When a mother texts her family group chat “update,” the air in the room usually thins. But in this particular instance, the news was a jagged pill: her cousins, cornered by ICE agents, were being screamed at about their origins and ordered to “show their papers.”
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This is not supposed to happen to us. For a long time, we leaned on a fragile, unspoken logic — that immigration enforcement was “their” problem, a weight carried primarily by the Hispanic community. Even as the political crosshairs shifted toward Somali Minnesotans, we convinced ourselves that citizenship was an impenetrable armor. We were wrong. We are Black, and we are realizing that in the eyes of the state, our papers are never quite white enough.
And it keeps happening.
In another terrifying ordeal, ICE agents allegedly showed up at a Black man’s daughter’s bus stop. He claimed they lingered as children exited from the bus and questioned people nearby. And the group chats hold the weight of countless other encounters of Black people being stopped, intimidated and harassed by immigration agents who insist they are simply doing their jobs.
This is not random. It is not confusion. And it is not accidental.
In May during an interview on Fox News, Stephen Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor since 2025, outlined a new arrest quota for immigration enforcement. “Under President Trump’s leadership, we are looking to set a goal of a minimum of 3,000 arrests for ICE every day, and President Trump is going to keep pushing to get that number higher each and every day,” Miller said.
Mix a mandatory arrest quota with recent policies that now include hefty signing bonuses for ICE agents, and the outcome is a foregone conclusion. You’ve created a paramilitary force professionally incentivized to hunt. When law enforcement is granted “broad discretion,” history has already written the script on who gets cast as the villain.
In September, the Supreme Court handed them the pen, clearing the way for stops based on race, language and geography. Now, some agents are reportedly treating that ruling as a “get out of the Constitution free” card, harassing people of color simply for existing in the vicinity of a “targeted raid.”
When pressed during a recent interview about why these encounters appear so indiscriminate, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson offered this explanation on “60 Minutes,” per New Republic: if agents encounter anyone while traveling to or from a target location, questioning them is still considered part of the operation. In other words, simply being nearby is enough.
The optics of these encounters are already backfiring. Images of aggressive enforcement have begun to tank Trump’s polling on immigration, and even the White House has expressed concern about how this looks. But optics will not protect us. Only information will.
So, why are Black people caught up in it at all? When numbers matter more than rights, enforcement expands outward. And as it always has, that expansion lands hardest on Black people and other people of color.
ICE is no longer asking who they are supposed to stop. They are asking how many. And when the goal is volume, none of us are invisible anymore.
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