Episode 4
Anti-Blackness and the Criminalization of Immigrants – Part Two
In part two, host Sarah Hamilton-Jiang continues discussions on anti-Blackness in immigration law with Nana Gyamfi of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration and Professor Alina Das. The episode explores the challenges Black immigrants face in the era of Trump, and how to address some of those challenges within the immigrant rights movement.
Transcript
Alina Das: It's clear that the odds are stacked against Black immigrants. You are treated as a suspect the moment you come to the United States because of the color of your skin and that's simply not the same experience that every immigrant has. Until we recognize that and recognize that the criminal legal system itself is fundamentally racist and that racism carries over into the immigration system, we're never going to have an immigrant rights movement that's truly inclusive of everyone, and one that really contends with its own anti-Blackness.
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Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: I'm Sarah Hamilton–Jiang and you're listening to “The Other Side of the Water: Immigration and the Promise of Racial Justice.” Today’s episode is the second part of our discussion on anti-Blackness and criminalization in immigration law. In part one, we traced the history of anti-Blackness and criminalization up until the Obama administration.
In today's episode, we'll look at how anti-Blackness and criminalization has played out in the era of Trump and what lawyers, activists, and organizers can do to work towards racial justice for Black immigrants. We're again grateful for the valuable insights provided by Nana Gyamfi, the executive director of The Black Alliance for Just Immigration, and Professor Alina Das, co-director of New York University School of Law’s, Immigrant Rights Clinic.
As explained in part one, anti Blackness and criminalization are embedded in the nation's immigration policies. Nana Gyamfi explained that the Trump administration has built upon this long legacy, targeting Black immigrants and other immigrant communities of color that were already over-policed.
Nana Gyamfi: We see the increase in raids and attacks on community by ICE and CBP, (Customs and Border Patrol) which is not just on the border anymore, but has now come to a city near all of us, and engaging in snatch ups of people, which is their regular thing.
Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: The Trump administration have introduced a plethora of xenophobic and racist immigration policies, unleashing a visceral attack against Latinx immigrants.
But Nana explained that these policies are also anti-Black and anti-indigenous at their core. We've seen constant attempts to remove Black, and other immigrants of color from the United States. Black and Brown immigrant holders of Deferred Enforced Departure or DED; Temporary Protected Status or TPS; and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA have witnessed this firsthand.
Yatta Kiazolu, a DED holder who has lived in the United States for the majority of her life, shared her anguish over the attempts to end DED for Liberians in March 2019 in a House Judiciary Committee Hearing. Kiazolu’s powerful testimony echoed the fears of the many Black and Brown immigrants whose lives depend on the protections provided by DED, TPS and DACA.
Yatta Kiazolu: I'm here because of the love and labor of my mother, grandmother and aunties, who, when I first arrived were all working class, Black immigrant women. They worked jobs that required them to stand on their feet for sometimes over 10 hours a day in order to protect me and offered me a space to imagine, dream and explore my world as a child should.
Though the majority of my family are now permanent residents and US citizens, I'm here for all the working class immigrants on DED, TPS, and are also dream eligible. I'm here for all the young people like myself who have anxiety about their futures. If Congress allows DED to end [in 25 days omitted] I do not know what will happen to me.
My mother and stepfather lose sleep every night, worrying about me. I want to graduate this year and begin my career in higher education. To this end. It is my greatest appeal that Congress create a permanent path to citizenship for DED and similar programs like DACA and TPS.
Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: We've seen a consistent attack on forms of entry used by Black immigrants, such as the diversity visa, and the historic drop in refugee admissions. Nana also shared the example of the 2017 Muslim ban.
Nana Gyamfi: So, when you think about how this man brought in Black History Month when he first came into office, one of the things that he did was to focus on and to create an executive order around the Muslim ban.
And when people think about the Muslim ban, they would talk about, you know, all of the folks were like come out and all these attorneys, were looking for people that spoke Farsi and there was this big focus, at least from my perspective, on folks coming from Iran. And I didn't hear anyone talking about who speaks Somali here. Right? Even though Somalia was included in the ban.
