Black Migrants Brace for Intensified ICE Raids and Mass Deportations Under Trump

While discussions about immigration and mass deportations often center around the Mexican border, Black migrants are disproportionately targeted by ICE.

(Screenshot, Boston 25 News)

When the Trump administration announced it was terminating the temporary protective status of the more than 500,000 Haitian migrants as early as Sept. 2, it was a reminder that ICE raids have everything to do with Black people, both migrants and citizens. While a federal judge blocked Trump’s order—which would have prematurely ended a Biden extension of Haitians’ TPS due to political unrest in the country—given the ramping up of ICE raids around the country, no one thinks any of this is over.

When people discuss immigration, they’re usually talking about the Mexican border. In reality, the Trump travel and immigration restrictions disproportionately affect Black migrants the most. And we’re not hearing the stories of Black migrants from Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America and throughout the African diaspora. Their stories are rendered invisible when they are most affected by these depraved white supremacist policies.

Consider Farah Larrieux, a Haitian woman in the country on the TPS program whose life has become “smaller … constrained, awkward and fearful” since Trump’s second term, according to a May 2025 report on African and African-descendant migrants from the Thurgood Marshall Institute of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

“A trip to the grocery store. Going to Mass. Meeting with recent arrivals from her native Haiti, or asking them to meet her. It all suddenly feels too risky for Farah Larrieux,” said the report. “Now that Donald Trump has returned to the Oval Office with a compliant Congress and what he sees as a mandate to purge the nation of an untold number of immigrants like herself, Larrieux only goes where she absolutely must. Work, then home. Drive slowly. Mind the speed limit, Larrieux reminds herself. This is no time to attract any unwanted attention in South Florida.”

What’s getting lost in the current discourse on ICE, immigration and mass deportations is that ICE disproportionately sweeps up Black migrants. According to a 2022 report by Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), Black migrants are 5.4% of undocumented people in the U.S., yet they are 20.3% of those facing possible removal based on criminal convictions. And with Trump’s current war on immigrants, driven by policies fueled by racism and xenophobia, there’s no reason to expect those numbers to change.

According to the Thurgood Marshall Institute, Black migrants are over-targeted in the U.S. and funneled into a “prison-to-deportation pipeline.” Traffic stops drive the overcriminalization and harsher punishment of Black communities in general and Black migrants specifically (BAJI notes that 76% of Black migrants are deported because of contact with police). People who are swept into the ICE system have fewer legal protections than those caught up in the regular criminal justice system. Deportations will only surge with Trump’s executive orders deputizing local police to help the feds.

Black migrant families are being deported and separated—even those in the midst of trying to stay in the U.S. legally. Monique Rodriguez, who came from Jamaica in 2022 on a six-month visa to live with her husband, an American citizen in Florida, was arrested in February for a domestic dispute. Rodriguez, who had just given birth via C-section two weeks earlier and was on medication and facing postpartum depression, was detained by ICE as her husband went to bail her out. Despite her pending green card application, she was sent to an ICE facility in Louisiana, where she met other mothers whose children were ripped from their arms, before being deported to Jamaica.

Unhoused with mental health challenges and prison time, Jermaine Thomas was recently deported to Jamaica, a country he had never visited. Thomas was born on a U.S. Army base—his Jamaican-born, U.S. citizen father was a servicemember, his mother a Kenyan citizen; but being born on a U.S. overseas base does not automatically make you a citizen. Thomas spent most of his life in Texas. According to Thomas, an ICE officer on his deportation flight said, “I don’t have records for more than half of these people. There’s something wrong.”

Jane Eugene of the British R&B group Loose Ends—with hit songs “Slow Down” and “Hangin’ on a String”—has been detained by ICE in Kentucky for three months for overstaying her visa. Eugene, who has lived in the U.S. for decades, was arrested while traveling to Canada and faces deportation and a 10-year ban from the U.S. Her GoFundMe page says the legendary singer suffers from deteriorating health.

Even HBCU alums are vulnerable. Alex Maganda, 30, was arrested by ICE following a routine traffic stop in Dallas and now faces deportation. The Mexican-born, 2018 Morehouse graduate and football player came to America at age 5 under the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program. Maganda’s DACA status recently expired.

Trump is also purging foreign students for exercising free speech and social justice activism. Momodou Taal—a dual British-Gambian citizen and Cornell Africana studies doctoral student—voluntarily left the country after Trump officials revoked his student visa for his pro-Palestinian student activism and ordered him to turn himself in.

The targeting of Black migrants comes as the Trump administration denied visas for the Senegalese national women’s basketball team to enter the U.S. In June, Trump issued a travel ban for a dozen countries, followed by another 36, most of them African nations, including Senegal.

With a $175 billion military-level budget for ICE, mass deportations and detention centers, the purging of Black migrants will continue. ICE is the new paddyrollers, and Alligator Alcatraz in the swamps of Florida is the reincarnation of the prison plantation, where privately owned and operated facilities get rich, and ICE increases arrests to fill the empty beds.

“I’m old enough to remember when Black people were snatched off the streets in this country, because they were Black—not because they committed a crime or [were] suspected of anything—and that was not that long ago,” Rep. Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.) said recently while being denied access to inspect an ICE field office in Baltimore. Well, yesterday is now.