When America Sends Its People:

The history that brought us to the ICE raids, and why immigration defense programs matter.

8 min readSep 18, 2019

By Zain Murdock

“Because being aware of what is happening in our era and choosing to do nothing about it has become unacceptable. Because we cannot allow ourselves to go on normalizing horror and violence. Because we can all be held accountable if something happens under our noses and we don’t dare even look.” –Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions

It was the end of summer for Morton, Mississippi. In particular, it was a Wednesday. And that Wednesday, 680 undocumented immigrants were detained at their place of work. Children came home from school to empty houses. Parents were released with ankle monitors later — marking them as criminals, examples, wards of the law. This shift in worksite enforcement has been in the works for at least a year, according to ICE’s acting director Matt Albence, who also told CNN, “These are not new laws, nor is the enforcement of them new,” and spoke of execution of the criminal investigation as straightforwardly as one would talk about an investigation into any ordinary case not involving sending away human beings with families and communities to leave behind.

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Laissez-faire: leave alone, let do. Considered laissez-faire both de jure and de facto — by law and by practice — America, whose fresh face was once washed with light by the lamp of the Statue of Liberty, is still commonly perceived to be a symbol of endless opportunity.

We see now the statue to be a symbol of immigration. But, it’s more than that. Abolitionist Edouard Laboulaye and sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi created Lady Liberty to celebrate the end of slavery, to demonstrate the amicable relationship between France and the United States, to represent, as the statue itself depicts, walking forward into a brighter future.

So, when Patricia Okoumou, a black woman and an immigrant, climbed the green figure last year on Independence Day in protest of ICE detainment, the symbolism was two-fold, and fell on unheeding ears.

The reality is that, yes, America was once less populated and more welcoming to immigrants. However, for immigrants of color especially, that door was not one propped open by freedom and hospitality, but a revolving door fueled by both labor exploitation and xenophobia.

By the time the national Asiatic Exclusion League came into full, organized swing in 1908 — championing the end of Asian immigration into the country, naming their presence a “degrading and contaminating influence to the best phases of American life” — the Statue of Liberty’s once copper complexion had been thoroughly infected with the blue-green color we know today. And, surrounded by racist, nativist attempts to protect and establish an ‘American society’ — precedented by 1882’s Chinese Exclusion Act, pre- and post-Civil War’s Black Code legislation, and 1830’s Indian Removal Act — it is clear that, regardless of its color, and regardless of the history of people of color, the Statue of Liberty has always stood an empty metaphor for freedom and hospitality.

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The Obama administration had its hand in deporting thousands of immigrants, who largely either landed in inhumane living conditions back home or died. Then, shortly after taking office, the Trump administration concretely established itself as anti-immigration by making plans to cut aid to Latin American countries, build a wall, and end opportunities such as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Temporary Protected Status, for immigrants already within the country.

There have been immigrants from all around the world who have entered the country and not yet acquired citizenship — but the main target of anti-immigrant rhetoric, urged on by President Trump and his administration, has been Mexico. “I want nothing to do with Mexico other than to build an impenetrable WALL and stop them from ripping off [the] U.S.,” Trump tweeted in 2015. He has referred to African nations as “shithole countries”. He told Democratic congresswomen to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came”.

We know these things to be true. That kind of speech has been not only the backdrop but encouragement for both the ICE raids in Mississippi and around the country, and violent attacks on largely Hispanic and Latinx communities, like the recent tragedy in El Paso. That kind of speech cannot be ignored, and it certainly cannot be perpetuated.

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ICE has detained American citizens. ICE has arrived at the houses of potential ‘suspects’ in disguise. ICE has pulled people over for minor traffic violations, then worked to send them away to a road to abuse and deportation.

The 680 undocumented immigrants arrested by ICE in Mississippi on August 7, 2019 were people working at chicken processing plants. They were people earning a living, people making a path for themselves and their families in this country. ICE acting director Albence has claimed that the raids were part of a “long-term operation” and that the companies that had hired undocumented workers could be charged and further investigated for fraud. He said the raids were “racially neutral”. But, whatever your stance may be on the intentions of these raids, there is one thing that is certain: we cannot afford to look at incidents like this as wholly independent from the moral bankruptcy of everything else going on in our country — we have been given every reason to believe that these events are in tandem.

As a country, there is a lot of work to be done.

It is unproductive to interrupt the discussion of immigration raids in this country with calls for a distinction between “legal” and “illegal” immigrants.

It is unproductive to reduce immigration reform to a “politics” issue, or a “both sides” issue. This is a human rights issue. And, quite frankly, the heart of America’s politics have been racist, sexist, xenophobic, and otherwise all for the liberation of everyone except who people in power have found to be undesirable and threatening. The heart of America’s politics have always, for as long as any of us have been alive and centuries longer, infringed upon human rights.

