“White people are trapped in a history they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it.”
— James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
The United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids are not an invention of law and order. They are the evolution of slave patrols — by another name, in another uniform, in another century.
Slave patrols, or paddy rollers, hunted and captured Black people in the antebellum South, enforcing terror and calling it law and order. Established in 1704 in South Carolina, they were formally abolished after the Civil War, but they did not disappear. Instead, slave patrols evolved into the Ku Klux Klan, lynch mobs and eventually modern policing. Today ICE and other law enforcement agencies use the same logic — state-sanctioned violence to intimidate and abuse communities of color.
ICE uses raids, detention and deportation, relying on surveillance programs like ImmigrationOS to track undocumented people, U.S. residents and citizens alike. Families are torn apart and individuals are detained, often during critical immigration processes including marriage, citizenship and naturalization interviews with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. These practices are not about safety, but domination and whitening America.
The consequences are clear. On Sept. 8, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that ICE agents may use race and language as proxies for citizenship to stop, question and detain a person based on their own judgment.
This decision sets a precedent at the state level by legalizing racial profiling at the federal level. Arizona’s SB1070, the notorious “show me your papers” law, gave local police similar authority to target Black and Brown bodies under suspicion alone. Now, at the federal level, racial profiling is sanctioned, legalized and normalized, granting the state authority to hunt, harass and criminalize communities of color under the guise of public safety.
Slave catchers historically coerced enslaved and free Black people to hunt runaways, using threats, incentives and the logic of survival to perpetuate slavery. ICE mirrors that centuries-old system, recruiting Black and Brown agents to police their own communities and turning them into weapons to enforce deportations, raids, detentions and racial order against people already marked as other.
Both slave hunters and ICE disproportionately target racialized communities. By using Black and Brown people in enforcement roles, the state hides systemic oppression in plain sight while perpetuating fear and control over the very communities it exploits. Slave patrols criminalized Blackness; ICE criminalizes racialized migration — both enforce rigid hierarchies under the banner of law and order.
The Trump administration and ICE echo the Confederates of the Jim Crow South, reviving the logic that once defended slavery to justify detaining and deporting immigrants, citizens and undocumented people alike simply because of the color of their skin. On Sept. 30, 2025, federal agents from U.S. Customs and Border Protection and ICE conducted a pre-dawn raid on an apartment in a predominantly Black Chicago neighborhood.
The operation, part of Operation Midway Blitz, resulted in the arrest of 37 people, including children, most of whom were U.S. citizens. These raids are not about public safety; they are about control, intimidation and domination over nonwhite people in service to purging America of color.
From mass incarceration to mass deportation, ICE raids, police surveillance and detention centers are modern slave patrols — proof that “making America white again” is business as usual.
Rashaad Thomas is a writer, poet and U.S. Air Force veteran. This commentary first appeared on the New York Amsterdam News.