The Fight For Black Immigrant Rights Doesn’t End With Black History Month
This blog post was written by NMILC staff member, Emma Kahn. Emma is our Detention Services Coordinator and Legal Assistant
The murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and hundreds of other Black people at the hands of police sparked new waves of outrage over anti-Black racism in the U.S in 2020. As thousands of Americans took to the streets shouting Black Lives Matter, Black immigrants detained at the Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center in Louisiana echoed those cries behind locked doors.
Their hunger strikes and other protests-- led predominantly by Cameroonian immigrants-- cited routine anti-Black racism in Pine Prairie, which is run by private prison corporation The Geo Group, Inc. In response to this organizing, Pine Prairie prison guards threatened, choked, beat, and pepper-sprayed Black immigrants and forced them to sign falsified deportation papers. Freedom for Immigrants’ national detention hotline received hundreds of reports of forced deportation signatures from Black immigrants across the country during this time. Many Black immigrants participating in the Pine Prairie organizing were subsequently deported back to Haiti and West Africa. Some of those deportation flights included women who had spoken up about their forced sterilization at the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia; ICE had rushed them onto those deportation flights at the last minute.
Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center in Louisiana
Black communities have long argued that privileges such as wealth, physical ability, educational achievement and citizenship status do not protect them against the anti-Blackness that pervades the fundamental structures of our society-- especially, our criminal justice system. But this much has been made clear by Black immigrant communities for decades: the intersection of anti-Blackness and xenophobia subjects Black immigrants to unique forms of structural racism that place them at heightened risk of removal.
Since 1980, the number of Black immigrants in America has increased nearly eightfold, which has partially contributed to the expansion of our modern immigration detention apparatus. Europe’s xenophobic and anti-Black policies over the last few years have pushed more African refugees to seek protection in the U.S by way of our southern border. Estimates currently show that nearly 1 in 10 Black Americans were born outside of the U.S., with over 600,000 Black Americans being entirely undocumented.
Not only are Black immigrants in the U.S. subjected to systems of over-policing and criminalization, but they often become trapped in the prison-to-deportation pipeline: a process that directly funnels Black and Latinx immigrants from the criminal court system into the immigration court system, where they can face imminent deportation. Despite no evidence that Black immigrants commit more crimes than other immigrants, Black immigrants are disproportionately represented among immigrants facing deportation on criminal grounds. While Black people make up only 7.2% of the noncitizen population in the U.S., they make up over 20% of immigrants facing deportation on criminal grounds. Even worse-- Black immigrants are statistically less likely than other immigrants to be released on parole or bond, or to win their asylum cases and simultaneously six times more likely than other immigrants to be sent to solitary confinement.
In New Mexico, Black people make up roughly 2.6% of the population and are just as likely to be U.S. nationals as foreign born. While it is challenging to measure the population of Black immigrants detained in NM at any given time, since ICE frequently rotates people in and out of their facilities, NMILC and our partner organizations noted a clear increase in African immigrants in New Mexico’s ICE facilities in 2017 and 2018. During that time, there were numerous instances of subtle and blatant incidents of racism perpetrated by NM prison staff against Black immigrants.
Torrance County Detention Facility in New Mexico
NMILC is outraged that ICE has deported over 900 Haitian immigrants this Black History Month. As Executive Director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance Guerline Jozef stated earlier this month, “It’s callous but not surprising that ICE kicked off Black History Month today by deporting Black immigrants, inflicting pain and trauma on Black families seeking safety.” Many Black members of Congress have also expressed concern over ICE’s targeting of Black immigrants “for detention, torture, and deportation” and over the Biden Administration’s relative silence on the matter. This is what happens when centuries of anti-Black racism shape our present-day immigration system.
As an organization, we remain committed to fighting for Black lives here in New Mexico and across the U.S. We must honor those whom we have lost to deportation and state-sanctioned murder and follow the lead of Black immigrants in their demands for a better future. We know that there is no immigrant justice without Black liberation.
If you’re looking to support organizations specifically dedicated to Black immigrant justice, check out the Haitian Bridge Alliance, Black Immigrant Bond Fund, UndocuBlack Network, Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), and African Communities Together.
