In only 7 months under the Trump administration, over 200,000 people have been deported by ICE. Hundreds of people get arrested, deported, and separated from their families every day under this administration, and thousands more are placed in detention centers. The late January greenlighting of ICE raids in sanctuary cities and the increasingly violent stealth tactics are leaving many immigrants in this country fearful. Fear of ICE has already taken a toll on industries heavily reliant on immigrant labor like hospitality, agriculture, and construction.
ICE violence feels all too familiar for the Afrikan American community. Since 2020, police brutality has been a headline in all news stories, but this was never new to Black Americans. Growing up Black means hearing seemingly countless stories of peers being brutalized and killed. And each name echoed through the media, each father, mother, and child that gets killed leaves a scar on the heart of communities who just want to exist and feel safe.
This physical and psychological violence is all rooted in the American worship of the use of force. Law enforcement is protected by the shield of this phrase. Claiming that innocent persons pose imminent danger to others, utilizing deadly force, and reframing the narratives later for self-preservation. And when applied to those without the protection of citizenship, we have seen unorthodox and inhumane tactics.
The Afrikan population falls disproportionately through the cracks when it concerns the use of force. Use of violence and force after all is intrinsic to our being. To be sought and to be brutalized is simply a globally accepted facet of Blackness. With 20% of those held in ICE detention facilities being Afrikan, despite being 7% of the “non-citizen” population, the enhanced policing and monitoring of violence still is informed by an anti-Black project that has socialized enforcers of force to attack and criminalize on a racialized basis.
Whether it is ICE or the police precincts besieging communities across the United States, policing entities are one and the same in their use of force. They serve to preserve a hierarchical system that benefits state agents through subjugation, driven by an intrinsic connection to globalized anti-Blackness and violence against those challenging such hegemony.
The ideological alignment with forceful and peaceful expression has also presented itself through the passivity of movements that require escalatory modes of action. In movements that are to be labeled as peaceful therein lies a harsh reality that the entities being protested are not, and violence is intrinsic to their existence. Amerikkka’s inception has a basis of force through justice and freedom as a justification of violence against Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Afrika. The use of force is now a pillar in how we are made to be passive in the face of state and structural violence as it actively harms and kills, through slow and rapid machinery.
The militarized use of force from extensions of federal deployments, police, and immigration enforcement are at a height of violence and criminalization that those made victim of its inception must be fought, humanized, and organized for. In rejecting displays of passivity, we may find ourselves deepening our work in prioritizing the lives to be lived for those incarcerated. Rather than remembrance, we work toward a material emphasis on care and collectivist practices for the futures we imagine. The work done in firstly interrogating why communities in the imperial core are so served on bases of racialization and class, and how we develop material solidarity within and on a global level, starts with the community patrols, mutual aid, and social organization that is intrinsic to a transformative struggle. There is power within grassroots organizational capacities and escalatory capacities seeking to educate and actively contribute toward building a world that will value humanity.
When violence is exacerbated through means of militarized control and capture such as the white militias of immigration enforcement, the extraction and sanctioning of the Caribbean, the obvious coups in South America (most recently Venezuela) to fuel a chase for geopolitical power, alongside the instigated warfare in West Asia and across the Global South in an attempt to preserve democracy, it creates networks spreading these colonial forces thin. Within a racial capitalist regime—one in which class and constructions of race are wagered, one in which there are entities and aristocrats that are aligned with this aforementioned cannibalistic system of wealth and control—these colonial networks will soon perish and find themselves pumping out of a dead carcass.
