Black Immigrants in the United States Face Racism and Criminalization

I was a 16-year-old undocumented kid during my first encounter with police in New York City. It was 2011, one of the peak years of Stop and Frisk, the policy, since then ruled unconstitutional, that allowed officers to stop, interrogate, and search anyone under “reasonable suspicion.” Under this policy, between 2004 and 2012, more than 80% of those stopped were Black and Latinx people. In 2011, 88% of the 605,328 stops were of people who did not commit a crime. The data only confirms what my friends and I had always been told: Cops would find a way to stop us at some point, simply because they could. Still wearing our school backpacks and cracking jokes over shared sunflower seeds, we were nothing but a couple of kids hanging out on the steps of our junior high school. That day, when my friends and I were charged with loitering for sitting outside as we had done countless times growing up, we were the ideal targets for police officers to fulfill the quotas that the New York Police Department illegally enforced. But I wasn’t just growing up Black during one of the most over-policed periods in New York City’s history. I was also undocumented — a fear to which few of my friends could relate. My Blackness made me a low-hanging fruit for potential arrest, which, in my case, also meant possible deportation. This is how my journey to citizenship in the U.S differs from that of non-Black immigrants. As the world witnessed the discrimination against Black immigrants fleeing war in Ukraine, they correctly labeled it racism. For me, it mirrored my lived and living experience in the United States and how my right to safety has been deprioritized because of my Blackness. Immigrants from majority Black and brown countries seeking protection have spent months and in some cases years waiting to be granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS). Yet the U.S. granted Ukraine TPS with the swiftness of the wind. TPS is a temporary status that protects immigrants from designated countries from deportation and grants them authorization to legally work in the United States. The U.S. decision means Ukrainian immigrants already living here have permission to reside and work legally and won’t be forced to return to their home country because of unsafe conditions there. So many Black immigrants don’t have those rights or protections. And while we wait, we find ourselves uniquely vulnerable to persecution by law enforcement, in addition to more subtle forms of racism. Growing up in the Bronx and realizing the fatality of police encounters with Black people, immigrant or not, I tried to stay under the radar. But my efforts didn’t stop the police from coming into contact with me. Ironically, my next encounter came when I was a college graduate with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice with a background in criminology. By that point, I was also a green card holder on a formal path to citizenship that TPS recipients aren’t granted. I knew my rights, but it did not matter. A friend and I had stayed in a park after the park’s closing time, unbeknownst to us or to the two white men who were drinking beer on the bench next to us. We spotted a patrol car approaching the area where we sat. “Imagine we are actually in trouble,” I jokingly told my friend under my breath — a joke pregnant with premonition. After they briefly talked to the officers, the white men stood up to leave. My friend and I looked at each other in anticipation. I know we both felt it in our stomachs: that familiar feeling of powerlessness and underlying rage that Black people feel when discrimination laughs in our face, knowing no one and nothing can come to our rescue. The officers loomed over us while they asked, “Do you have any weapons on you tonight? Do you have any drugs we should be aware of? Any arrest warrants?” We quietly shook our heads and handed them our IDs. As they took our IDs back to the patrol car to check if we had outstanding warrants, my friend and I stood there in trepidation. I was reeling at how much the officers’ demeanor changed during their interaction with us. So when I eventually pointed out how the white men were also at the park and allowed to leave, the police officers threatened to arrest me. Because I knew that green card holders and legal permanent residents with criminal convictions are still at risk of deportation — and that Black immigrants in particular are much more likely to end up in deportation proceedings due to criminal history — there was not much I could do to stand up against the blatant racism my friend and I were experiencing. We knew that neither the criminal justice system nor the immigration system was going to protect us. That night, the New York Police Department charged me with “Failure to Comply with Directions of Police Officer” instead of the violation they stated we broke of being in the park after it closed. This charge haunted me all the way to my citizenship interview six years later and threatened my prospect of obtaining citizenship. These racist encounters with police happened fairly often to my loved ones, too. They account for the ways in which Black immigrants are often placed in danger of deportation by the police and how a disproportionate number of Black immigrants are detained and deported on criminal grounds compared to non-Black immigrants. Wherever Black people dare to immigrate we receive similar treatment. We see this in the way Ukraine and neighboring countries deprioritized the safety of Black immigrant students, leaving them stranded in a war zone instead of allowing them to return home. This intentional choice to ignore the safety and livelihood of Black people trickles down from the institutions we have been conditioned to respect. Anti-Blackness is global and discrimination is institutionalized. Black immigrant-led organizations have fought for years to secure TPS for predominantly Black countries, organizing, advocating, and petitioning for countries like Cameroon, Ethiopia, and Mauritania, which are in ongoing crisis. Immigrants from those countries seeking status have been repeatedly overlooked. Yet it took just seven days after Russia’s invasion for the United States to offer TPS to Ukrainians in the country. Black immigrants need the same protection that Ukrainians do. Our lived experiences, rooted in racism and criminalization, have left wounds that reopen every time another Black immigrant, no matter where they are, is mistreated, harassed, or killed based on race and immigration status. Visit us for more information at: http://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/index.html