Why Black Americans should support ICE and Deportations 

A response to Travis Claybrooks’s op-ed, “Why Black America can’t be silent on ICE arrests and deportations” in the publication The Tennessean

In his May 21st, 2025 opinion editorial for the The Tennessean, Travis Claybrooks tries to paint a portrait of fear and abuse from ICE toward illegal aliens, and encourages Black Americans not to “feel the pull to look away”. He goes on to connect our experiences with slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration to what illegal immigrants are experiencing now. Ridiculous.  Slavery and deportation are not the same. ICE officers are not slave catchers. Illegal immigrants were not forcibly brought into the country. They chose to break U.S. immigration laws, and they can choose to return home.

As Claybrooks himself states, Black Americans are “still fighting for equity in housing, education, healthcare, and justice.” Well, mass immigration makes all these areas worse. For instance, “immigration growth equal to 1 percent of a city’s population can increase rent by 1%”. Education and healthcare programs have been overwhelmed with the sheer number of people needing these services. Glenn Loury, a professor from Brown University, has the right idea about incarceration, education, and immigration. He stated, “[M]y view is that if these [immigrants] weren’t coming into the workforce, the employers would be so desperate for workers that they would become a lobby on behalf of locking up fewer people, spending more money on education…” Black Americans need to focus on pressuring politicians to lower immigration numbers. 

We can not be concerned with helping illegal immigrants stay in the country when our own neighborhoods are in chaos. Chicago is perpetually dealing with gang violence, crime, and poor education. During the border crisis, migrants were bussed into sanctuary cities and placed in Black neighborhoods. Brian Mullins from the Black American Voters Project sums it up best: 

What message should Black Americans take away from city officials who provide housing, warming buses, showering units, free food, and free medical care to citizens of other nations, when these resources have never been equally accessible to Black Americans? Roy Beck, Founder of NumbersUSA, makes a point about humanitarianism that we should all contemplate. He says, “Helping one category of persons deserving of compassion can UNDERMINE another category also deserving compassion.” The border crisis has exacerbated problems in the Black community and has prompted pushback from grassroot organizations against open border policies. 

Mr. Claybrooks would have Black Americans break with a long history of Black leaders who demanded from their government an immigration policy that served the Black interest, which of course is the American interest. 

W.E.B. DuBois stated that “the stopping of the importing of cheap white labor on any terms has been the economic salvation of American black labor”. A. Philip Randolph stated that we have “immigrant indigestion”. After the largest wave of immigration (legal and illegal) in American history, our communities are once again struggling to absorb a wave of immigration that threatens to push us to the back of the hiring lines.

I agree with Mr. Claybrooks on at least one point. Black Americans should not be silent on ICE arrests and deportations, we should be supporting them. Critics of our enforcement agencies might consider supporting tools like E-Verify that employers use to verify that they are legally hiring. A nationwide E-Verify law would encourage more people who are in the country illegally to leave on their own, and reduce the need for arrests. Mr. Claybrooks should at least acknowledge that without measures like E-Verify, we are completely dependent on ICE to give our immigration policy validity. And for that, we should be grateful.