Cover image: Haitian migrants seeking asylum in the U.S. wait in line to board a bus to Houston from Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition, Marco Bello/Reuters
From the founding years of the United States, racialized immigration regimes have shaped how Black and Brown people move through—or are barred from—this country. More than 225 years after the first Fugitive Slave Act codified the forced removal of Black people from “free” soil, today’s immigration policies reflect a chilling continuity: targeting Haitians and other migrants of color for detention, deportation or disappearance under the guise of legal order.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, and its harsher 1850 update, empowered federal authorities to override local sovereignty in the name of “property rights.” These laws deputized ordinary citizens to assist in the capture of Black people—enslaved or free—who were accused of escape. The statutes denied due process, barred Black testimony, and incentivized capture with cash rewards. In essence, they legalized kidnapping under color of law.
Fast forward to the present, where Haitian migrants face a similar peril—this time at the border, in detention centers or in the waters off the coast. Despite fleeing political collapse, gang violence, and economic devastation, many Haitian asylum seekers are classified not as refugees but as “economic migrants,” a label that strips them of the legal right to stay. Thousands have been intercepted, detained or deported in recent years under policies that echo racial exclusion rather than humanitarian response.
Haitian migration to the U.S. has unfolded in waves—particularly after the Duvalier era (1957–1986), when middle-class Haitians sought political asylum. In the early 1980s, tens of thousands secured permanent residency, with many settling in South Florida and New York. But those wins were hard fought. In legal challenges that reached the courts, Haitian asylum seekers argued that they were being held under more restrictive conditions than other refugees—a violation not of the Fifth, but the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, which guarantees protection from discriminatory treatment by state and federal authorities.
Even now, equal protection remains elusive. Many Haitians intercepted at sea are detained under the custody of the U.S. Coast Guard and summarily returned—denied the chance to plead their case. Civil rights advocates have pointed out that this pattern of treatment reflects deeply embedded biases about which migrants are worthy of refuge, and which are disposable.
Meanwhile, a related crisis unfolds inside Haiti, where kidnapping has become a rampant form of violence. Haitian families with relatives in the diaspora are often targeted for ransom, particularly those believed to have financial support abroad. Known locally as règleman de kont (settling scores), this form of community-level abduction stems from collapsing infrastructure, gang rule and economic desperation—but it mirrors an older logic: extracting value from Black bodies by force.
What links these two crises—past and present, in Haiti and the U.S.—is the sanctioning of forced removal as state policy. Just as the Fugitive Slave Acts provided a legal cover for kidnapping free Black Northerners, modern immigration policy often operates as a selective removal system, where Black and Brown migrants are denied due process, detained without transparency, or deported en masse. MAGA-era policies like Title 42, family separation, and mass repatriation flights are not isolated responses to migration—they are continuations of a long tradition of racialized border enforcement.
Latin American migrants face their own distinct dangers—particularly those fleeing cartel violence, femicide, and authoritarian governments. Yet there is often a striking divergence in how the state categorizes suffering: Brown migrants are placed into civil proceedings with minimal protections; Black migrants are often dismissed outright as “inadmissible” or “criminal.” The peril is compounded for Black immigrants, who face disproportionate enforcement, anti-Black violence abroad and at home and the ever-present threat of erasure.
The Fugitive Slave Acts didn’t just uphold slavery—they codified the idea that Black movement must be surveilled, regulated and reversed. Today, immigration laws do the same. They create tiers of deserving based on race, origin and proximity to whiteness. They legalize disappearance, and they render exile a bureaucratic tool.
More than two centuries later, the names have changed, but the cruelty remains. From shackles to borders, from slave catchers to ICE, from plantations to processing centers—the architecture of removal persists. The challenge now, as then, is not only to protect the right to stay, but to confront the systems that were never built to allow us to belong.
Joshua Levi Perrin is a writer and content curator for Unerased | Black Women Speak and communications and program manager at Funders Together for Housing Justice.
