Undocumented and Black
Department Store, Mobile, Alabama, 1956, Via Gordon Parks Foundation
I am utterly sick of the “I told you so’s”, fake outrage, or apathy from an array of establishment Democrats and content creator “activists” that do not have layered, intersectional or deep-rooted activism or are not a part of activist communities (digital, global, in-person, local, or otherwise).
I am Jamaican and Black American; I am a birthright citizen of the United States and a dual citizen of Jamaica. I remember having conversations with my elderly southern Black American father about Trump’s early threats to revoke birthright citizenship in his first administration in 2016 and as an ongoing campaign promise. He stated, “Trump is a fool!” and that “I”, his daughter, would be “okay” because I am American. I let him speak without interrupting him with stories of our shared past but responded within the depth of my mind with a sigh: You never signed my birth certificate. I let him speak because it would be too difficult to explain the utter layers of the fact that none of us are safe. The fear and impetus to organize, share information and be a resource, are not solely about jeopardy to my status or my comfortability. When the 45/47 administration comes for the 14th Amendment, they come for the due process and citizenship rights of all who have attained them in the past 150 years.
Everyone is being and will be affected by the anti-Black, anti-immigrant, anti-brown, and anti-Indigenous draconian laws and Executive Orders put in place by this administration—and upheld by Democrat-led administrations of our recent past. As lessons learned from the “failures” of their first administration, Trump 2.0's renewed efforts to fascism backed by tech-billionaires have been utterly confusing, swift, and at times debilitating. The implementation of DOGE (the fake-ass “Department of Government Efficiency”), led by Apartheid era South African-born Elon Musk and his cadre of teenage and twenty-something minions, is proof of this.
The random and constant slew of white supremacist executive orders, such as “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” and “Securing Our Border” have wreaked havoc and caused much harm. In terms of immigration policy on the ground, small clerical issues (an American parent not signing a birth certificate), not having the right documents in possession (a birth certificate or passport), being detained by TSA for leaving and entering the United States as a multi-documented person, a pending status due to ongoing asylum hearings, or access to the right documents when stopped by arrogant racist Immigration, Custom, and Enforcement agents—could create a bevy of issues for all Black, brown and Indigenous Americans and their multi-status communities.
ICE arbitrarily targets Black and brown community members with even US citizens having to prove status at a moment's notice or be detained. This has been documented through an anecdote from a Black American man in the Bronx who was randomly stopped by ICE agents and asked if he was from the Spanish Caribbean; Navajo nation indigenous peoples without access to nation IDs rounded by the ICE agents in Arizona; and primarily Spanish speaking Puerto Ricans being detained by ICE in Chicago. These experiences, along with those of undocumented community members and multi-status families, highlight the ruthless and disheartening nature of deportations.
1851 poster, written by Boston abolitionist Theodore Parker. Via Encyclopedia Virginia.
Although Trump is deporting at rates lower than the Biden administration, cutting his high teeth during the Obama-era, Border-Czar and Head of Homeland Security Tom Homan is resuscitating controversial and utterly illegal past US immigration policies that played out throughout the 1980s and 1990s, particularly with Haitian immigrants and asylum seekers. ICE uses the notorious Guantanamo Naval Base’s GITMO prison camp on the island of Cuba to indefinitely detain immigrants. ICE has also political jurisdiction in Panama, where deportees from an array of countries are held hostage in locked hotels and heading to constructed detention camps in the Panamanian jungle, leaving human beings stateless and with minimal recourse. This, along with the new ICE directive to “fast-track” deportation proceedings for thousands of unaccompanied children, demonstrates the disturbing reality of this particular era of xenophobia and white supremacy in this country.
Nonetheless, these lower rates may be less about the 45/47 administration's precision, and more about the preparation and organizing efforts of multi-status communities. Although Mar-a-Lago sellout Eric Adams has allowed ICE to expand in New York City as a quid pro quo with the white house, mayors and public officials in Boston, Worcester, and Chicago sustain their cities as “sanctuaries” or at the least spaces in which immigrant rights and the US Constitution will be regarded.
Recently, Border-Czar Homan has vowed to “bring hell” to Boston, Massachusetts due to the outright resistance and protection of undocumented community members. I was born in Boston, and in the words of our working-class hero and patriot Greyhound bus driver from Seattle, ICE can gargle our collective balls. Communities have been organizing in churches, mosques, immigrant community centers, cultural centers, at community colleges, universities, using newspapers, zines, pamphlets, social media, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, etc., before and throughout the recent Bush, Obama, Trump 1.0, Biden, and Trump 2.0 administrations.
Our multifaceted communities are built on resistance and safety.
Im/migration and “My Black Business”
I have written and taught about the intersections of undocumentedness and Blackness where I contend with the false depiction of “The War on Terror” and anti-immigration control as solely an “anti-brown issue” focusing on non-Black foreign nationals and recent arrivals from South and Central America and the SWANA region. Additionally, I push back on the false claim by many white scholars and academicians, as well as the foolish Thomas Sowell (Trump’s Black American hero—Sowell literally hates Black people), of an elevated status of Black immigrants and migrants to pathologize Black American experiences in the US and negate the existence of systemic marginalization. However, the experiences of Deporter-in-Chief Barack Obama’s aunty Zeituni Onyango demonstrates the intersection of undocumentedness and Blackness that has had an important impact on the persisting narrative of Black criminality and the continuously evolving viability of the prison industrial complex.
As we have teetered between diet-Fascism of Democratic administrations and the good-old Gilded Age Fascism of Trump 1.0 and 2.0, I have come to the conclusion that Obama would have deported his aunt, just like he did with my family member during his presidency, if he could.
