Slave Patrols & ICE Agents – Two Similar ‘Policing’ Groups Split Decades Apart

Recently, our government hasn’t really felt like the democracy it should be. With Trump as our president pushing bad decision after bad decision and following that up with terrible lies and cover ups, it’s started to feel like we’re living under an authoritarian government. Especially when you consider how Trump’s managed to change states who have been permanently red states, such as Texas which has been red for quite a while, into blue states with how bad of a president he’s been. And the main source of his power, in which he retains through fear, he gains through his personal army: ICE.

ICE, aka US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, stated that their mission is to “protect America through criminal investigations and enforcing immigration laws to preserve national security and public safety.” However, since ICE has had Trump’s full support after he was unfortunately re-elected into office, their agenda has since become corrupted. They have been abusing their power for a while now. Arresting and pulling over random people just based on if they ‘look’ like an immigrant, beating those who they deem ‘noncompliant’, and even going as far as to kill these people. Only weeks ago an ICE agent fatally shot Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a Mexican national who lived in the U.S. for decades. He is at least the 8th person to die in this immigration enforcement campaign being pushed by the Trump Administration. The ICE agent who shot him was not charged, similar to the results of many of these abuses of power made by ICE. And then the nefarious actions they commit to the over 70,000 people , in which 70% of them have no criminal record and 95% of them have never been convicted of a violent crime, they capture within their detention centers and being allowed to get away with these actions is even worse as they sexually assault, rape, beat, and torture the ‘immigrants’ within their hold and get to get away scot free. Especially since the media is forced to stay silent about this information so ICE doesn’t look even worse than it already does.

These ICE agents being allowed to get away with their crimes is very much so largely due to the support they receive from the Trump administration. This support was made pretty much clear from the get go, especially since the Deputy White House Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller has told ICE agents that they are legally protected from prosecution, meaning that local officials are not allowed to arrest them. Plus, they are allowed to be fully masked, not have to identify themselves to people, and are allowed to drive in unmarked cars.

It is not having to identify themselves as ICE that is widely considered the biggest problem. It leads to a lot of mishandling and misunderstandings of different situations as these people who ICE have pulled over from their perspective are dealing with masked gunmen whose motives are completely unclear. It leads to an immediate fight or flight response as they face what they think is certain death, which almost certainly leads to violence being used against them. It’s like an intended cycle of viciousness, most meant to further push their idea of ‘all immigrants being bad’ and lead to less public backlash. It’s an agenda that’s been being pushed, but that has also already been realized and called out. However, our government simply refuses to come together to get rid of their rotten roots.

But this isn’t the first time that our government hasn’t felt like a democracy. Back when slavery was still rampant in the South, abolitionists in the North worked tirelessly to help free enslaved people and abolish slavery for the whole country. Then, the Fugitive Slave Act was passed on September 18, 1850, and their efforts were not only mostly made obsolete, but their prior wins practically all vanished. And legalized by this new law was Slave Patrols. A group of individuals who acted as private ‘militias’ in a way as they would let people from the South hire them to catch self-emancipated enslaved people or to simply kidnap freed Black people in order to fuel their waning workforce.

Slave patrols were first formed in 1704 in South Carolina. They would last over 150 years and would ‘technically’ end with the abolishment of slavery. However, their influence would not necessarily die out with the death of their legality as groups like the KKK with similar goals would work to reverse the action of freeing enslaved people by terrorizing them. The methods Slave patrols used to re-obtain Self-emancipated and freed men included beating, punishing, and overall terrorizing the Black population to try and force them into submission. It didn’t help that, because of the Fugitive Slave Act, a lot of people were forced to be compliant and even help aid Slave patrol in kidnapping these people.

These actions sound so similar to ICE’s current actions. They are both targeting a specific group of people and attempting to terrorize them by committing awful acts to them. Their ultimate goals are both to capture people of this specific group, although ICE’s plan for them afterwards does differentiate. And they are both being helped by the government to allow them to continue operating without being able to be stopped. It’s insane to think about how these two ‘policing’ groups can operate so similarly despite being decades apart and how they can have both had similar goals and been supported similarly by the government. Especially when you take into consideration the fact that our governments democratic systems should have improved and advanced with passing time, not stay stagnant. The government should not still be in a state where they let racial hate guide their decisions and cloud their judgment with how they interact with who is supposed to be their people.