Black migrants now account for 10% of the Black population and 7.2% of all non-citizens, and are disproportionately demonized and targeted for violence and exclusion at the border, criminalization, detention, and deportation. Among all migrants, Black migrants are nearly 3 times more likely to be detained and deported as a result of an alleged criminal offense. Migrants seeking to enter and living in the U.S. are subject to intensifying and violent militarized border enforcement, interior enforcement and raids, bans and bars to entry into the U.S.; the elimination of opportunities to claim asylum, as well as surveillance, policing, profiling, and criminalization; detention under inhuman conditions; family separation; and exclusions from access to programs to meet basic needs. At each of these points, migrants are experiencing physical and sexual violence, violation, degradation, torture and abuse, family separation, gross medical neglect, demonization, and are being forced return to dangerous or desperate conditions.
Repeal of the 1996 crime and immigration bills, an end to all deportations, immigrant detention, immigration and custom enforcement (ICE) raids, and roving border patrols, and mandated legal representation in immigration court.
The number of Black migrants in the United States is currently estimated at 4 million, of whom 619,000 (15%) are undocumented (compared to 24% of the overall migrant population in the U.S.) This figure has increased by 71% since 2000 and four-fold since 1980. Black migrants now account for 10% of the Black population and 7.2% of all non-citizens.
Half (49%) of all Black migrants living in the U.S. are from the Caribbean, primarily from Jamaica and Haïti. In 2009, women and girls made up the majority (55%) of Black migrants from the Caribbean. Between 2000 and 2016, the Black African migrant population more than doubled, from 574,000 to 1.6 million. Africans now make up 39% of the overall migrant Black population in the U.S., up from 24% in 2000.
Black migrants exist at the intersections of multiple marginalized identities and remain invisibilized in public discourse, and in both migrant and Black-led movements.
It is currently estimated that large areas of the Earth’s equator will become uninhabitable and a significant percentage of global coral reefs will be dead within decades, prompting massive migrations from the region.
Additionally, the U.S. government has engaged in military actions and implemented foreign policies around the globe designed to destabilize democracies and promote U.S. political and economic interests.
For example, for 60 years following a successful uprising by enslaved Africans, the U.S. refused to acknowledge Haïti’s independence because the government feared a slave rebellion in the U.S. Since then, the U.S. has seized control of Haïti’s banks, occupied and embargoed the country, installed dictators, and implemented foreign aid schemes that increased dependency on U.S. corporations and products. The U.S. invaded the independent nation of Grenada in 1981, and has funded death squads and military forces and exercised economic and military control over the nations of Central and South America and the Caribbean for decades. These actions have created conditions of extreme violence and deprivation, forcing migrants, including Black migrants, to flee their homelands.
In Africa, the U.S. military initiative Africa Command, or AFRICOM, has nearly 50 military bases throughout the continent, with 1700 Special Forces and other military personnel undertaking close to 100 missions in 21 countries. These military interventions are devastating land, depleting resources, and making occupied land uninhabitable, forcing people to migrate in order to survive. Unregulated American corporations act with impunity in African nations, extracting resources and killing or promoting violence against any who resist without restraint or accountability.
These policies have contributed to widespread poverty and instability in majority Black countries across Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, driving migration from these regions by people fleeing climate injustice, violence and following resources extracted from their economies.
Even as actions by the U.S. government, state, and private actors around the globe are driving migration to the U.S. by people fleeing the extreme violence and economic and environmental devastation they produce, only to be met by closed doors – as seen in 2019 when people fleeing the devastation of the Bahamas by Hurricane Dorian were turned away.
In Africa and parts of the Caribbean, U.S. institutions like evangelical churches spread false narratives around race, gender, and sexuality that criminalize and create volatile unlivable conditions for women and LGBTQ+ folks. Currently, 38 out of 54 African countries criminalize homosexuality, giving state and private actors carte blanche to brutalize Black LGBTQ+ people. In Nigeria, the penalty for being queer is a 14-year prison sentence, while in Uganda, the penalty was initially death.
As organizing for LGBTQ+ rights intensifies in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean, so too do the numbers of Black queer, trans and gender nonconforming people forced to flee their homes due to anti-LGBTQ+ violence.
Deploying narratives rooted in anti-Black racism and ableism, the U.S. government’s anti-migrant rhetoric and actions have intensified, framing migrants as a disease that must be “cured” or “prevented” through militarized border and immigration enforcement tactics and gross violations of the rights of migrants. These attacks are rooted in eugenic framings of migrants as inherently inferior, dependent, and “criminal.”
The Trump administration has imposed multiple restrictions on migration by African, Middle Eastern, Latin American, and Asian migrants, including the visa ban targeting citizens of five majority-Muslim nations — Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia — along with Venezuela and North Korea, which was recently expanded to include 7 additional countries, 4 of which are in Africa (Tanzania, Eritrea, Sudan, and Nigeria, which is the most populous country in Africa, and has given rise to some of the most fierce resistance to environmental destruction by multinational corporations through oil extraction), and two of which are majority Muslim (Kyrgystan and Myanmar).