And so, this was something that affected our communities. Somali folks are a big part of our communities here in this country, and suddenly they could not connect up with their loved ones. Of course, that ban has now been expanded to what we call the Muslim and African ban to include countries like Nigeria—which is the largest country on the continent, and has the second largest number of Black people in the world next to Brazil, right? And that doesn't get talked about enough. We had to push, as Black immigrant groups to make sure that this was not just described as Muslim ban 3.0, but that really the conversation was that this was also an African ban.
Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: We’ve also seen a targeted attack on asylum at the border. This year, the administration have enacted a series of unprecedented policies, that decimate protections for those seeking asylum at the border. This is a culmination of efforts over the past few years, including policies of deterrence, that were taken straight from the playbook written by the Reagan administration's response to Haitian’s seeking asylum in the 1980s. The 2019 Migration Protection Protocols or the “Remain in Mexico” policy is a perfect example.
Under the policy, certain asylum seekers must return or “remain in Mexico” to wait until their asylum determination hearing takes place. In a 2019 article, Muzaffar Chishti and Jessica Bolter discuss the striking similarities between the “Remain in Mexico” Policy and the Haitian interdiction program of the 1980s that sought to deter Haitian asylees on the high seas.
They write, quote: “The new policy will mean prolonged stays in Mexico, with considerable danger to would-be asylum seekers and their families, with a minimal expectation of success in their asylum claims in the United States. Limiting or cutting off access to the U.S. asylum system, as the Haitian case demonstrated, can be powerful.”
Carl Lindskoog, a historian and guest in our last episode explained that the “Remain in Mexico” Policy is an example of the next step in the formal evolution of exclusion that began with Haitian’s seeking asylum in the 1980s.
Carl Lindskoog: And now what we see with MPP is a sort of procedural wall to keep migrants and asylum seekers out. You know it's not coast guard cutters intersecting them before they get here. It's this new policy that makes them remain in Mexico in order to wait while they file asylum claims. Jorge Ramos said, you know, “Mexico has become the wall.” We don't need a wall if Mexico has become the wall. Detention functioned in the same way. Its purpose was and is to keep those who already made it to the US out of the country and effectively cage them, and then apply a blanket denial of asylum claims which was done to Haitians. All of which is to exclude the unwanted, and attempt to deter people from coming in the future.
The other policies of the Trump administration, things like metering, you know, only allowing a trickle of asylum seekers to come and apply at any given time, the transit country asylum ban, the asylum cooperation agreements, which puts asylum seekers in a whole different country—all of these things are just restrictions that are designed to eliminate the United States asylum system, basically altogether. And once we can see the history of Haitian detention and exclusion, and what grew from that, we can see that these steps by the Trump administration are just the next steps of what started in the 1970s and 1980s against Haitian and then Central American asylum seekers.
Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: The “Remain in Mexico” Policy is just one example of the many US domestic policies and third-party agreements that focus on excluding Central American Latinx immigrants, but whether directly or indirectly, these border policies also impact Black immigrants.
Nana Gyamfi: There's two borders I would like for us to think about. One border is the border between Mexico and Guatemala, so the southern border of Mexico. The second is the northern border between the United States and Mexico. And BAJI does work at both of those borders—at least before COVID right. They work at both of those borders.
And the reason I bring that up is because by the time folks get to the northern border, they have already been detained in the largest detention center in Mexico at the southern border so they've already been in that situation by the time they get to the northern border. And so, they have already faced hunger, they've already faced medical issues. They've already faced beatings. They've already faced the kind of detention in which one of the officials there said it reminds him of what he's heard happened in the bowel of slave ships during the trans-Atlantic, middle passage.
Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: But these exclusionary border policies also mean that many Black immigrants approaching the border find themselves stuck. And while in this state of limbo, they frequently face anti-Black racism and are denied access to basic human rights. For example, in 2019, media outlets reported on more than a thousand African migrants who were stuck in the southern Mexico city of Tapachula.
Nana Gyamfi: When they're stuck, they're stuck. There’s no way for them to be able to get money. How are they eating? Sister, we heard about women giving birth on the sidewalk, unable to go to the hospital.
People refusing to house Black immigrants in shelters. Black immigrants trying to get their children to at least go to school, right? Because of course you know children, they suck it up, all the language, all of that. And people telling them that, no, we don't know how to teach Black children. We're not clear on how to do that so your child can't come to school here. And then the violence— the response to the protests, and the violence in those responses. Again, so difficult to hear.
