In 1791, George Washington wrote an entry in his ledger: “[Paid] for the passage of Negroe Jack sent…to the West Indies to be disposed of…” The president had just sold a man he’d enslaved to a Caribbean sugar plantation, considered a death sentence knowing the high mortality rates there. From Jamaica and Barbados to U.S. states, punishing enslaved people with family separation and deportation was common. It would only continue.
In another genocide, Nazis, inspired by U.S. violence against African and Native Americans, deported, murdered, and exploited the labor of millions of Jewish, Roma, queer, Black, and disabled people.
Today, Trump’s new “border czar” is known as the “architect of family separation.” Ten percent of Black Americans are immigrants. But could the other 90% be deported, too?
Under President Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s prisons are a horror show of human rights abuses. Bukele recently offered to house “dangerous American criminals...including those of U.S. citizenship and legal residents” in a new 40,000-person capacity prison.
Trump’s attacks on our birthright citizenship may not come to fruition. But using incarceration to deport us would be a natural loophole in a country that’s only offered us conditional citizenship and rights through its violence and our resistance. Pay attention to the historical patterns laid out for us. And watch how they define what it means to be “criminal.”