This article was originally published by The Emancipator.
Editor: Racist immigration policies have resulted in innocent people who are in the U.S. legally to get swept up in ICE raids.
On the campaign trail, Donald Trump vowed “mass deportations.” As president, he unleashed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on cities with dense and racially diverse migrant populations to round up anyone suspected of breaking laws.
Black and Brown people — a number of them in the country legally — have been recklessly profiled. The administration has argued that ensnaring native-born and naturalized citizens and legal and law-abiding migrants are merely “collateral arrests.”
Collateral is a word for objects and events, not people. The phrase conjures the idea of “collateral damage,” which refers to incidental and undesired negative outcomes experienced by innocent bystanders — a calculated cost factored into a necessary action.
But in the case of ICE raids, the Trump administration is wielding racial profiling as a legitimate and justifiable tool in the name of national security.
Normalizing collateral arrests with impunity fuels an atmosphere of xenophobic paranoia and jeopardizes the civil liberties of non-White people living in the US.
This will ultimately lead to capricious demand for people of color to prove their allegiance and a return to race-based policies that cast entire groups of people as potential public enemies.
History shows our nation’s track record for allowing fear and hate to drive legislation, a shameful legacy we must not repeat.
During the Haitian Revolution of the late 1700s to early 1800s, large numbers of Haitians immigrated to what was first Spanish, then French, and ultimately American-ruled Louisiana territory.
These governments, terrified of the contagion of Black liberation, profiled the newcomers, and outlawed materials deemed “seditious” and even tried to bar men from migrating from the island nation.
The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first law restricting immigration to the U.S. of a specific ethnic group. It was fueled by anti-Chinese sentiments that viewed them as the dangerous “Yellow Peril” that would threaten the good order of American society.
Chinese residents in the U.S. at the time were prevented from becoming citizens and required to carry certificates that proved their immigration status or risk deportation.
Anti-Chinese laws helped form the foundation for systemic racism within U.S. immigration policy.
During World War II, following Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese Americans were treated as national security risks. Roughly 120,000 people of Japanese descent were rounded up and interned in camps.
Some 80,000 of the people forced to live in the camps were American-born citizens.
German and Italian Americans were also sent to internment camps in modest numbers relative to their population at the time.
The U.S. government formally apologized decades later for the years of indignity, harsh living conditions, and the loss of property and jobs Japanese Americans faced.
After the 9/11 attack in 2001, the resultant “War on Terror” led to unchecked Islamophobia and national security theater at the expense of civil liberties for those who were profiled to appear Muslim, which included anyone with dark skin, wore head coverings, and/or had an Arab-sounding name.
They were terrorized with threats of violence, vandalism, excessive search and seizure, and often mistakenly added to “no-fly” lists, which limited travel.
In the years after 9/11, 780 Muslim men were forcibly taken to the infamous Guantánamo Bay detention center, many of whom were held without formal charges.
ICE secretly hauled Mahmoud Khalil to Louisiana as retaliation, lawyers allegeMahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident of the U.S. who participated in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, was recently seized from his home and transported to a Louisiana detention center.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio argues he has the power to revoke Khalil’s green card on the unfounded basis that Khalil is a Hamas supporter.
Xenophobic legislation is also percolating at the state level.
Republican Rep. Riley Moore of West Virginia recently sponsored the “Stop Chinese Communist Prying by Vindicating Intellectual Safeguards in Academia Act” (Stop CCP VISAs Act), which would prevent Chinese nationals from obtaining student visas to the US.
Immigration experts recommend people of color to carry proof of their citizenship on their person to try to mitigate being taken in by ICE as a collateral arrest.
This is exactly the type of defensive posture generations of Black and Brown people have lived under during earlier points in America’s history.
These echoes of past immigration policies are built entirely on racial profiling with disingenuous claims, all for the sake of protecting America.
However, the irony is that these actions actively dismantle fundamental aspects of what makes the U.S. “the land of the free.”
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