The Architecture of Removal: Black Immigrants, Disappearance, and the Politics of Survival in the United States

by Amber Butts

Immigration policy in the United States has always enforced racial hierarchy, and the Trump administration further developed an aggressive removal process against Black immigrants. Expanded policing partnerships, broader detention authority, and rhetoric that cast immigrants as criminals and predators created conditions that pushed Black immigrants into detention and deportation at strikingly disproportionate rates. Families and neighborhoods are knocked off their axis and made to go on when a loved one is kidnapped

Black immigrants make up a small share of the undocumented population, roughly 5.4 percent, yet they account for about 20 percent of deportations tied to criminal convictions. These outcomes reflect how immigration enforcement and the criminal legal system operate together. A traffic stop turns up a name, an old charge shows up again, and what started as an ordinary encounter ends in ICE custody; for others, nothing comes up and they are taken just the same.

Not only that, Black immigrants are routinely pushed out of public conversations about immigration. Coverage, policy debates, and even organizing spaces split immigration from Blackness, keeping Black life fixed in enslavement and pushing Black immigrants out of view.

Black immigrants are pushed out of the story, and taking them draws less response. Detention, torture, and solitary confinement are easier to justify when the people most affected are kept out of view. Black people are held at the edge of everything—outside the nation, outside immigrant frameworks.

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Inside detention centers, the routines carry the policy. Black immigrants report longer confinement, harsher treatment, and higher rates of abuse. One former detainee said, “They don’t have any humanity.” Another said, “They just tryna break you.” These accounts align with data showing that Black migrants, though a minority of detainees, generate a disproportionate share of abuse reports, including some of the most severe cases.

Punishment is the point. Detainees describe lights left on around the clock, erasing any sense of time. Pregnant women recount being shackled during transport, denied adequate food and medical care, left to manage pain and complications on their own. Solitary confinement is used often, and it falls hardest on Black migrants.

And so people are transferred without notice, families lose contact, parents miss court dates because they are moved overnight, and children wait by phones that do not ring. It runs on proximity, suspicion, and racialized discretion.

In Minneapolis, a young Somali American man named Mubashir was walking outside to get food when federal immigration officers stopped him. He told them he was a U.S. citizen and offered to show identification. But none of it mattered. He was tackled, forced to the ground, placed in a chokehold, and taken into custody. Hours passed before agents acknowledged his status and released him. Even then, they refused to take him home. They told him to walk.

Folks who’ve been kidnapped—those names pass between people and settle in without needing to be explained, because the kind of attention they call up is already familiar—Black people have long had to read a block before stepping onto it, to notice who lingers, who watches, who has decided something before a word is spoken—and now that attention tightens, routes shifting, pauses stretching at doorways, phones kept close.

Unfamiliar vehicles show up near bus stops, and some children stop going to school, while others sit in class with their phones in their laps, checking for updates and watching for names they recognize as teachers talk about rooms going quiet when sirens pass. Black immigrant youth carry this alongside what is already there—school policing, discipline that falls unevenly, the constant need to read a room before speaking—so hallways, cafeterias, and playgrounds are never neutral. This is fascism. It makes informants out of neighbors, and people call ICE on the family down the block, on the man they saw at the store, on whoever they can name.

After someone is taken, the neighborhood adjusts as people trade fragments—who saw what, what time, which car—while a porch light stays on, a child eats without speaking, and phones are checked again and again for something that does not come. By the next day the shift is visible in what is missing: the person who translated mail for half the block is gone, the cousin who covered late shifts does not show up, adults lower their voices and make plans around who is gone, routes to work change, clinics become places where entry is weighed before stepping inside, and a knock at the door interrupts whatever was happening before it.

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Black and Brown communities have always woven rapid-response networks. They alert families when enforcement begins, sit in courthouses and watch, walk each other’s children to school when unfamiliar vehicles appear, check streets before stepping outside, prepare children for what to do if a parent does not return, track vans, and pass information hand to hand. Mutual-aid groups raise bond funds, deliver food, provide childcare, and keep households steady after someone is pulled into detention. Know-your-rights information circulates through group chats and meetings, carried from one person to the next, keeping people alive and accounted for.

The Black Panther Party organized to defend Black life, and that insistence continues here, as people watch, coordinate, and step in for each other where the state fails them, coaching children, checking streets, tracking vans, sharing updates, and making sure the network holds when the world does not, sustaining care and protection across households, blocks, and neighborhoods.

Changing enforcement priorities cannot undo a system built on racial hierarchy, sustained through surveillance and punishment. Immigration debates that sideline Black immigrants keep the structure intact, treating Black immigrants as peripheral, widening who is harmed, and leaving families to carry the weight of what happens to them.

Black people shape the life of communities across the country—in the work that feeds mouths, delivers messages, translates words, keeps each other counted, keeps each other alive—and if that work were concentrated, if people followed our model instead of letting it be demonized and erased, it would reach every block, every table, every door.

Amber Butts is a Black mama, abolitionist, and advocate for collective freedom and self-determination. Rooted in Oakland, she moves through worlds of play and repair, treating tenderness, nuance, and joy as abolitionist strategies of survival and transformation. Her role as an organizer is guided by expansive, nuanced visions of Blackness that refuse constriction and one-dimensionality. Her work—through cultural strategy, storytelling, and grief practice—carries forward traditions of mutual aid, imagination, and struggle across generations. Amber’s favorite freedom practice is observing how non-human beings organize to confront power and protect one another, lessons that shape her abolitionist commitments and her vision for interdependent futures.