And so during this time of COVID, even in spite of what is known about how people will be suffering for lack of assistance, because organizations like BAJI, we can still provide some legal assistance via video and WhatsApp video and other things, but in terms of food, diapers, clothing, the basic kinds of things that we were assisting with and others assisting on that humanitarian level, even more than us—those things are not able to happen right now and it's frightening to hear from our siblings, what is happening with them on the other side of the border.
And most of these folks not speaking Spanish in terms of these Black asylum seekers being denied healthcare, being denied basic human rights and having to find themselves engaged in protest, and in petitions against these governments in these other countries who were pushing policies that were being imposed on them by the Trump administration.
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Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: So how do we work towards change? Well, first let's think about some of the barriers to change. As Nana pointed out, Black people are excluded from political discussions about immigration reform because the framing is racialized. Challenges for Black people are associated with the criminal legal system and challenges for Latinx people are associated with immigration. Black people are therefore erased from discussions on immigration reform. This occurs even within the immigrant rights movement.
Nana Gyamfi: So we're already not in there because of the way that the system operates. It excludes us from those spaces. And then because of anti-Blackness within the immigrant rights movement, because of this unfamiliarity with our issues and an unfamiliarity with advocating for issues that they don't see affecting them directly—we don't get brought into those.
So, we're always the crasher of the wedding. You know, we're always the party crasher coming in and saying “yo, we are also at the border; hey, we are also undocumented, right; wait, we also are people who are day laborers. Just because the person is braiding hair, why are you putting them in a different category than this other person that you think of as the day laborer? Maybe, who is a vendor of food on the street? Because you don't have hair braiders in your world. That's fine. We have them in our world. And so, we have to look out for them and we demand that you also shine a light there.”
So, some of it is the system, the outside system, white-dominated power structure system. And then some of it is within the immigrant rights movement itself and you know, where we're not being discussed. We're not in the room to discuss our own issues and it results in a situation that perpetuates itself.
And so, the work that BAJI has been doing since its beginning in 2006, has been to crash the party. And to insist that “No we are here, we are going to put on some Fela, we're going to play some Highlife, some Reggae, some Soca, like all of it, Calypso, all of this is about to go on right now. Some Salsa and some Samba—you're going to include us in the playlist that is called the immigrant rights movement and we're not going to let you ignore us.” And I think that in some spaces we've been more successful than others. There's still a lot of pushback, even in this moment. People would rather talk for us than give us the space to appear and talk for ourselves. But we're doing the work to you know, to be there wherever we need to be on behalf of our people.
Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: The immigrant rights movement has been guilty of forgetting racial justice, but Nana explained that for The Black Alliance for Just Immigration and other Black-led immigrant organizations, the connection to racial justice and Black lives has always been clear.
Nana Gyamfi: Now on the general immigration rights side, I think what we found is that people are picking up the rhetoric of abolishing and of de-funding and attempting to address them on the immigration side, but they're attempting to address them outside of a racial justice frame. As I said, framing is important. And so, it's not working. So, it's falling on, you know, it doesn't have the magic, it doesn't have the power to be able to do what it needs to do.
And so we're again—BAJI and other Black immigrant rights organizations are pressing, especially in this moment, others in the immigrant rights movement and those who we are already in transformative solidarity with, right, we share values, we have relationships, we trust each other. We're taking these conversations that we're already having to the next level. And those that maybe we are more in transactional solidarity with, we are pressing them to make this solidarity more transformative by daring to address racial justice and anti-Blackness without fear.
Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: But despite these barriers, there is a way to move forward. As we think about this year’s renewed support for the movement for Black lives, we must also be cognizant of Black immigrant lives. This intersectional framework must be adopted by the immigrant rights movement.
Nana Gyamfi: I think when we talk about the Black Lives Matter movement that we need to place it in the context of the Black liberation movement, the actual bigger B, bigger L, bigger M, Right. And we can't talk about the Black liberation movement in this country without talking about folks like Marcus Garvey; and folks like Kwame Touray formerly known as Stokley Carmichael; and folks like Claudia Jones; and folks like Audre Lorde; and folks like Malcolm whose mother was from Ghana; Shirley Chisholm, both parents coming from the Caribbean; Audre Lorde, both parents coming from the Caribbean, you know what I mean? We can't talk about these people or talk about the liberation of Black people and the fight for liberation without naming people that we may or may not know as people that have short roots in the United States. So, we've always been a part of this movement, right? This is what we do. We've always been a part of the movement for Black liberation in this country.
Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: For example, Black immigrants were front and center of the Black Lives Matter protests that took place earlier this year.
Nana Gyamfi: And then in this current iteration when we talk about what happened with our brother George Floyd in Minneapolis, that neighborhood, that area, is a Black immigrant neighborhood.
And so the people who were doing a lot of the organizing in Minneapolis around abolition, around police crimes are Black immigrants. Many of whom—especially when we're talking about the Somali, who have had, you know, terrible encounters with the police and security forces in general, in the United States. And so they're very keenly aware of anti-Blackness and how it plays out and, and what part, you know, and how it impacts their own lives.
And so, the image, I think of this image that was in one of the papers that showed this sister, hijab on, kicking a canister and I just thought to myself. “Wow, is that Minneapolis? Or is that Mogadishu?” You know what I mean? And so that energy is there. When you look at who was cooking, who was doing childcare, openly like, “Hey, come over here, bring your kid here so you can keep protesting, etc.” It was Black immigrants. And when you look at who has served as some of the rallying cry, even when you look at “Toyin” Salau you know others, it's like Black immigrants. Black immigrants are and have been a part of this movement and continue to be a part of this movement, both as people who are harmed and as people who are organizing and pushing back against the harm and toward healing.
Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: This resistance even took place in detention facilities – reminiscent of the type of resistance we saw Haitian’s undertaking in the 1980’s. In June 2020, Black and Brown immigrants in the Mesa Verde Detention Facility in Bakersfield, California held a hunger strike and released a video in support of Black lives in America, and to protest their own treatment in detention.
United in the Fight for Liberation Clip: We are speaking from the Mesa Verde Detention Facility in Bakersfield, California. We stand with the Black Lives movement and against the system that took the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and so many Black people. We are speaking out against the disregard of human lives. We're speaking out against the racist criminal injustice system. We have suffered racial profiling and discrimination in the United States. Almost all of us have suffered under the criminal system.
We want the Black and Brown people to be free. We here, at Mesa Verde want to be safe and free. We want the attorney general to investigate the situation inside our detention center during the pandemic that led to the recent death of our friend Mr Ahn and also Carlos Mejia. We will continue our protest until these demands are met. Thank you.
Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: Professor Alina Das then discussed the need to be intersectional in our calls for reform. Specifically, Alina noted the importance of seeking reform in both the criminal justice space and in immigration.
Alina Das: I think the movement for Black lives in particular has identified policing and the resources that have been spent on policing and prisons in a very intersectional way—that understands that agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement, like Border Patrol, are a part of the policing problem as institutions that use state violence to arrest and lock up and ultimately banish people of color (and disproportionately Black immigrants) from the US, that any sort of policing reform and abolition platform would incorporate a platform that also will work for Black immigrants.
The immigrant rights movement has to show up for Black lives in general. We can't readjust the immigration system until we fix the problems in our criminal legal system. Until we dismantle mass incarceration, until we divest from failed policies like policing, prosecution, and prisons and instead invest in Black communities.
Doing that in and of itself would achieve huge gains for immigrant communities, both Black immigrants, as well as other immigrants of color. Because the foundations of racism and policing, prosecution in prisons are really what the system of deportation and detention in the US is built upon.
It's clear that the odds are stacked against Black immigrants. You are treated as a suspect the moment you come to the United States because of the color of your skin and that's simply not the same experience that every immigrant has. Until we recognize that and recognize that the criminal legal system itself is fundamentally racist and that racism carries over into the immigration system, we're never going to have an immigrant rights movement that's truly inclusive of everyone and one that really contends with its own anti-Blackness.
Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: This is especially important as Alina reminded us that some attempts at reform in the criminal legal system might actually end up excluding Black immigrants.
Alina Das: Sometimes we adopt policies or we fight for legislation that only works for citizens and we see this in drug reform where we might focus on re-sentencing laws and, you know, we'll be able to achieve lower sentences for people who are facing a long period of time in prison for drug offenses.
But instead of getting released back to their families, if they're immigrants they get released into immigration detention and ultimately deported. So, unless we think about immigrants and the way that they may be facing a different punishment we won't be able to advocate for Black people in this country because so many Black people in this country are immigrants and they lose out on those opportunities. Similarly, if we think only about immigration issues, we're going to be harming ourselves by failing to deal with the foundational issues that people face with the police.
Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: And as we look at the upcoming election, Nana implored us to build effective and inclusive coalitions.
Nana Gyamfi: We have great things happening at this time, but we also have, this is a very dangerous time, because these elections are coming up and because of the way this administration rallies its base through anti-Black violence and immigrant violence.
And so there is an even greater effort being made to divide Black communities, not just by citizen and non-citizen, but documented and non-documented in refugee and immigrant, you know what I mean? There are all these different ways that this administration is trying to have people turn on, you know, turn on each other and we have to push back against that and unite in an effort to do that which includes addressing some of the harmful ways that we deal with each other internally.
Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: We must also remember the importance of calling out anti-Black racism and centering Black-led organizations such as The Black Alliance for Just Immigration.
Nana Gyamfi: Anti-Blackness is a specific thing, and we need to talk about it in its specific way and what that means. The framing that needs to happen is going to require people to let go of what they've been taught and to pick up new things. And so I think that's critically important.
And of course, we're asking folks, you know, for these particular issues to support Black immigrant orgs like BAJI. You know, to center Black immigrants in the work that you're doing. To center Black folks generally in the work that you're doing. And so that is a very important piece, which means again that you have to include Black people and in particular Black immigrants in the conversation.
We must be at the table, not somewhere else with like a cup and a string, and you’ve got a cup on the other side, inside of the table and we're whispering to you. “What's happening?” No, we need to be right there at the table, and able to understand and able to be understood as we talk about the things that are important to us. And so those are the kinds of things that can be at least a start, right.
Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: And in closing, Alina offered critical advice for law students, immigration lawyers, and civil rights lawyers.
Alina Das: It's important to go back and read the history of these immigration laws. Read the decisions that have become the foundation of our immigration policies and recognize how openly racist they are.
I think it's very easy today for people to talk about immigration policy without recognizing the systemic racism that's inherent in our current policies and how they're built on that foundation. How we have a Supreme Court that still cites cases from the 1800s that use openly racist language as the reason why they're going to allow the federal government to get away with really atrocious acts towards immigrants.
And to recognize that anti-Blackness and this country's obsession with enslaving Black people as being really the source of so much of the anti-immigrant, legal precedent and case law and policies upon which our current immigration system is built today. It's important to contend with that history and to recognize that its footprints are still on all of the policies that we currently see being debated and to support, and recognize that when Black-led organizations call for changes that seem deeply radical that that's what we need, because anything less will allow the foundations of racism and our laws to remain.
And if we're building over those foundations, we are going to have, and continue to have racist policies. So, we need radical change. We need something very, very different from what we have today if we can hope for more humane policies to exist.
Sarah Hamilton-Jiang: In our next episode, host Ellie Happel will meet with Ninaj Raoul and Sejal Zota to reflect on the role that social movements and movement lawyering can play in the fight for racial justice, for Black, and other immigrants of color.
But for now, we'd like to thank our guests, Nana Gyamfi and Alina Das for their incredible work and their valuable insights in these two episodes.
This episode was produced by Keecee DeVenny of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and edited by Zach McNees. This episode features music by the Haitian band Lakou Mizik and DJ Producer Joseph Ray.
For more information about the podcast series and our conference, Immigration, Equal Protection, and the Promise of Racial Justice: The Legacy of Jean v. Nelson, visit our website, jeanvnelson35.org.
Thanks for listening.
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Hosts:
Raymond Audain
Senior Counsel, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.
Sarah Hamilton-Jiang
Legal Research Consultant
Haiti Project Director, Global Justice Clinic at New York University School of Law
Production:
Keecee DeVenny
Digital Media Associate, NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.
Zach McNees, Editor/Mixer
Resources referenced in this episode:
Muzaffar Chishti and Jessica Bolter, Remain in Mexico Plan Echoes Earlier U.S. Policy to Deter Haitian Migration, Migration Policy Institute, 2019.
An Invisible Crisis: Thousands of African Migrants Are Stranded in Mexico Hoping to Head North, Democracy Now, Sept. 10, 2019.
Jorge Ramos, Trump Got His Wish. Mexico Is Now the Wall, New York Times, Feb. 7 2020.