Brutality continues to rain down on U.S communities, at the hands of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), and millions of people, for the first time, are grappling with the prospect of becoming targets of state sponsored violence for simply walking down the street.
People cry, “this isn’t us!” or, “these aren’t the values we were raised with!” Their confusion seems genuine. But what did they think before? And why are they feeling this fear just now? The flood of outrage came when, in the last two weeks, a white woman, and then, a white man, were shot down in cold blood – martyred by our government. Prior to Renee Good’s and Alex Pretti’s tragic deaths, many Americans didn’t realize what their country was capable of.
I see the storm of anger and calls on social media. The mainstream media coverage of the crisis in Minnesota surpasses that in Charlotte, North Carolina; Los Angeles, California; even Chicago, Illinois. I welcome how thoroughly Americans are rejecting the violence perpetrated by ICE & CBP. But although our collective eyes are opening, I’m concerned we may still have a blind spot.
A common exchange I see unfold: White people rightfully express shock, disgust, terror – the stark emotions that come with seeing their fallen neighbors – innocent bystanders, attacked seemingly for the entertainment of armed federal agents, whose superiors absolve them of their crimes and deny observable facts. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) leaders even compel them to violence by calling peaceful bystanders domestic terrorists. People correctly rage that this is sheer madness, law enforcement gone off the rails – emerging totalitarianism.
Almost in lockstep, Black Americans remind us that this outrage, this spine chilling fear, is nothing new, but something Black people have long endured in America. They ask, “Are you listening now,” since people have not always heard, much less protected them from, all the discrimination, neglect, setups, slander, smears, or horrors they’ve been subjected to by authorities. The same can be said for most indigenous peoples.
Their point is an important one – it shouldn’t take the murder of whites to shatter our collective silence on state-sponsored violence. If we learned anything from movements for Black lives, the callous disregard for human life by those entrusted as protectors should not come as a shock. And yet, as true and painful as this refrain is, it only reveals one part of our blind spot.
In the very center of the tornado of hate ripping through American cities since 45 first ascended, then again last year, all too often, we neglect to see and say the names of the very people being targeted – immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees.* It’s almost as if our blind spot renders them invisible.
But I can’t unsee it. Because my husband of nearly 25 years was previously ‘undocumented’ in the U.S., I have lived almost every national news cycle related to ‘immigration’ since 2001 by his side. Ironically, our relationship began a few weeks after 9/11, and the actions taken by the federal government in the wake of that crisis literally led us to where we currently stand.
The Patriot Act, passed in the aftermath of 9/11, resulted in the creation of DHS, parent to various agencies. Some were new, like ICE, others were repurposed, like CBP, and U.S. Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS), the functions of which originated with the INS – Immigration and Naturalization Service. Their budgets ballooned, under both GOP and Democratic leadership, and as politics are fueled by increasingly polarized and financially motivated campaigns, these agencies have only grown more powerful.
Throughout this entire onslaught of federal agents in our communities, it is rare to hear from the people targeted. Cases are mentioned on social media, now even in the mainstream. But directly hearing migrant voices has not been the norm. In their path to a better life and contributing to American society like all immigrant communities before them, the immigrants themselves — the lived experiences of the actual people under siege — are poorly represented in our discourse.
There are clearly many reasons for this, primarily their own safety. But the shadows that shield migrants also isolates them from the national narrative. Invisibility breeds unfamiliarity, and neighbors struggle to identify with them. When migrants’ voices are not central to the stories told about them – we risk objectifying them, making the perception of their humanity at even greater risk. This becomes dangerous when language is weaponized against them.
Migrant is a confusing term, because it’s used to describe both peoples who’ve emigrated from all over the world, as well as people native to the regions they move within, whether their home or destination countries’ racial, ethnic, or cultural purity tests recognize them as such. How the first peoples of a continent are called “aliens” in their own lands is a paradox of our time.
Whether we keep using the terms given us, or whether we create a better lexicon for this longstanding debate about the border, we must always remember the targets of immigration policy, laws, racial and national quotas, DHS, ICE, CBP, and their abuses. They are our neighbors, our coworkers, our friends. In many cases, they are our own family members, or our partners.
Our migrant neighbors may be new to our local community, or maybe we are just newly aware of their presence. Their cultures or ancestors’ histories may predate our own, or carry even more ancient legacies of conquest and oppression than those of our relatively young nation. To more accurately represent reality, we must avoid a U.S.-centric black / white dichotomy, and strive for multicultural fluency. Local mutual aid groups and national coalitions embody this principle on the daily, and when their efforts bear fruit, communities become truly safer.
Those who agree that America is so much more than white, black, and Main Street USA, even those of us working at ground zero, still have room to grow. What if we (safely) centered the voices and experiences of the most vulnerable among us? Is it naive to think that we could better identify with them, and there would be equal outrage for their deaths or displacement as well? Could we be more effective at preventing more tragedies?
Once we clearly see how much immigrants are targeted by law enforcement, how disproportionate this is to actual crime statistics, how much funding and infrastructure has been earmarked for this (far beyond our domestic carceral system), it is hard to look away. Our surprise dissolves, and we can even propose solutions. We can decriminalize migration and embrace it as a human right, disincentivize detention, do away with bloated enforcement agencies and their budgets, or more.
I fear that the tendency to exclude migrants’ faces and voices for so long has led us to an even more precariously vulnerable position, now that the criminalization of migration and the detainment machine has grown to a scale near impossible to tame – a sort of Frankenstein that’s escaped mainstream concern as long as the violence was directed at the border, in detention centers, or abroad. Now, its insatiable hunger has set its sights on its own sponsors.
But once we’ve seen through the tear in the veil concealing the monstrosities, what will we do? Will we simply allow it to be stitched it back up again? Or will we remove the veil, confront the nightmares our beloved country is causing, and get to work righting these injustices and giving the world’s children a future worth hoping for?
*For purposes of this essay, I use the term migrants, when referring to immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees.
