The United States insists it cannot afford housing, jobs, or care. Yet it can always afford cages. Immigration enforcement is not a response to crisis; it is a budgetary preference. Billions are reliably available to detain, transport, and deport people, even as Black communities are told to be patient, resilient, and fiscally realistic.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement—ICE—embodies that choice. Its budget has ballooned over two decades, underwriting detention centers, surveillance technologies, transportation contracts, and a growing enforcement workforce. This spending does not meaningfully enhance public safety. It sustains an enforcement economy—private detention operators, logistics firms, and surveillance contractors—that profits from fear and instability.
Every dollar spent on ICE is not merely unavailable elsewhere; it is taken away from housing stabilization, workforce development, mental health care, violence interruption, and youth employment. Scarcity is not the problem. Priorities are.
ICE’s economic function is as important as its legal one. Immigration enforcement operates as a labor-control strategy. By making workers deportable, raids and threats suppress wages, fracture organizing, and discipline entire industries—construction, food processing, care work, hospitality—where Black and immigrant workers are concentrated. A workforce that can be removed cannot bargain.
This does not create jobs for Black workers. It does the opposite. When wages are pushed down at the bottom, Black workers are pulled down too. Employers benefit from fear; workers absorb the loss. Immigration crackdowns don’t lift Black employment—they weaken bargaining power and call it order.
The claim that ICE does not affect Black people collapses under scrutiny. Black immigrants—particularly African and Caribbean—are disproportionately detained and deported, often because minor criminal records shaped by racially biased policing become removal triggers. Detention is longer. Bond is less likely. Civil immigration law borrows the harshest tools of the criminal legal system and applies them selectively.
Black Americans recognize this system because we have lived under its predecessors. Long before ICE, the state developed mechanisms to control movement, suppress resistance, and protect an economic order built on exploitation. Slave patrols enforced racial boundaries and labor discipline. After emancipation, vagrancy laws and convict leasing carried the work forward. In the twentieth century, mass incarceration normalized punishment as policy. ICE belongs squarely in this lineage.
The uniforms have changed. The logic has not.
And that logic does not remain neatly contained. Enforcement systems always expand beyond their stated targets. In Minnesota, ICE agents broke into the home of ChongLy Scott Thao, a 56-year-old Asian American man and U.S. citizen, dragged him outside in his underwear in freezing weather, and detained him for nearly an hour. He was returned with no charges, no explanation, and no apology. This was not a clerical error. It was a demonstration of power.
Black Americans recognize this move immediately. We know what happens when suspicion overrides citizenship, when force precedes explanation, and when the state decides accountability is optional. History teaches us that unchecked state power—especially when fueled by rumor, fear, and racialized suspicion—rarely stops with its first target.
This expansion becomes even more dangerous when enforcement collides with dissent. In Minneapolis, the killing of legal observer Renée Good during an ICE operation sparked protest and public criticism of federal tactics. The federal response—scrutiny of officials who spoke out—sent a familiar message: criticize enforcement and expect retaliation. Protest becomes threat. Speech becomes suspect.
Black communities have heard this warning before. From civil-rights marches to protests against police violence, Black political expression has repeatedly been met with surveillance and discipline. Immigration enforcement is simply the latest arena where that muscle is being exercised.
The scale of this system matters. ICE now employs roughly 22,000 officers and agents, up from about 17,000 at its creation in 2003. Budgets exceed $10 billion annually, with tens of billions more authorized for detention, deportation, transportation, and surveillance. Roughly 70,000 people are detained at any given time, most with no criminal conviction. Meanwhile, Black communities are told there is no money—for housing, jobs, schools, or health care. No money to uplift people, but plenty for punishment, including large signing bonuses to rapidly expand enforcement capacity without commensurate accountability.
This is not inevitability. It is choice. A nation that funds removal more readily than repair is not preserving order—it is enforcing hierarchy. ICE’s budget tells us exactly who this country is willing to invest in and who it is willing to endanger, dispossess, or disappear. Black communities recognize this pattern because we have survived it before. Power exercised without accountability never stops on its own.