And, it is not only unproductive to the issue but to the improvement of the moral framework of this country, to continue to regard immigrants — and, more specifically, Central American immigrants and other immigrants of color — as an “infestation” or an “invasion” of people that need to be sent away. This implies that they are threatening the virtue, safety, and wealth of America and its documented citizens. And there is a history — America’s history — to answer to first.

As a replacement for the Chinese presence in the farming and industrial industries, America recruited workers from Mexico, creating, as a byproduct, a community and culture of Mexican-Americans in the West and Midwest. And, after World War I, national origin quotas were implemented to both stunt the growth of, and deplete, Asian-American communities, as well as the Jewish, Greek, and Italian. Mexican immigration continued to flow in — until the Great Depression, where the sentiment of “immigrants taking white jobs” led to an all-too-real deportation of Mexican citizens and immigrant residents alike.

It wasn’t until the enactment of the Bracero Program in 1942 that Mexican labor recruitment burgeoned once more — that program, of course, also enacted years of labor exploitation and trauma (enter the Japanese-Mexican Labor Association’s strike of 1943). It ended just before the establishment of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which aimed to reunite families and pull talent and skill into the country — leading to a wave of diversification. But, that act also established a new limit on Western immigration. Meaning: it became harder for folks from Mexico, a country with a large population, and with which America shared a border and a significant relationship in trade, to get visas.

The demand for Mexican labor did not suddenly dematerialize, though. So, people kept coming, continuing to fulfill their historic role as crucial to our agricultural/food industry. And, by now, that role has expanded to construction, services, and transportation as well.

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But, America had its own hand in transnational work. The Monroe Doctrine was enacted over a century before the Immigration and Nationality Act — America’s claim to protect Latin America from Europe and other outside powers — with its own best interests in mind, of course. And, one of those interests was stamping out communism, leading to the United States’ sponsorship of right-wing militaries, which largely affected the stunting of grassroots social justice groups and unions, and the growth of political corruption. America’s relationships with these countries cannot be captured in an easy paragraph, however — these are relationships that historians have spent thousands and thousands of pages detailing in articles and books.

Because America has a long, serpentine history — of, first, exploiting the lives and labor of people of color — then, wanting them out when they come too close to infringing upon its homogenous culture, its manifest destiny, and its omnipotent institutional infrastructure of white supremacy and control. Our justice system is as broken as the chains hidden at the feet of our national statue. If we don’t act in the face of the current practices taken by ICE and the current presidential administration, America’s future will soon be just a vessel for the reflection of its past.

There was no social media, no large-scale programs and resources aimed at immigrant justice and reform when Asian and Latinx immigrants were forcibly removed from our country decades ago. How could there be? There weren’t even significant resources aimed to protect the African and Native Americans who were already here. The ACLU, which formed in 1920, fought against Japanese internment in ’43 and ’44, but both cases unfortunately lost — and advocacy for their rights at the time was otherwise slim.

We also now have the privilege of a variety of initiatives which target immigration justice, from RAICES Texas and The National Immigrant Justice Center, to Never Again Action and Rising for Justice’s immigrant defense program. There are a diverse number of organizations, both national and local, some focusing on children, LGBTQ+, women, and more. It’s fantastic that we are now armed with the knowledge and resources that we didn’t have before — but we still need the support of these programs and activism of everyday people more than ever.

If we take the time to look at America’s history, at the present events that are creeping up into what could — what will be — an unforeseeable, horrifying future, we can understand that advocating for immigrants is not a favor — and they are not a liability. In fact, advocacy is, in a way, reparations — stomping out the blaze of injustices this country kindled on land that was not its own to begin with.

President Trump, in the speech announcing his candidacy in 2015, said confidently to a crowd, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best.” Strangely enough — considering the exhaustive timeline of labor exploitation, interventionism, and xenophobia — the same can be said for America.

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Sources & Helpful Reading:

https://theintercept.com/2019/07/25/ice-surveillance-ruse-arrests-raids/

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/rethinking-last-200-years-us-immigration-policy

https://www.cnn.com/2019/08/08/us/mississippi-immigration-raids-children/index.html

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/illegal-immigrants-us-jobs-economy-farm-workers-taxes/

https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/primer-expedited-removal

https://time.com/5615944/statue-of-liberty-climb-protest-family-separation/

http://pluralism.org/document/the-asiatic-exclusion-league/

http://immigrationtounitedstates.org/363-asiatic-exclusion-league.html

https://www.loc.gov/law/help/guide/federal/indians.php

https://time.com/4473972/donald-trump-mexico-meeting-insult/