This is America

They tell us we live in the land of the free. They declare, “we the people,” and we assume they mean us when we were only ever defined – designed – to be the fodder to build their “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.”

On a Thursday, a 2-year-old girl returned home from the store with her father, Elvis Tipan-Echeverria, when unknown, masked agents trespassed onto their driveway and smashed the window in. In the name of defending the pursuit of happiness, she, with her father, was shoved into a car with no car seat and placed on a plane to Texas. This little girl was eventually returned to her mother in Minnesota; her father – still imprisoned in the land of the free.

In the name of liberty, 5-year-old Liam Ramos, with his father, was seized and flown away from his mother and his home to sit in a detention facility in Texas, where his education will halt, his freedom is non-existent, and his pursuit of happiness – denied.

In the name of life, Chaofeng Ge was “found” hanging, dead, in a shower stall in detention, his death declared a suicide though his hands and feet were bound behind his back, a fact evidently not deemed worthy of being initially disclosed. Geraldo Lunas Campos was handcuffed, tackled and choked – murdered – in detention, in an effort to “save” him. Victor Manuel Diaz, too, was “found” dead, a “presumed suicide,” the autopsy – classified.

American voters like to declare that our present reality isn’t “what they voted for,” despite the fact that one of Donald Trump’s campaign promises in the 2024 election was to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” inevitably according to xenophobic and white supremacist lines. What many of us fail to remember is that this is not the first time we have voted for this. Indeed, I am not confident there is any point in American history that we have not collectively voted for this, regardless of so-called “party lines.”

We Have Been Here Before

While the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was founded in 2003, slavery and genocide predated the very Constitution of the United States, the bodies of African Americans and Indigenous Americans brutalized and broken in the service of laying the foundations of (white) American wealth. Though slavery was “abolished” in 1865 by the 13th amendment, this did not end the policing of racialized bodies.

During the Reconstruction era, convict leasing and black codes preserved the conditions and social hierarchy that existed under slavery. Moreover, any legal rights afforded Black Americans were and still are persistently undermined by their inferior social caste, whereby their deaths and suffering at the hands of law enforcement, the healthcare system and other Americans often goes unprosecuted and/or unpunished.

Within WWII-era Japanese internment camps, inmates were stripped of their freedom to move, subjected to harsh living conditions and coerced to partake in underpaid, unprotected labor.

The Lucrative Business of Slavery and its Bipartisan Profiteers

To this day, the prison system remains a potent vestige of slavery, again for the sake of profit, as inmates’ human rights are systematically liquidated. As early as the 1980s, the federal government has contracted for-profit prison corporations to operate federal detention facilities. Today, over 90% of ICE detention facilities are operated by for-profit prison corporations as of 2023, a figure which increased from 79% within Biden’s presidency alone.

These trends, in conjunction with the ongoing mass detainments of America’s people of color, are not surprising when we consider the immense profits our politicians and some Americans stand to gain, made possible by the continuous enslavement of racialized bodies.

Our bodies are their profit.

Under the Voluntary Work Program, forced carceral labor is codified, whereby detainees are to receive “monetary compensation of not less than $1.00 per day of work completed,” their “voluntary” labor absolving them of legal employee protections, such as minimum wage. And although ICE affirms that “all detention facilities shall comply with all applicable health and safety regulations and standards,” there is confusion as to how these standards are checked, especially when we consider the Trump administration closed the DHS’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in March 2025.

Nevertheless, several lawsuits and detainee testimonies attest to the fact that the work program is rarely voluntary, the survival of themselves and the facilities imprisoning them hinging upon their labor and minimal income. Indeed, many detainees are expected to purchase their own basic products, such as toilet paper and soap. Other detainees recall being threatened with solitary confinement, poorer living conditions and material punishment if they refused to work. Martha Gonzalez was denied access to sanitary pads when she requested a day off work, demonstrative of a larger pattern of ICE’s refusal to provide hygiene products and spaces to maintain one’s hygiene in a dignified manner.

In 2023, GEO Group, one of the largest for-profit prison corporations, made over $2.4 billion in revenue, of which ICE, as their largest customer, accounted for 43%, or $1.04 million. ICE also accounted for 30% of CoreCivic’s – another large for-profit prison corporation – revenue. Thus, our bodies enable these companies to amass hundreds of millions in profit.

Incidentally, CoreCivic and GEO Group are among the private prison companies that contribute the most to political campaigns, parties and candidates. In the 2024 election cycle, GEO Group gave $3.7 million in contributions, including $1 million to Make America Great Again Inc, while CoreCivic provided roughly $785,000 in contributions. While Republican candidates and committees have been the recipient of the large majority of these funds in recent years, Democrats and the Democratic Party are also guilty of accepting funding from these corporations, among others. In the 2024 cycle, CoreCivic contributed $50,000 to the Democratic Lieutenant Governors Association and Kamala Harris received $9,500 from GEO Group.

