By: Christiana Best-Giacomini
January 13, 2026
Once you become Black in America, nothing else matters. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s observation captures the reality confronting Black immigrants upon arrival in the United States. They do not enter outside of America’s racial hierarchy; they arrive directly into it. Under the current administration, this reality has become unmistakably clear as immigration enforcement has increasingly merged with long-standing systems of anti-Black racism. While immigrants of color broadly have been targeted, research consistently shows that Black immigrants are detained and deported at disproportionately higher rates and are more likely to experience harsh and unsafe detention conditions, as documented by the Black Alliance for Just Immigration
In cities such as Minneapolis, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, Oakland, and Portland, intensified U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations have subjected Black and Brown immigrants, as well as those allied with them, to heightened surveillance, detention, and state violence. These practices closely mirror the patterns of criminalization historically imposed on African Americans. Reports from the American Civil Liberties Union have shown how immigration enforcement relies on and reproduces racially biased policing systems
At the same time, undocumented white immigrants experience little to no comparable enforcement presence. This uneven application of immigration law underscores a central truth: immigration enforcement in the United States is not race-neutral. It functions as a racialized system of social control that depends on the dehumanization and othering of people who are perceived as not white and therefore disposable. Through political rhetoric, media narratives, and enforcement practices, Black and Brown immigrants are cast as threats, burdens, or invaders, stripping them of complexity, dignity, and humanity in ways that normalize exclusion and violence.
Minneapolis is not incidental to this analysis. The city is globally recognized as the site of the murder of George Floyd, an event that laid bare the routine and lethal nature of anti-Black policing in the United States. A subsequent federal investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice confirmed widespread civil rights violations within the Minneapolis Police Department. In the aftermath of Floyd’s killing, federal law enforcement expanded its presence under the guise of restoring order, reinforcing a familiar pattern in which moments of Black resistance are met with militarization rather than accountability. In this context, Coates’s assertion resonates with renewed clarity: Blackness itself, rather than citizenship or legal status, remains the primary marker of vulnerability to state violence.
When immigrants arrive in the United States, regardless of where they come from, they are quickly taught how race operates. Through media, institutions, and everyday social interactions, they absorb negative stereotypes about foundational Black Americans that shape who is seen as deserving, dangerous, or disposable. Sociological research, including Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s work on colorblind racism, has long documented how these racial narratives are learned, internalized, and reproduced. Too often, this leads some immigrants to distance themselves from Black communities rather than learn from generations of resistance, survival, and collective knowledge forged under racial oppression. The result is fractured solidarity and a missed opportunity to confront systems that rely on division and dehumanization.
More recently, heightened enforcement has targeted specific Black immigrant communities, including Haitians in Ohio, Ethiopian communities in the Denver and Aurora area of Colorado, and Sudanese populations in Minnesota. Advocacy organizations and human rights monitors have raised alarms about these patterns, noting how Black immigrants are rendered hypervisible as threats while simultaneously treated as disposable.
For Black and Brown immigrants, the experiences of foundational Black Americans offer hard-won lessons in survival, resistance, and collective care. These histories teach how to recognize dehumanizing state narratives, organize under surveillance, and reject systems that rank human worth by proximity to whiteness. The path forward is not assimilation into a racial hierarchy that was never meant to protect us, but solidarity with those who have long understood its dangers and fought to transform it. Recent incidents involving harm to immigration observers, including the shooting of community advocate Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, further underscore the urgent need for accountability, transparency, and protection for those who bear witness to state power.
(Dr Christiana Best is an Associate Professor at the University of Saint Joseph, Connecticut)
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