How Trump’s Immigration Crusade Is Endangering Black Americans

After what began as a routine traffic stop in Georgia, U.S. Army veteran Godfrey Wade was arrested, transferred to a facility in Louisiana and shipped to a country he hadn’t known in 50 years.

Roderick Johnson, 67, a black American citizen, found himself tied up and left outside for hours after Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents broke down the door to his apartment and many others in an apartment building in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood.

And while driving in Minnesota, a US couple from Illinois underwent an ICE traffic stop during which the driver had to show identification and can be heard saying they are a US citizen.

Harassment by law enforcement, traffic stops gone wrong, and the use of what are essentially arrest warrants are not foreign tactics to many black people living in America. But under President Donald Trump’s sweeping anti-immigration campaign, culpable agents have expanded to include Customs and Border Patrol agents and ICE. Black Americans, particularly those who have been convicted of crimes or participate in political dissent, are at risk of being drawn into Trump’s migration net. The Trump administration has even threatened its political enemies with the prospect of denaturalization. As the administration dilutes civil rights, including through Supreme Court-approved policies like “Kavanaugh Stops,” which allows federal immigration agents to engage in racial profiling, activists and constitutional law scholars told TPM that the overlap of street policing and immigration enforcement poses unique risks to Black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved here.

On the campaign trail, Trump and his allies pledged to implement an aggressive and unprecedented deportation program. Tom Homan, current White House border czar and former Trump ICE chief, bragged about the July 2024 operation.

“Trump will come back in January — I’ll be hot on his heels when he comes back,” Homan told attendees at the National Conservatism Conference. “And I will lead the largest deportation operation this country has ever seen.”

Since then, the administration, through a dizzying wave of actions, has laid the groundwork for undermining civil rights in America, including the rights of naturalized citizens. (It has gone so far that Homan has now been sent to control ICE, presented as a voice of moderation.) Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in February 2025 that they were evaluating their ability to deport nonimmigrant Americans convicted of crimes to foreign prisons. The president doubled down on his push to deport citizens convicted of crimes in April.

“If it’s a local criminal, I have no problem,” Trump told reporters during a meeting with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in the Oval Office. “If we can do that, that’s good. And I’m talking about violent people. I’m talking about really bad people. Really bad people. Just as bad as the ones that are coming.”

That should especially ring alarm bells for black people, said Karla McKanders, director of the Thurgood Marshall Institute at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Black people are about twice as likely to be searched during traffic stops as any other racial group, according to 2022 Bureau of Justice Statistics data analyzed by the Prison Policy Initiative. Black people are disproportionately more likely to be incarcerated than white people. And black people are 7.5 times more likely to be wrongly convicted of murder than white people, according to the National Registry of Exonerations.

McKanders has studied what she calls the prison-to-deportation process and has shown that black immigrants are much more likely to be subject to traffic stops and subsequent immigration enforcement. Thanks to the Kavanaugh decisions, named after Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and allowing federal law enforcement to engage in racial profiling, Black Americans can be arrested simply for being Black, regardless of their immigration status.

“Black descendants of slaves should be concerned because the same type of pipeline that is disproportionately affected by traffic stops applies to all black people,” McKanders told TPM.

Trump also ordered federal law enforcement to investigate left-wing advocacy groups that the administration classified as domestic terrorist organizations, which experts said was “a clear pattern for going after political enemies.”

And the administration has also repeatedly discussed a denaturalization campaign, including in a June DOJ memo that considered targeting people “who pose a potential danger to national security,” a dangerously broad classification under an administration that has expanded definitions of terrorism to punish Trump’s opposition.

“[I]“If this administration can label anyone a domestic terrorist and say that a domestic terrorist is not entitled to due process, then that could not only erode that person’s rights, but also put them in danger,” said Timothy Welbeck, a professor of constitutional law and African American studies at Temple University. “If someone doesn’t have due process, anyone could be labeled a criminal, their rights could be violated, and they could disappear, and that should concern all of us.”

Heather Wills is deputy executive director of the Workers Center for Racial Justice in Chicago, the city where black Americans were rounded up alongside Latino immigrants by ICE agents who descended on an apartment complex in the middle of the night. She said any idea that black community organizations are fighting a separate fight from immigrant communities is a myth.

“Our struggles are parallel, our struggles are intersectional, and we have always defended the constitutional and human rights of all people,” Wills said.

DC is another example, said Amaha Kassa, executive director and founder of African Communities Together. Last summer, the nation’s capital saw National Guard troops flood black neighborhoods and pursue residents in encounters posted on social media. Kassa said the presence of federal law enforcement, whether Guard troops or ICE agents, shows the intersection between issues that have long plagued Black communities and immigration law enforcement seeking to change the interpretation of the U.S. Constitution.

“I think we could not have predicted how reckless and lawless the use of executive power was,” Kassa said. “And certainly,” he later added, “they are aggressively seeking to denaturalize people who may have had contact with the criminal justice system. There is clearly a risk of denaturalization and removal of citizenship from people who have criminal convictions.”

Trump’s attempt to revoke the citizen’s birthright is another looming concern for Black Americans. The January 20, 2025, executive order contrasted the 14th Amendment’s protections against “exclusion of persons of African descent from eligibility for U.S. citizenship solely on the basis of their race” with children born to undocumented parents or parents with legal temporary residence in the United States.

Almost as soon as Trump issued his order, it was met with an avalanche of legal challenges, eventually becoming the subject of a class-action lawsuit filed by groups including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The Supreme Court will hear arguments in the birthright to citizenship case in April.

In response to a TPM inquiry, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said the executive order “would not apply retroactively” and aims to remove the citizenship guarantee for the children of undocumented immigrants. “This is an absurd argument made in bad faith by partisan actors seeking to attack the administration’s efforts to safeguard American citizenship,” Jackson said. “The Government’s position is that the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment was expressly designed to ensure that slaves and their descendants were guaranteed citizenship and that it did not guarantee citizenship to the children of illegal aliens.”

But experts say revoking any part of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship protections is a slippery slope for generational U.S. citizens, including Black Americans whose naturalization is only guaranteed under that amendment.

“To begin to question the supreme law of the land, which has always been what it is, raises a lot of concerns,” Nkechi James-Gillman, an immigration lawyer based in Minnesota, told TPM. “Because if this one is compromised, what else?