The administration has also restricted migration through Family Reunification, participation in guest worker programs, and Visa Lotteries. Recent changes to the “public charge” rule, rooted in policies denying formerly enslaved people their freedom if they were deemed likely to become a “public charge,” prohibit entry into the U.S. or adjustment of status for migrants who have relied on any sort of public benefit/welfare, or who are perceived by the state to be “at risk of collecting benefits from the state.” The rule greatly expands the definition of what constitutes a “public charge”—from use of cash benefits or long-term care to a far more expansive set of criteria examining whether a migrant is receiving, or is likely to receive, any one of a range of public benefits. These changes will likely exclude a significant number of Black migrants from being admitted to the U.S. or adjusting their status, with disproportionate impacts on low- and no-income people, survivors of violence, single parents, disabled people, people living with HIV, trans migrants, elders, and youth, among others. The rule has already had a significant chilling effect on access to a range of services, including basic preventive health care, for migrants with no or low incomes, disabled people, pregnant or postpartum people, and people living with HIV. Increasing focus on employment-based immigration further limits immigration possibilities for disabled people and low-income people.
Additionally, the U.S. currently bars entry to people diagnosed with certain medical conditions, including gonorrhea, tuberculosis, or syphilis, people labeled with a “physical or mental disorder associated with harmful behavior,” and “drug abuse or addiction.” Individuals deemed to have committed acts deemed “crimes of moral turpitude,” or who are simply found to have engaged in prostitution (regardless of whether or not they have ever been convicted of a crime) in the past 10 years are also barred from entry into the U.S.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) houses the largest number of federal law enforcement agents, and Customs and Border Patrol is the largest law enforcement agency in the U.S. DHS, ICE and CBP’s budgets and personnel have ballooned over the past two decades, including by several billion dollars annually to fund border militarization and extension of the wall along the southern U.S. border. Since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, the federal government has spent an estimated $324 billion on the agencies that carry out immigration enforcement. The number of U.S. Border Patrol agents nearly doubled, and the number of ICE agents devoted to enforcement tripled. The annual budget of the U.S. Border Patrol has increased more than ten-fold since 1993, from $363 million to more than $4.7 billion. Border Patrol and ICE budgets have more than doubled since 2003. Much of ICE’s current $7.6 billion budget is spent on incarcerating immigrants in detention.
The current administration has removed many restrictions on the operations of ICE and Border Patrol agents, allowing them to violate the rights of migrants, including and up to sexual assault, death by medical neglect, and murder, with impunity. Additionally, migrants charged with unlawful entry or presence are subject to mass criminal proceedings through Operation Streamline in border states like California, Texas, and Arizona, where judges will hold hearings for dozens of people at a time.
Through regulations and dangerous third party agreements signed with Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, the U.S. government is now effectively denying migrants at the southern border the right to seek asylum in the U.S. by requiring them to first seek asylum in another country instead. The U.S. government has also entered into agreements with Mexico and Canada to further restrict entry into the U.S. For instance, Mexico’s immigration enforcement mandate and capacity has increased as a result of an agreement with the U.S., making the southern border of the U.S. more impenetrable and inaccessible to migrants from Central and South America, as well as to migrants from other parts of the world, including migrants from Africa, Haïti, and other parts of the Caribbean who are increasingly seeking entry to the U.S. through Latin America.
Asylum seekers are now automatically detained when they enter at the southern border and sent back to the first country they entered on their way to the U.S., even if they establish that they have a credible fear of persecution if they return to their home country or to the third party country. The Attorney General has threatened to eliminate bond for detained asylum seekers, which means people could be detained for longer periods of time, leading more people to self-deport to escape indefinite detention, often far from their families and communities, and without access to legal counsel.
These agreements effectively build a wall of policies that trap Black asylum seekers in countries where they experience virulent anti-Black, anti-migrant, homophobic, transphobic, and gender-based violence. Black migrants are experiencing gross human rights violations in camps in Mexico, and dying in attempts to cross the Canadian border through isolated areas.
The Department of Justice has also attempted to block asylum claims based on domestic violence and gang-related violence. The federal government has drastically capped the number of refugees admitted, proposing to admit just 18,000 in 2020, which is the lowest number since the 80s.
In addition to tightening barriers to entry into the U.S., the federal government has ended a number of programs intended to provide a pathway to immigration status for people already in the U.S, including the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, for which 30% of eligible people are Black. Additionally, of the 13 countries which had Temporary Protected Status (TPS) (which allows people fleeing countries experiencing natural disaster or war to remain in the U.S.) at the beginning of 2017, the government withdrew TPS status from 9, 7 of which are majority Black countries. The administration has also proposed drastic measures to deny legal status to migrants and their families, including ending birthright citizenship rights for children of migrants.
The U.S. government is also aggressively waging war on migrants within U.S. borders. ICE raids and roving Border Patrol enforcement are increasing in number and intensifying: the number of federal criminal arrests for immigration offenses increased by 87% in 2018, and the number of people criminally prosecuted for immigration offenses rose 66%, representing the highest figures in two decades.
