Papers, Please, Again: ICE, Surveillance and Black America

In January, on a cold evening in Portland, Maine, a cell phone captured a Black man being pinned and handcuffed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. He was shouting to be told what was happening. He was a Cumberland County corrections officer recruit, cleared to work in the United States, with what Sheriff Kevin Joyce called a "squeaky clean" record. Joyce called the arrest "bush league." The man had done everything the system asks. It didn't matter.

His case is not an outlier. In 2026, ICE has become one of the most visible arms of federal power in Black America. It stops Black citizens, floods Black cities and, as new court filings show, spies on the community groups that try to protect them.

Stopped for Being Black

ProPublica has counted more than 500 cases of immigration agents holding U.S. citizens during the current crackdown, more than a hundred of them held after agents questioned whether they were citizens at all. Many are Black.

In Illinois this September, ICE agents mistook a Black U.S. citizen for a fugitive and pinned him to the pavement while he kept telling them who he was. He was injured before they let him go. In Chicago in October 2025, a Black man said agents held him during a late-night neighborhood raid even after he offered proof of citizenship. "They're not checking IDs," he said. In Minneapolis, Mubashir Hussein, a 20-year-old Somali American citizen, told Congress that agents refused to look at his ID at all.

For Black Americans, none of this is new. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 let federal agents seize Black people on a claim and denied them the right to testify in their own defense. Free Black Northerners carried "free papers" because their skin was treated as evidence against them. The demand to prove you belong has a long history in this country, and it has always fallen hardest on Black people.

Cities Under Occupation

The detentions follow the deployments. Since 2025, federal forces and ICE surges have moved into Washington, D.C., Memphis, Atlanta, Charlotte, New Orleans, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, Newark and other cities, according to Brookings. Most of them are majority-Black or home to large Black communities.

In Memphis, a city that is more than 60 percent Black, the federal task force has made more than 4,000 arrests and more than 48,000 traffic stops, according to the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, which documented the targeting of Black and Brown residents. In New Orleans, "Swamp Sweep" brought about 250 federal border agents into the city in December with a goal of roughly 5,000 arrests. The Vera Institute found that every so-called crime-fighting National Guard deployment has come with a surge in immigration enforcement, and that the deployments are not making people safer.

One Community, Many Origins

Black America is not one thing, and ICE does not treat it as one. Roughly one in ten Black Americans is an immigrant, and about one in five is an immigrant or the child of one, many of them from Jamaica, Haiti, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Somalia. Their homes, mosques, churches and shops sit beside those of U.S.-born Black families and Latino neighbors.

Columbus, Ohio, shows what that means. The city has the second-largest Somali community in the country, woven into its Black neighborhoods. In December, days after President Trump said "the Somalis are ripping off the country," ICE launched "Operation Buckeye" in Columbus and across Ohio, reporting more than 280 arrests in a single week. Somali-owned shops emptied. "I'm scared to go outside," one resident told The Guardian. The same is true elsewhere. Minneapolis is home to the nation's largest Somali community, beside the city's historic Black Northside and Southside. The Washington, D.C., area has the country's largest Ethiopian community, alongside one of America's most storied Black cities. Atlanta draws Nigerian, Jamaican and Haitian families into a majority-Black metro, and in Chicago, Black and Latino neighborhoods share the South and West Sides. All four have seen federal surges. When agents sweep a shared neighborhood, they do not stop to sort citizen from immigrant, African-born from U.S.-born. Black skin becomes the reason to ask for papers.

The pattern is clear. Calling it immigration enforcement doesn't change the fact that Black neighborhoods are being policed by a federal force with fewer limits and less accountability than city police.

Watching the Defenders

When communities organized to protect their neighbors, the government started watching them too. On October 28, WIRED reported that court filings in the federal "Minnesota 15" prosecution show Homeland Security Investigations sent more than 120 agents, including 11 undercover, into the Twin Cities to infiltrate community-defense networks that grew up during Operation Metro Surge. The operation used Reaper drones, Patriot Act tools and undercover operatives in churches. Defense attorneys and former officials have compared it to COINTELPRO.

That comparison should stop every Black reader cold. COINTELPRO, the FBI's program from 1956 to 1971, targeted Martin Luther King Jr., the Black Panther Party, SNCC and dozens of Black organizations with wiretaps, informants and forged letters. Its stated goal, in Hoover's own memos, was to prevent the rise of a Black "messiah" and to "discredit, disrupt and destroy" Black movements. The Church Committee exposed it in 1976, and Congress promised it would never happen again.

Churches, block clubs and rapid-response phone trees are the same institutions Black communities have always used to survive state violence. Planting undercover agents inside them repeats the history that the FBI files at UC Berkeley document in detail.

Why It Matters

Each of these pieces makes the others possible. Federal surges make it routine for armed agents to stop Black people on city streets. Questioning citizenship turns Black skin back into grounds for suspicion. Surveillance of community defenders punishes the people who document abuse and push back. Together they form a system, and Black Americans have seen this system before, under the Fugitive Slave Act, under Jim Crow and under COINTELPRO.

The answer has always come from organized Black communities: the vigilance committees that hid freedom seekers, the civil rights lawyers who won in court, the activists whose files are only now being read. The corrections recruit in Maine, the man on the Illinois pavement and the church volunteers in Minneapolis are part of that line. Their stories need to be told while they are happening, not fifty years from now in an archive.