This article was written by Rashaad Thomas for the New York Amsterdam News and was reposted by Word In Black.
“White people are trapped in a history they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.”
— James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids are not a new invention of law and order. They are the evolution of slave patrols — by another name, in another uniform, in another century, but with the same mission: “Make America White Again.”
President Trump is stripping all references to slavery from national parks and the Smithsonian Institution in an effort to erase American history. He claims those references, like the “Scourged Back” and similar exhibits, promote “corrosive ideology” and “unfairly disparage Americans.” He embraces a long American tradition of reshaping history to obscure injustice, clearing a path to revive America’s ugliest machinery of racial control.
Slave patrols, or paddy rollers, hunted and captured Black people in the antebellum South, enforcing terror and calling it “law and order.” Established in 1704 in South Carolina, they were formally abolished after the Civil War, but did not disappear. Rather, slave patrols evolved into the Ku Klux Klan, lynch mobs, and eventually, modern policing. Today ICE and other law enforcement agencies use the same logic — state-sanctioned violence to intimidate and abuse communities of color.
The ruins of segregation are visible in cities across the country today. Redlining, supported by banks, real estate agents, and government policy, denied and still denies Black and Brown families the opportunity to build wealth or own homes. Those same red lines shape political maps, laying the groundwork for gerrymandered districts that weaken Black and Brown political power. In the same neighborhoods once marked “hazardous” to justify a lack of investments, police presence remains pervasive, trapping generations in cycles of poverty.
Today, ICE uses raids, detention, and deportation, relying on surveillance programs like ImmigrationOS, to track undocumented people, U.S. residents, and citizens alike. Families are torn apart and individuals are detained often during critical immigration processes, including marriage, citizenship, and naturalization processes with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). These practices are not about safety, but domination and whitening America.
History warns us where this leads. In 1989, five Black and Latino teenagers — the Central Park Five — were wrongfully accused of rape. Donald Trump inflamed hysteria by spending $85,000 of full-page ads demanding, “BRING BACK THE DEATH PENALTY. BRING BACK OUR POLICE!” branding them guilty before trial. His words amplified the racist stereotype of Black and Brown youth as inherently violent. Decades later, the same narrative persists. President Trump calls Black and Brown children “roving bands of youth,” implying they are “born to be criminals,” justifying militarized policing and invasion of U.S. cities such as Black-majority Washington D.C. rather than acknowledging that the community itself was being neglected by the government. In practice, the theory provided the NYPD justification for aggressive policing that disproportionately targeted Black neighborhoods, turning minor infractions, like jaywalking, littering, and fare-dodging, into criminal offenses. Policy and prejudice worked together to devastate lives then, and their effects continue to impact Black and Brown communities now.
The consequences are deadly clear. On Sept. 8, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that ICE agents may use race and language as proxies for citizenship to stop, question, and detain a person based on their own judgment. This decision sets a precedent at the state level by legalizing racial profiling at the federal level, an unsettling similarity to the slave patrols’ mandate, and Arizona’s SB1070, the notorious “Show Me Your Papers” law, gave local police the same power to target Black and Brown bodies under suspicion alone. Now, at the federal level, racial profiling is sanctioned, legalized, and normalized, granting the state authority to hunt, harass, and criminalize communities of color under the guise of public safety.
In New York, outgoing Mayor Eric Adams has reimplemented stop-and-frisk, allowing police officers to pat down anyone suspected of being armed and dangerous. This revival stands in stark contrast to 2013, when Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled New York City’s stop-and-frisk practices unconstitutional for their reliance on racial profiling.
This machinery of racial control is now being fortified. Facing a recruitment crisis like the U.S. military, ICE has begun lowering standards to expand its force. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem recently announced the agency will waive age limits for new applicants.
“We are ENDING the age cap for ICE law enforcement,” she declared, urging “qualified candidates” to apply with no restriction. This resembles the broader military trend of loosening requirements, offering financial incentives, and expanding waivers to meet enlistment quotas. Rather than confronting the deeper issues like public distrust in the government, moral conflicts about serving oppressive systems, and the targeting of minoritized and poor communities, the government instead chooses to expand its enforcement arms by any means necessary.
Slave catchers historically coerced enslaved and free Black people to hunt runaways, using threats, incentives, and the very logic of survival to perpetuate slavery. ICE mirrors that centuries-old system, recruiting Black and Brown agents to police their own communities, turning them into weapons to enforce deportations, raids, detentions, and racial order against people already marked as “other.” Both slave hunters and ICE disproportionately target racialized communities. By using Black and Brown people in enforcement roles, the state hides systemic oppression in plain sight while perpetuating fear, control, and monitoring the very communities it exploits. Slave patrols criminalized Blackness; ICE criminalizes racialized migration — both enforce rigid hierarchies under the guise of “law and order.”
The Trump administration and ICE echo the confederates of the Jim Crow South, reviving the same logic that once defended slavery to justify detaining and deporting immigrants, citizens, and undocumented people alike, simply because of the color of their skin. On Sept. 30, 2025, federal agents from the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and ICE conducted a pre-dawn raid on an apartment in a predominantly Black Chicago neighborhood. The operation, part of Operation Midway Blitz, resulted in the arrest of 37 people, including children, the majority of whom were U.S. citizens. These raids are not about public safety; they are about control, intimidation, and domination over all non-white people in service to purging America of color.
Yet, resistance persists. Across the country, a network of volunteers and organizations like a modern-day Underground Railroad rises in defiance of the Trump Administration and ICE’s raids, living in the legacy of those who guided enslaved people to freedom. Lawyers, organizers, and churches provide sanctuary, safe passage, and protection, moving quietly to shield families from the trauma of detention and deportation. Every act of care is resistance, demonstrating that love, courage, and community can foster freedom even under oppression.
As the philosopher George Santayana warned, “Those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”
This nation was built on Black backs, yet Black Americans still are stalked, hunted, and killed — denied the freedom promised in the Emancipation Proclamation, the Reconstruction Amendments, and every policy that swore life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as their human and constitutional right. We are asked to maintain hope and be grateful for progress, but it’s difficult to imagine when Black and Brown people are commodified, dehumanized, and treated as disposable.
From mass incarceration to mass deportation, ICE raids, police surveillance, and detention centers are nothing but modern “slave patrols,” proof that “Making America White Again” is business as usual.
Rashaad Thomas is a writer, poet, and U.S. Air Force Veteran whose writing has appeared in AZ Mirror, AZCentral, Zócalo Public Square – ASU, Sojourners, and in poetry journals, including The Columbia Review and Hayden’s Ferry Review.
This post appeared first on New York Amsterdam News.