Much immigration activism is done within cultural, language, and regional communities. Coalitions exist, but immigrant communities have specific needs, and these are usually met from the everyday third places they are a part of. Within the United States organizing is taking place from within cultural communities. We also have to recognize the breakdown in progressive and Leftist organizing by establishment Democrats, in an effort to keep empire, capitalism, and militarism moving. The Harris campaign depicts this vividly through alienation and targeting of anti-genocide voters.
It is My Black Business to be vigilant, show small and large acts of community, and support those organizing grassroots and legal efforts at the local, national and international levels. Many Black Americans, especially in the urban city centers, have always come from multi-status and multicultural families just like mine. Garveyism and Black Muslim communities demonstrate that immigration and migration have always been Black American business, that fighting fascism has always been Black American business.
Harriet Tubman was a refugee in Canada for almost a decade because of early US policies on border patrol and undocumentedness that affected fugitives of slavery and Free Black communities. Marcus Garvey, CLR James, and Claudia Jones were deported from the United States and held as prisoners at Ellis Island and a Women's Prison in West Virginia. Malcolm X and Kwame Ture (FKA Stokley Carmichael) were Caribbean American and very Black American holding the core of what Black activism looks like in the United States as Muslim, Anti-Imperialist, and Pan Africanist. They were very Free Congo, Free Haiti, and Free Palestine; and are a part of the coalition of ancestors that established much of the foundation of global Black activism. New Jersey born Paul Robeson fought tirelessly against fascism within the imperial-core of the United States, bringing genocide charges against the United States to the United Nations in 1951, and never feigning under the pressure during the crackdown on the Left in the 1950s that revoked his passport for 8 years.
Anti-Blackness and US Immigration Policy
In “Globalized anti-Blackness: Transnationalizing Western immigration law, policy, and practice,” Vilna Bashi assesses the multifaceted dimensions of anti-Blackness in global immigration policy. She asserts that “Western lawmakers’ denial of access to the privilege of immigration to phenotypically ‘Black’ persons from ‘Black’ nations functions as systemic and global anti-Blackness.” Three important themed justifications supported by Western governments are cultural and biological inferiority; the transition to non-racial and color evasive language in the creation of anti-Black immigration policy and practice; and the reliance and recruitment of immigrants as temporary laborers through contract labor agreements, like the H2A and H2B systems for agricultural workers and workers in healthcare and childcare.
Historically, these same justifications were simultaneously constructed in the development of domestic policies that affected the lives of Black Americans. Anti-Blackness and anti-brownness, in general, are central parts of international policy and the experiences of immigrants in the United States.
The historical and current realities of the “War on Drugs/Tough on Crime” policies and Black criminalization streamlined by Joe Biden are merged with the War on Terror and anti-immigration border control of the Bush era. Understanding the issues of Black immigrants and the history of Black immigration and regional migration provides an important contribution to the systemic and intersectional ways that race and incarceration work in the United States. Although in both spaces citizen and noncitizen/foreign national Black and brown people are hyper-criminalized and rendered to statelessness, the “War on Drugs/ Tough on Crime” is presented as a “Black American” issue and “War on Terror” as “brown”—brown meaning not of African descent.
Black immigrants from the Caribbean, Latin America, and continental Africa—particularly foreign nationals—have been currently and historically relegated at the intersection of prosecutorial and policing practices of Black citizenry. 45/47 administration's unceremonious cancellation of Temporary Protective Status for Haitian (August 2025) and Venezuelan (April 2025) immigrants demonstrates this. These individuals are a large part of a temporary and permanent foreign national labor force whose efforts for U.S. citizenship or presence in the United States is highly contested, controlled, and repressed.
At the end of the day, we must connect Black criminalization and police brutality at the center of the #Blacklivesmatter movement of the 2010s and the expansion of the contemporary Black social movements to include Black people the state stations at fringes of U.S. and Western societies. With 45/47 rescinding the Biden-era policy eliminating Department of Justice contracts with private prisons, prisons industrialists like The GEO Group's stocks have been on the rise with literal Black and brown bodies as precious commodities in demand (sick!). The evolution of the U.S. carceral system has been expanding for decades to include immigrant detention and the criminalization of Black and brown immigration and migration.
“I told you so’s” are boring
The “I told you so’s” just tells me a person's depth of activism and political organizing is limited or non-existent. Elements of what was already dehumanizing, racist and illegal in past Democratic and Republican administrations have been rebranded and resuscitated. And many of us were organizing on this issue during the Obama or Biden administrations and were silenced as we made demands and pleas in the midst of the Harris presidential campaign. The apathetic blaming outlines some of the most odious parts of Americanization and Americanism, as well as that many may not have cared about or are not aware of the effects of Black and brown criminalization as the multi-level marketing scheme that targets and incarcerates citizens, documented foreign nationals, and the undocumented alike.
This apathy also takes the tune of retribution for 3rd party voters and those who stayed home and did not vote for Vice President Kamala Harris on account of genocide. However, Harris and the Democratic Party’s allegiance to the military state of Israel {who loves Trump (make it make sense!)}, investment in Israel’s genocide on Gaza and brute militarism in the West Bank, and alienation of a wide swath of her working-class base is the reason why she loss (see “Delete Later” by Lisa Betty). The Democratic Party is useless in this fight, because their diet-Fascism policies and approach have always been a part of the problem and the defining starting point for Trump 2.0.
They will find a way to detain us, exploit us, make us stateless, and extract our labor. But in the times that I feel hopeless, I remember that Harriet Tubman was undocumented from a multi-status family, and she protected her community with all she had.
We have been here before, and still, we rose and won.
We will be okay.