In addition to increasing resources to and eliminating restrictions on the operations of federal law enforcement agencies, the federal government is deputizing state and local law enforcement and private corporations to wage the war on migrants. Police surveillance, profiling, and criminal prosecution serve as a dragnet funneling migrants into the detention and deportation proceedings.
Among all migrants, Black migrants are nearly 3 times more likely to be detained and deported as a result of an alleged criminal offense, and one out of every five non-citizens facing deportation based on a criminal offense is Black.
Additionally, many Black migrants are ineligible for any form of relief, including a green card, DACA, TPS, or citizenship, as a result of contact with the criminal punishment system, whether through racial profiling, discriminatory enforcement and selective prosecution, or pressure to plead guilty to avoid prolonged pretrial detention. As a result, millions of Black migrants have been deported over the last twenty years. There was a 140% increase in removals of Africans in 2017.
The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA), known collectively as “the 1996 laws,” allow ICE to enter into agreements with local law enforcement agencies to share information about migrants (often referred to as “287(g) contracts,” in reference to the federal legislation that enables them). These laws also expanded grounds for deportation to include more than 20 state offenses, both criminal and noncriminal. The 1996 laws apply to both undocumented migrants and people with green cards or some other formal status in the U.S. People deemed deportable following conviction of one of these offenses are mandatorily detained and deported by ICE.
The number of ICE/local law enforcement contracts and Intergovernmental Service Agreements (ISA) fostering collaboration between local and state police departments and agencies has more than doubled since 2017, making any interaction with law enforcement—including requests for assistance, domestic violence calls, traffic stops or low-level encounters—a risk for deportation. Additionally, the state is increasingly relying on technology and data to drive the deportation machine.
Corporations like Amazon and Palantir create and promote technology that enables the U.S. government to track, detain, and deport migrants.
According to Mijente, Amazon hosts “the database for the immigration case management systems and stores biometric data for 230 million unique identities – including fingerprints.” Holding these corporations accountable is essential to ending the ICE-detention complex, as the system cannot function without the technological services these companies offer it.
Under these conditions, everyday surveillance, data collection, the “war on drugs,” “war on terror,” “broken windows” policing and other policing practices targeting gangs, street vendors, prostitution enforcement, and survival, as well as regulatory and traffic law enforcement, have all become instrumental tools in waging the war on migrants.
Black migrants are particularly affected by the criminalization of poverty and survival: nearly 1 in 5 Black migrants live below the poverty line, and Black migrants have the highest unemployment rates amongst all migrant groups.
Additionally, the current administration has taken a number of steps to end government administered programs that support survival of migrants and our communities, including access to medical care. For instance, in 2017, non-citizen migrant women were three times more likely to be uninsured than U.S.-born women, and nearly half of noncitizen migrant women aged 15–44 living at or below the poverty level remained uninsured in 2017. As a result, migrants are likely to be forced into criminalized economies to cover the costs of medical care. Migrants convicted of poverty-related offenses such as fare evasion, shoplifting, trading sex, or drug possession, for example, are not only punished by the criminal punishment system, but also face immigration detention and/or deportation.
Most migrants in deportation proceedings are not represented by an attorney. Since immigration proceedings are generally “civil” rather than “criminal” proceedings, there is no constitutional right to an attorney in civil immigration court. Many migrants cannot afford to retain private representation, adversely affecting their cases, as studies show that representation significantly increases the likelihood of successfully fighting detention and deportation.
Once in detention, migrants are frequently deported without notice and taken away, bound and shackled, to waiting vans and eventually planes where they are bound and left for hours and days. Often, they are deported back to places they haven’t seen in years or decades, without any money, housing, community, employment opportunities, or life-saving resources awaiting them. They are also unable to take with them any of the wealth or assets they have built and accumulated in the U.S. Often, their attorney and community are not even notified they have been deported until it’s too late.
Once in detention, there are fewer and fewer pathways to release. Even if they are not subject to mandatory detention, many migrants are unable to afford high bonds (averaging $8,000-$10,000) set in immigration cases, particularly given that, in the vast majority of cases, bond must be paid by a U.S. citizen or green card holder, in cash up front, instead of through a bail bonds agency as in criminal proceedings. Migrants often face significant obstacles to retrieving the funds at the conclusion of their cases: ICE is currently holding over $200 million in bonds posted by migrants, reflecting a $57.3 million increase between September 2014 and July 2018.
Both public and private migrant detention centers—and the jails many migrants are housed in under contracts between local authorities and the federal government—are sites of brutal physical and sexual violence and violation, severe deprivation, family separation, abuse, and medical neglect, all too often fatal.
We affirm that migration is a human right, a natural aspect of human existence, and a consequence of colonialism, imperialism, and human-induced climate impacts. We reject the label “immigrant,” which is an imposed and discriminatory legal status used to dehumanize, demonize, exclude, and discriminate against Black and Brown migrants. We use the term “migrant” in order to reclaim our humanity. We hold a deep critique of terms and concepts like “borders” or “citizen” rooted in the ways the U.S. deploys these concepts to exclude, displace, and criminalize Black people both in the U.S. and globally.
