactics like racial profiling, "broken windows" policing, excessive and pervasive surveillance, and the disproportionate use of excessive force and extrajudicial executions that are rarely punished are all deployed to maintain the physical and social segregation today that was initially enforced by slave patrols, plantation militias, and the deputization of white citizens to police the enslaved.
But these were not merely unofficial or accepted practices carried out by racist white, local, or state authorities. Racist and oppressive policing is backed by legal and judicial precedent that is itself foundational in its justification of racial discrimination to facilitate economic exploitation.
Supreme Court decisions like Dred Scottv. Sandford that denied Black people citizenship and gave opportunity to Chief Justice Taney to declare that white men had no obligation to observe any rights for Black people, and Plessy v. Ferguson that established “separate but equal” as a legitimate social structure even though the separate was never equal, and state and local ordinances that limited access to housing, education, movement, and economic stability for Black people provided federal validation for the brutality and bloodshed used to enforce discriminatory state and local laws for generations, leading to the modern expression of these abuses in immigration enforcement today. The latest example can be seen in the September 2025 Supreme Court ruling codifying racial profiling in immigration stops into law. The ruling in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, in which Justice Brett Kavanaugh opined that a Hispanic person’s ethnicity can be used as a factor in providing “reasonable suspicion” for immigration agents to stop and question people wherever they encounter them, is the license immigration forces needed to carry out the spectacle of racial profiling and resulting violence that have been dubbed “Kavanaugh stops.” While the brutality that has ensued from these stops has led Kavanaugh to try to claim that these outcomes are not what he meant to happen, the damage is and continues to be done.
The contemporary practices of DHS, ICE, CBP of house-to-house raids, raids of houses of worship, mass detentions, violence against deportees in public and private (including sexual violence and abuse of children), and family separations—draw unmistakable comparisons to the operations of slave patrols and other historical modes of racial control.
Just as slave patrols focused on enslaved Black people and Jim Crow-era and later police focused on Black communities, immigration operations today disproportionately target specific racial/ethnic groups—predominantly Haitian, African, Latino, and other non-European immigrant communities. But as we have seen in the first not even full month of 2026, they will brutalize and even murder white people who stand in defense of their neighbors and the very laws that MAGA insisted they were committed to all these years, the U.S. Constitution and its guarantees of due process and equal protection under the law for all people in this country, “legal,” or “not.”
The racism is as overt today as it was in the 19th century, as Trump regime immigration officials admitted months ago that they are relying on racial profiling to determine who they target to enforce the boundary between “citizen” and “non-citizen” or “legal” and “illegal immigrant,” continuing the mandate of slave patrols which enforced the boundary between "slave" and "free" and often disregarded the boundary altogether. All three systems, slave patrols, policing, and immigration enforcement, all rely on types of pervasive, persistent, invasive surveillance, the threat or reality of incarceration in immigration detention, jails, and prisons, and the threat of family destruction through the sale of enslaved family members, to convict leasing and mass incarceration, to family separation and deportation, as central mechanisms to force compliance and maintain the established social and economic hierarchy through racial terrorism.
As horrific as the public executions of white Minnesotans Renee Good and Alex Pretti are, they were preceded by the murders of Keith Porter, Jr, Brayan Garzón-Rayom, Marie Ange Blaise, Jesus Molina-Veya, and dozens more under the latest regime’s immigration policies. That the deaths of white people spurred the demands for accountability and even abolition among a larger portion of the population, after the deaths of more than 30 non-white people were not responded to in the same way if at all, is also a by-product of the racial bias inherent in this country’s history that has been ingrained in the psyche of its people. Even the good white people who do want change do not realize how they have been conditioned to not care about the repression of “the other,” and only respond when that repression shows up on their door or the door of someone they can personally identify with.
The history of policing in this country compels us to understand that removing the present figurehead of the U.S. regime will do little to end the suffering of the people targeted by this centuries-long system of social, racial, and ultimately economic control. The only thing that will change this material reality for all of us is a socialist revolution led by the people who are the most impacted by this centuries-long program.
The people, rightly and righteously angry about the deaths of the latest victims of this system, are ready to launch a nationwide general strike to elevate the demand to abolish ICE after a well-supported general strike in Minneapolis that saw many cities across the country carry out solidarity demonstrations. However, the meaningless “reforms” like body cameras and limits to use of force that House Democrats demanded as they voted to continue funding ICE will not achieve the desired outcome, even if Senate Democrats do what they promised and refuse to vote for the funding bill. So, where does this leave the people fighting in the streets??
Simply put, the people must move beyond simply demanding to abolish ICE and even the police, as has been the demand among Black radicals for decades. Rather, the people must pivot fully toward confronting and abolishing capitalism and this entire system that still needs slave patrol/police/ICE violence to protect it from those it exploits the most, and everyone who would stand with them in defense of humanity.
For all of us to live free, capitalism–not just ICE–must die.
Jacqueline Luqman is a radical activist based in Washington, D.C.; as well as co-founder of Luqman Nation, an independent Black media outlet that can be found on YouTube (here and here) and Facebook.
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