From Slave Patrols to ICE: Scholars Say America’s Immigration Crackdown Has Deep Roots

Under the Trump administration, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has received $85 billion in funding, making it the most-funded law enforcement agency in the country. Americans have seen masked ICE agents crackdown on immigrant communities — illegally infiltrating places once considered safe zones, detaining residents in broad daylight, and murdering  Minneapolis residents Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good. 

But, scholars Angelo Guisado of the Center for Constitutional Rights and SUNY New Paltz Professor Weldon McWilliams say the violence Americans are witnessing right now is not merely a product of the Trump administration, but is actually deeply rooted in American history — going back to this country’s creation. 

History of ICE

The origins of ICE as an agency itself can be traced to 9/11. In response to the attacks, Congress passed the Homeland Security Act of 2002, which established the Department of Homeland Security and the three agencies under it — ICE, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

Guisado, who specializes in immigration rights, said that what this act did, at significant cost, is end the preexisting Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) and replace it with a system that divided immigration processing and enforcement into two distinct branches. 

“With those two things in mind, you can start to see that as opposed to a kind of a civil enforcement agency charged with deciding who can come in and outta the country, processing visas and things like that, you have a pretty violent police arm that’s all of a sudden now charged with immigration enforcement. There’s an adage — if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and I think that really informs how ICE has transformed.”

That is not to say that the INS was perfect — far from it. Under the Clinton administration, Guisado says INS enforcement rates went up 900%. Furthermore, as a means of addressing crime and immigration, Clinton would pass a pair of immigration laws — the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) — that set the stage for expanding the incarceration of immigrants, deportation without due process and local police and ICE collaborations. 

Looking Deeper Into Historical Roots

Guisado says some of the aggressive tactics of ICE can be traced back even further through three historical issues — militia violence at the expanding borders of the United States, the creation of slave patrols and the Fugitive Slave Act and the advent of “Juan Crow” laws, which paralleled Jim Crow in the South. 

Looking at white militia violence at the borders may not seem like an accurate parallel — ICE is an established agency of the federal government, while private militias were not. However, Guisado said that militias actually played a crucial role in establishing the borders of the United States and displacing Indigenous peoples in the process. 

“Back at the nation’s founding, the borders were a little fuzzy, and going into the 19th century, there really wasn’t one singular federal agency that was charged with that,” Guisado explained. “In fact, there were very few immigration laws because the idea that they had borders was still kind of an amorphous concept. They were constantly negotiating or outright stealing from native peoples and especially Mexico, so the United States relied upon private militias and individual citizens to execute that vision.”

Either indirectly or directly sanctioned by the government, white militias were vital in violently displacing the Indigenous peoples and Mexicans already living at what would become the southern border of the United States. According to Guisado, this process of securing land under the notion of Manifest Destiny reveals that the borders that the Trump administration and the United States has worked to secure against immigrants is, in reality, the product of their own violence and a narrative switch happened as to where Indigenous people would become the aliens in their own home. 

Alongside expropriating Indigenous people’s lands, white militias were also essential in their de facto function as slave patrols, capturing escaped enslaved people and forcing them back into slavery. Black and brown scholars and activists have increasingly called back to these slave patrols as precursors to ICE in their restriction of Black people’s movement, their violent tactics and lack of due process. Early iterations of these slave patrols, Guisado says, included the Texas Rangers. Starting out as an ad-hoc group of ten men in 1823, they worked to maintain slavery in Texas and were the inspiration for what would become Border Patrol. 

“One of the primary tasks of the Early Texas Rangers, in addition to the ethnic cleansing of native peoples from the area, was actually to go and capture escaped slaves on what became known as the reverse underground railroad. Slaves would escape southward into Mexico where slavery had been abolished many years earlier, and the Texas Rangers would go into Mexican territory and bring back slaves.”

The Fugitive Slave Act

The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 would then come to legally order the recapture and deportation of enslaved people back to the South. The federal government worked with slave catchers, who carried out rogue operations with little oversight, and the act further reshaped the judicial system in favor of slavery. When a case was brought to them, magistrates were paid $10 if they ruled a person should be returned to enslavement, but only $5 if they ruled they should remain free. 

Professor McWilliams, chair of one of the oldest Black Studies departments in the country at SUNY New Paltz, said the very term “Fugitive” parallels what we’re seeing today with ICE — the criminalization of Black and brown communities in the name of this violence. 

“The terminology ‘Fugitive Slave Act,’ it already puts in a description of who it is that you’re looking for, or who it is they want you to believe they’re looking for,” McWilliams said. “Because the assumption is the enslaved African does not have the right to be free. The enslaved African does not have the right to look or search for freedom and to escape from its oppressive state as an enslaved African — when in essence the real fugitives and the real criminals are the ones who sought to continue an unjust system.”

And while the act was targeted towards formerly enslaved people, in reality, it meant any Black American was at risk, McWilliams said. 

“Things like the Fugitive Slave Act. had put some free Africans into the institution of enslavement,” McWilliams explained. “ICE is [also] moving in a way where, under the orders of this administration, they are racially profiling folks who they believe look like they don’t belong here, which is a  much bigger question. What does that mean? How do you look like you do not belong here?”

“Juan Crow” Laws

Fast forward to the early 20th century, the Jim Crow South paralleled what Guisado refers to as the “Juan Crow” laws along the U.S.-Mexico border that grew out of the United States’ capture of Texas from Mexico. During Juan Crow, Tejanos were systematically stripped of their civil, economic, and property rights in favor of white settlement, which devolved into massacres like La Matanza in Texas during the Mexican Revolution. 

“They executed hundreds of Mexican American Tejanos in the early 20th century, and this was done in any number of circumstances,” Guisado said. “And so you want to talk about how Texas was founded to expropriate property from people to make room for white settlers? Well, a lot of times Texas Rangers would just show up at farms or tenement houses owned by Tejanos and say ‘Here is a bill of sale to someone. You either sign it or we’re gonna kill you.’”

Guisado says that some of the violence Americans are witnessing today is seemingly foundational to this country’s history. 

“Any even superficial analysis of American history reveals that, at every instance, the United States government and its supporters, its cronies and its delegates, have separated families, have beaten, tortured, and imprisoned and murdered others for no reason other than they could get away with it,” Guisado said. “What we’re seeing today is the culmination of 270 years of settler colonial violence against native peoples, Black peoples and foreigners.”

Image credit: Radio Catskill reporter Kimberly Izar 

 

Note: Updates to this article were made for clarity and attribution on March 4, 2026.