Show me your papers: America’s new war on Brown skin

By De’Andre Brown

Between 1910 and 1970, approximately 6 million Black Americans packed up everything they owned and fled the American South. They were not leaving in search of adventure. They were running from racial terror, state-sanctioned violence and a government that looked the other way while their neighbors were lynched. They landed in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Detroit. History calls it the Great Migration. What it really was, was a verdict on what America had become.

Today, the verdict is being rendered again. But this time the people fleeing are not Black Americans escaping the South. They are immigrants and the children of immigrants, running from a country that has decided their skin is evidence of a crime.

The Trump administration would have you believe this is a win, pointing to 675,000 people expelled and 2.2 million more pressured into so-called “self-deportation.” But the word “self” is doing dishonest work in that sentence. People who flee under threat are not choosing. They are surviving. Under Presidents Obama and Biden, enforcement prioritized individuals with serious criminal records and recent border crossers. Today, that framework is gone. ICE arrests have more than quadrupled. For the first time in a century, an administration has shown open hostility not just to people without papers, but to legal migration itself. This is not stricter enforcement. This is a different enterprise altogether.

At the center of this moment is the machinery of ICE, the latest iteration of an enforcement tradition this country has rebuilt across centuries. Slave catchers were once federally deputized to identify and seize Black people based on appearance alone. Border Patrol was founded in 1924 to police Mexican migration. The names change. The logic does not. In September 2025, the Supreme Court issued a 6-3 ruling in Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem permitting immigration agents to use race and ethnicity as factors in investigative stops. Speaking Spanish. Working at a car wash. Looking Latino. These are now grounds for suspicion in the United States of America. Two lower federal courts had ruled these actions amounted to illegal racial profiling. The Supreme Court overruled them.

The consequences have been immediate. In Minneapolis, a U.S. citizen named Hussen was walking to lunch when masked ICE agents stopped him, placed him in an SUV and shackled him at a federal building. At no point did any agent ask if he was a citizen. In Alabama, Florida-born Leonardo Garcia Venegas was forced to his knees at a construction site by agents who claimed his Real ID was fake. A ProPublica investigation identified more than 170 cases in 2025 alone where U.S. citizens were detained. These are not accidents. This is a pattern.

Maryland is not a bystander. In February, Attorney General Anthony Brown sued the Department of Homeland Security after ICE quietly purchased an 825,000-square-foot warehouse near Williamsport for a 1,500-bed detention facility, branded the “ICE Baltimore Detention Facility.” The state was not consulted. No environmental review was conducted. In April, a federal judge halted construction. Gov. Wes Moore signed emergency legislation banning local police from entering 287(g) agreements with federal immigration authorities. Brown described the federal approach plainly: ICE wants to operate “like Amazon Prime, but with human beings.”

As a doctoral student in sociology at Morgan State University and someone with a master’s in homeland security, I understand that national security requires hard decisions. Borders matter. Enforcement matters. But enforcement without restraint is not security; it is occupation.

The wrongness of what is happening does not begin with American citizens being mistakenly detained. It does not become a tragedy only when veterans are shackled or children with citizenship papers are pulled out of school. The wrongness begins with the fact that human beings are being treated as criminals for the offense of existing while Brown. America is supposed to be a symbol of freedom and dignity. What we are watching is something else entirely.

America has always told itself a story about being the destination. The refuge. The place people risk everything to reach. That story is harder to tell when families are hiding behind closed doors, when citizens are being shackled at lunch, when the Supreme Court has sanctioned the idea that the color of your skin is probable cause. The land of the free is not free for everyone. It never fully has been. But we used to at least pretend to aspire to it. The verdict is in. America has stopped pretending.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the writer and not necessarily those of the AFRO.

The post Show me your papers: America’s new war on Brown skin appeared first on AFRO American Newspapers.