As we celebrate Black History Month – which began 100 years ago as Black History Week – we are again reminded that Black history is at the heart of US history. This is because it has shaped what happens in this country in so many ways, and continues to do so. A case in point is the parallels between the pre-Civil War slave patrols of the 19th century and the ICE/Border Patrol abductions of immigrants in the US today. A number of African American analysts have spoken to this in recent articles and videos.
Kahlil Greene, a historian and educator and founder of the History Can’t Hide substack, makes this point in his article “How ICE Is Mimicking 19th Century Slave Patrols,” which appeared in late January in The Preamble. “Over the last few weeks,” Greene writes, “as agents from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Border Patrol have flooded the streets of Minneapolis, snatching away residents and sending them to faraway detention camps — and even killing citizens — commentators have looked to history for comparisons, often reaching for World War II analogies that liken ICE to the secret police of Nazi Germany. But we needn’t look outside the US for the clearest parallel. ICE isn’t the Gestapo — ICE is the slave catcher. And the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 tells us everything we need to know about where this is heading.”
Greene goes on to describe how the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was enacted as a means of reassuring Southern slaveholders that their “property rights” would be protected if their slaves fled to free states. Before this law was enacted, an 1842 court ruling had absolved the free states of any duty to cooperate in recapturing escaped slaves. The 1850 law, Greene writes, “created one of the most aggressive federal enforcement regimes in American history. The new law didn’t simply allow slave owners to retrieve enslaved people who had escaped. The law empowered federal marshals — officers of the United States government, not local police — to enforce it directly in Northern states where slavery had been abolished. This was unprecedented: It was the first time in American history that the national government established a local law enforcement presence.
“The law also required state and local officials to actively cooperate with capturing fugitives, regardless of whether their states allowed slavery. Beyond that, it deputized ordinary citizens to participate in the hunting by granting marshals the authority to conscript passersby to act as their impromptu assistants. If someone refused to help a marshal catch a fugitive slave, they could be fined up to $1000. Those who interfered with a capture risked half a year in prison.”
In response, abolitionists in Boston formed the Boston Vigilance Committee, which pledged to protect the city’s Black residents from the slave catchers. “They would provide shelter, legal aid, and passage to Canada. They alerted Black neighbors when bounty hunters were spotted in the area. When slave catchers did manage to apprehend people, committee members mounted bold efforts to free the captives,” Greene writes.
He notes that, “Racial profiling was the engine of slave-catching in the 1800s, much as it is the engine of immigration enforcement today.” And there are other echoes of the past in today’s immigration raids, says Greene: “Then, as now, one faction of the country enlisted federal power to enforce a legal regime in such a manner that other jurisdictions found morally repulsive. Then, as now, those defending enforcement claimed their targets posed a threat to public safety, despite evidence to the contrary. Then, as now, the only ‘crime’ most people had committed was not having the correct legal status and documents. And just as watching people get dragged back to slavery turned Boston against the Fugitive Slave Act, watching ICE tear families apart, detain children, teargas and kill people has turned public opinion against the agency, prompting the current administration to threaten sending in soldiers.”
Jacqueline Luqman, an activist and co-founder of the independent Black media outlet Luqman Nation, explores a similar perspective in her article “Continuity of Social Control from Slave Patrols to Policing to ICE,” published in Black Agenda Report. She writes that, “Slave patrols roamed the Southern roads around plantations and where enslaved and free Africans lived (in some cities, the enslaved in urban areas lived in a separate, segregated area rather than on a land-intensive plantation) all day and at night, looking for Black people to stop and demand papers from. These papers proved the free status or the permission to travel of free and enslaved Africans. They broke into and raided free Africans’ homes, stopped Black people on the street in any context and location, and were legally expected to immediately and violently punish those found without papers. But slave patrollers were also known to reject, steal, or destroy papers that were supposed to keep free people from being re-enslaved, and enslaved people from being accused of escaping and being either sold back into slavery for the profit of the slave catcher, or severely punished as a runaway.
“The practice of surveilling, over-policing, randomly stopping, and demanding documentation of Black and Brown people suspected of alleged criminality is not a unique feature of modern policing. These are the tactics established by the slave patrols that shape all aspects of policing today.”
She goes on to say, “When the abolition of slavery led to the formal disbanding of slave patrols, their functions and personnel did not vanish. Their mandate to control the enslaved African population evolved as Black Codes, and then Jim Crow laws, established a new system of economic exploitation to replace slavery across the former Confederacy….The contemporary practices of DHS, ICE, CBP of house-to-house raids, raids of houses of worship, mass detentions, violence against deportees in public and private (including sexual violence and abuse of children), and family separations—draw unmistakable comparisons to the operations of slave patrols and other historical modes of racial control.”
It seems more and more clear that until the US comes to a reckoning with its true history, we are doomed to repeat it.
Bob Lee is a professional journalist, writer and editor, and is co-editor of the People’s Tribune, serving as Managing Editor. He first started writing for and distributing the People’s Tribune in 1980, and joined the editorial board in 1987.
