Before ICE raids terrorized American neighborhoods, there was stop-and-frisk. In marginalized communities, where its members’ civil liberties have been historically threatened by organized violence, the country behaving like a police state is unsurprising.
Political activist, philosopher, and a Birmingham, Alabama native, Angela Davis was friends with a few of the little girls who died during the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963. Bull Connor was the Commissioner of Public Safety at the time and a known white supremacist. As a result, no prosecutions occurred until 1977 and to this, Davis said, “We knew that the role of the police was to protect white supremacy.”
This awareness was shared by El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (also known as Malcolm X). Speaking of police brutality, he asked in 1964, “Why does it exist… because our people in this particular society live in a police state; a Black man in America lives in a police state.”
El Shabazz continued, “He doesn’t live in any democracy; he lives in a police state. That’s what it is; that’s what Harlem is.”
The same was true of cities like Cincinnati, where African American residents in the Avondale neighborhood were targeted following “white flight” and redlining in 1958. One of the first jurisdictions to implement stop-and-frisk, the program required the city’s police officers to meet a quota and create a file for each stop, which resulted in a database that officers used to target persons based on the sociopolitical construct of race.
Just two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., who was surveilled and harassed by the FBI under the guidance of its then director J. Edgar Hoover and with the permission of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, stop-and-frisk was constitutionally defined and its legal framework established in the Terry v. Ohio case on June 10, 1968.
Stop-and-frisk allows a police officer to briefly detain a person and search them based on “reasonable suspicion” of criminal activity, a standard lower than probable cause for arrest. In cities like New York, where African Americans were disproportionately impacted by the so-called crime-fighting strategy, the practice was met with outrage and legal challenges due to its unfounded claims and violent tactics. Justice Antonin Scalia would refer to stop-and-frisk as a “petty indignity” in Minnesota v. Dickerson.
In 2013, a federal court in Floyd v. City of New York found it unconstitutional on the grounds that it violated the Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments. However, there has been a resurgence under the Trump administration.
In an article titled “Unfettered and Unaccountable: How Trump is Building a Violent and Shadowy Federal Police Force,” J. David McSwane and Hannah Allam reported for ProPublica on ICE raids in Santa Ana, California: “Mayor Valerie Amezcua and the City Council asked their police chief whether there was anything they could do to rein in the federal agents—even if only to ban the use of masks. The answer was a resounding no.”
Multiple recent reports from news outlets and immigrant advocacy groups confirm that under President Trump’s current deportation mission, ICE and other federal agents are using aggressive tactics, including force, to detain and arrest immigrants. Reports also detail concerns over the expansion of enforcement powers, conditions of detention facilities, and the potential targeting of individuals with minor or no criminal offenses.
“People being tackled, people getting pepper-sprayed or tear-gassed. We’ve seen people getting threatened. And we’ve seen at least two incidents involving gunfire,” Fred Tsao, senior policy counsel at the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, said in an NPR interview on the fear that ICE tactics are growing more violent.
While immigration enforcement is a mandated responsibility, the intensity, targeting, and tactics of enforcement actions are influenced by each administration’s political priorities. The scope and focus of raids have varied significantly depending on the president in office, suggesting the strategy is a political choice—not unlike stop-and-frisk.
- About the Author
- Latest Posts
Director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, an associate editor, host of the Good Faith Media podcast, “The Raceless Gospel” and author of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church.