The opportunities for profit extend even further beyond the U.S.’s borders as more and more nations are gradually entering deals to imprison noncitizen deportees coming from the U.S. In November, $7.5 million was paid out to Equatorial Guinea for this purpose. Alongside other Latin American countries like Costa Rica and El Salvador, Argentina is also rumored to strike their own deal with the U.S.

Our bodies are their profit.

The ongoing ICE campaign stands as a bipartisan issue, mirroring the ways our country’s deepest social inequalities have been repeatedly upheld on all sides of the political aisle throughout our history.

The Occupied Mind and Body

Moreover, the policing of racialized bodies does not merely pertain to the body alone as a site to be moved and removed. Rather, this violence is also waged in our social spaces, in our fears and inside of our bodies.

In the classroom, our curriculums hardly, if at all, represent a version of events where we existed and meanwhile the current administration actively tries to erase any part of history we are given a claim to. Such initiatives, too, have been supported for generations, reflected in the 150-year period Indigenous American and Hawaiian children were forcibly taken from their homes and sent to boarding schools designed to facilitate their assimilation and more seamless theft of their native lands.

In our social spaces and lives – if not yet brutally taken – liberty and the pursuit of happiness is not ours for the taking. We are perpetually told under what conditions our movement is permissible. Decades of redlining have, in many ways, preserved segregation and pooled the best resources for the white and the wealthy to the detriment of communities of color.

But even this is not enough.

They police us from the inside, too. In exchange for gifts like food and photographs of her daughter, a Nicaraguan woman was subjected to have sex with a now former ICE officer whilst in detention. A “romantic relationship,” according to federal prosecutors. Our suffering is still romanticized even when guilt has been assigned. What they still do not realize is that there is no place for romance to reside so long as we remain shackled, our bodies – looted.

From the inside, they forcibly remove our reproductive organs, then and now. Many of us were among the 70,000 forcibly sterilized in the 20th-century, deemed “unfit” to reproduce. As we speak, 32% of surgeries performed in ICE detention facilities are performed without proper authorization, and there are reports of mass hysterectomies being exacted behind closed doors.

They dictate our movements, lock us up, take our insides out, inject their fantasies onto and into our bodies, deprive us of our right to learn and to work and to live. And even if they have not yet come bounding at our doorstep, we lie anxiously in wait for the moment our past may catch up with us and seep, once again, back into our present.

And yet, they have the audacity to say that it is by our hands that we are dying; that if only we had lived and loved differently, things wouldn’t be this way. In the name of safety and peace, they force our bodies into hiding or otherwise out onto the streets, despite the fact that only 5% of us have been implicated in a violent crime. In the name of safety, they drag a half-naked ChongLy Thao into snow-covered streets for existing, in their eyes, incorrectly; that is, non-whitely. In the name of safety, a one-year-old and her father are pepper-sprayed in the eyes whilst sitting in their car at the wrong time.

Dismantling the Oppressor to Dismantle Oppression

For all the state’s claims that a “war on crime” is being waged, it has always been and remains a war against our bodies, the means with which they wish to realize ICE’s utopic “Amazon Prime for human beings.” Similarly, the War on Drugs only ever served to terrorize our communities, to lock up and exploit our bodies. Meanwhile, this matter of “crime” never dissipated. For centuries, they tell us that it is our fault – our heinous “crimes” – that we are stripped of our families and our dignity. Meanwhile, politicians of all parties and colors have sat idle even while claiming to bear our interests to heart. We forget that they hold their money closer.

And, not so unlike the slave catchers recruited and paid out to return runaway slaves to their owners, so, too, it is we who are being recruited and paid out to bind and beat one another, to tease out the “other.” That is, unless we bring ourselves to see ourselves not only in the “other,” but in the ones dragging our tired feet across the pavement, forcing our bodies into further submission, pulling the trigger – all whilst looking us dead in the eye.

It was James Baldwin who said, “Everyone you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.”

Whilst the money and military might of the state and the oppressive systems that prop it up are, no doubt, daunting, their power is nevertheless maintained by individual choices made in the service of oppression and possession, as opposed to liberation. However, it is also important to remember that other individual choices are the reason we remain today, more free than before even if that freedom may be incomplete. Thus, just as individual choices have the power to oppress, so, too, individual choices have the power to resist oppression; to hold our people in check; to liberate.

Only through our decision to not become the monster we fear do we have any hope of collective liberation.