We cannot deport away our racist history

Photo credit: Newark community members march during the No Kings rally in Newark, NJ on October 18, 2025. Photo credit: Josie Gonsalves for Public Square Amplified.

Newark, NJ - What began as just another day waiting to start work had turned into what could be a life-altering sequence governed by the intersection of chance and systems that treat humans as capital assets.

He always said goodbye to his wife and children as if he might never come home. But today he was closer to that reality than he’d ever imagined, and his heartbeat thumped so loudly it seemed to silence the regular sounds of the day continuing around him. 

He was trying to catch his breath. He hadn’t made a mistake. He couldn’t have seen them sooner. They came around the corner, obscuring their faces, maybe 10 feet away, and he just happened to be there. They weren’t even there for him. But that wouldn’t stop them from taking him too. Extra credit.

He’d made it to some bushes, walk-running as if he’d forgotten something, and now he watched as they interrogated those who hadn’t been so lucky. He wanted to scream at them not to talk. Nothing they could say now would help them. But staying silent probably wouldn’t help either. 

These men would lie to them, pretend they were looking for someone else. Maybe if he helped, they’d find the person they were actually looking for and let him go. Maybe give him some papers to sign, and then they’d let him go. Except he couldn’t read the papers they would ask him to sign. Except there wasn’t any one person they were looking for. Or maybe, more accurately, they were looking for anyone with his skin color.

He knew it was just a numbers game; the more people they swept up, the more money fed into the system, the more people they could grab off the street. There was no process, no documents that could prove him either ‘documented’ or ‘undocumented’. If you had the ‘proper’ documents, they would claim they were fake. 

He’d be told he “fit the description.” He was in someplace that “people like him” congregated. Or you weren’t congregating, which was justification for stopping you and asking you where you were going. Moving too fast, you were fleeing, and subject to violent detention. Not moving fast enough, disrespecting them, subject to violent detention. 

He wasn’t so ignorant as to think that the police would help him. The police grew from the same racist roots, now part of the same racist system. His skin color allowed them to judge without knowing him. Yet for some, their own skin color meant they were just buying time before the system was turned back on them.

If they caught him they’d definitely send him South. Maybe they’d send him back somewhere he had some family or knew someone. Oh, to be so “lucky.” Or perhaps they already had a contract to ship him off somewhere more violent than anything he’d escaped. Somewhere he had never known, but what did that matter to them, his people were all the same to them.

They seemed to be wrapping up. Their semi-automatic rifles now swinging on their shoulder slings, no longer pointed at bystanders filming on their phones. Some had taken their helmets off, but their faces remained covered, their fear of demographics second only to the fear their kids might learn what they do when they go to “work” every day. They started to climb back into their armored vehicles, formerly used to murder or snatch brown bodies on other continents, now riding through US cities, returned to sender on the imperial boomerang.

You’d be excused for thinking this story was set far in our past, in the 1820s, not in the 2020s, but we have our own modern Redemption. 200 years of progress to exchange white hoods for black balaclavas. We’ve institutionalized the lawless, moral bankruptcy of “catching” other humans to pay the bills.

We’ve redirected the focus of the system from solely Black bodies, first adding in Arab bodies to the list of “valid” targets.  But then, after failing to dismantle the system once and for all, under two Democratic Presidents who enjoyed control of both chambers of Congress, Hispanic bodies are being thrown on the pyre.

At the time, it was “fine” because it was unlawfully and immorally targeting Arabs and Muslims, citizens or not, during a spike in [white] nationalism and the rally around the red-white-blue following an attack on the “homeland.” 

While raids and mass deportations were down under Obama, the infrastructure was maintained, ready for a Trump administration. Biden not only failed to roll back Trump’s aggressive policy overhaul to block immigrants, including asylum seekers and workers, from entering the country, but he also sought to increase the detention capacity within the country. Biden’s support included backing the private prison operators in lawsuits to allow them to not only keep operating within the US but to expand by opening new private prisons solely for increased immigrant detention capacity, including right here in NJ.

Obama and Biden’s inaction on ICE represents the larger strategic failures we see throughout the Democratic Party. Even now, as ICE rampages through our neighborhoods, Democrats dream of unmasking them, not tearing down the system as soon as they have the chance.

ICE agents are modern-day slave catchers: masked, nameless, guns drawn, fear-driven, wielding random violence, and no warrants, with complete impunity, going back at least to 1619 on these very same shores that ICE operates with impunity within 100 miles of. 

Will that unnamed man (because it’s almost always men), ashamed to show his face, let you pass? Will he hand back a likely fake document and wave you through? Or will he tear up your real documentation and throw you to the ground for resisting? Is he bound by morality or ideology? Does he see you as human? Because ultimately that’s what it’s about, not proof. 

Proof doesn’t matter when you can be grabbed and disappeared before anyone can hear, much less adjudicate your objection. 

Proof doesn’t matter when the Supreme Court has declared that the President can not be held accountable when they violate the laws that bind the rest of us. 

Proof doesn’t matter when you’re not white.

What do we owe those we’ve allowed to be terrorized? Those whose homes, churches, and children's schools have lost the feeling of safety? How do we deliver accountability for the individuals and systems that allow this to happen? What can we say? Can we promise to do better, that we’ll tear down these racist and dehumanizing systems the next time it’s possible? Have we finally gotten to the point where even those of us with the most privilege can no longer look away?

The views expressed in this article express those of the writer alone and not necessarily those of Public Square Amplified.