Fascism’s Building Blocks: 30 Years of Criminalizing Black Migrants

Introduction

The criminalization of Blackness predates the US. Over the centuries, criminalization has been incorporated into chattel slavery, the subsequent Black Codes, and laws and social customs throughout the 20th century. This narrative that Black people are inherently criminals is not merely a social prejudice; it is foundational to American policy making, mirroring and producing fascism.¹ The mechanics of fascism requires an “internal enemy” to justify the expansion of state violence, and in the American context, that enemy has historically been constructed through the lens of Blackness.

Today, the criminal legal system intersects with the immigration system, thanks to this centuries-old narrative of Black criminality—creating a “crimmigration” apparatus designed to surveil, detain, and displace. Specifically, two pieces of legislation—the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (the ’94 Crime Bill) and the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA)—have already assaulted Black lives for decades. While the ’94 Crime Bill is frequently cited as the catalyst for domestic mass incarceration, its younger sibling, the ’96 Immigration Act, is often overlooked. Yet the two laws are inseparable. Together, they form a “prison-to-deportation pipeline”² that subjects Black migrants to a “double jeopardy” of systemic racism. This dual-pronged assault signals a shift toward proto-fascist governance—where due process is replaced by administrative state violence.³

Decades before Trump, these legislative milestones created a trap for Black migrants. By removing their basic legal protections, the government has created a dual-track legal system that protects the rights of “preferred” citizens while using a “machinery of punishment” to cage or exile Black migrants. This system represents a state of fascist illiberalism where the US keeps the outward appearance of democracy—maintaining courts and legislatures—while stripping away the actual fairness and rights that make a democracy work.

Crimmigration

In the early 1990s, both Republicans and Democrats rushed to prove who in US politics could be “tougher” on crime. Such bipartisan rhetoric echoed the fascist obsession with “purity” and “social order.”

Under the leadership of President Bill Clinton, the 1994 Crime Bill became a massive infusion of $30.2 billion into the machinery of punishment. A core pillar of this bill was the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), which has, since 1994, funneled over $14 billion to local agencies.⁴ COPS led to a “broken windows” policing style that criminalized survival, ensuring that Black people had more frequent—and more dangerous—interactions with a militarized state.

Beyond policing, the 1994 bill incentivized states—through $10 billion in grants—to build “cages.”⁵ By 1999, 74 percent of defendants facing federal death penalty recommendations were people of color.⁶ This “warehousing” model of social control follows a fascist logic: the belief that “undesirable” populations cannot be integrated, only removed or contained. Crucially, the ’94 Bill laid the groundwork for immigration enforcement by establishing that “migrant” status rendered a person’s constitutional protections optional.⁷

Two years later, the 1996 IIRIRA effectively “criminalized” simply being an immigrant. The 1996 Act expanded the list of “aggravated felonies”—a legal category that reclassifies even minor, nonviolent offenses as deportable crimes—triggering mandatory deportation, stripping immigration judges of their power to consider a person’s family ties or years of residency.⁸ Fascist regimes often rely on the removal of judicial discretion to ensure the state’s will is absolute. The ’96 Act did exactly this.

At the intersection of the American criminal and immigration systems, a phenomenon known as “crimmigration” has emerged, creating what advocates describe as a predatory feedback loop for Black migrants.

The result was a staggering increase in detentions. In 1994, the average daily population in immigration detention was approximately 6,785. By 2019, it surpassed 52,000.⁹ The ’96 Act also introduced “expedited removal,” allowing low-level officers to act as judge and jury: a hallmark of authoritarian regimes where the executive branch bypasses the judiciary to purge “outsiders.”

The 1996 Immigration Act fundamentally reshaped the legal landscape for migrants by expanding the definition of an “aggravated felony” to include more than 30 different offenses, many of which are neither aggravated nor felonies under state law, such as minor nonviolent misdemeanors.¹⁰ In a legal context, this label functions as a permanent disqualifier for “Good Moral Character,” a sanitized term the state uses to justify the denial of an individual’s personhood and strip them of their legal standing.¹¹ By removing judicial discretion, the law ensures that no mercy or consideration of individual life circumstances can be granted to those the system has deemed “unfit” for society.

At the intersection of the American criminal and immigration systems, a phenomenon known as “crimmigration” has emerged, creating what advocates describe as a predatory feedback loop for Black migrants.¹² This “prison-to-deportation pipeline” is fueled by the historical legacies of the 1994 Crime Bill and the 1996 Immigration Act. Because the Crime Bill intensified the surveillance of Black neighborhoods, Black migrants are statistically more likely to be stopped, searched, and arrested by local police.¹³ These initial points of contact—often for minor offenses—transform into a “life sentence” of permanent exile.

The human cost of this system is reflected in stark racial disparities. By 2022, data revealed that 76 percent of Black migrants and 91 percent of Caribbean migrants who were deported were removed on criminal grounds—a figure that dwarfs the total migrant population average of only 58 percent.¹⁴ This disparity highlights a double bind: Black migrants are first targeted for their race by domestic law enforcement, then, targeted again for the resulting “criminality” by federal immigration authorities.

This dual assault is further intensified by immediate jailing, or mandatory detention, which strips away the fundamental pillar of due process by denying migrants the opportunity for a bond hearing. While Black migrants represent only 6 percent of the undocumented population in the US, they account for more than 20 percent of those in deportation proceedings initiated by criminal contact, reflecting a profound racial disparity in enforcement.¹⁵

Once trapped within these carceral spaces, Black migrants are twice as likely to be subjected to the punitive use of solitary confinement. This forced isolation represents the ultimate expression of state power, resulting in the total physical, social, and legal erasure of the individual from their community.

Current Invasions

Across the country, the machinery of immigration enforcement and criminal punishment is fusing into a single, seamless apparatus of control. This evolution follows a familiar playbook that has been used to cage, surveil, and disappear Black people for generations, now scaled and repurposed under the banners of “border security,” “public safety,” and “public order.”¹⁶ For Black migrants, the distinctions among these systems have always been an illusion. For centuries, they have been trapped within a “school-to-prison-to-deportation pipeline,” where the trajectory does not end at a cell door but simply attaches a new length of piping that leads to permanent exile. Within this crimmigration nexus, the state leverages the 1996 Act to automate removal, using the expansion of the “aggravated felony” to strip individuals of their personhood and to deny judicial discretion. By mandating detention and removing due process, the system traps people in a carceral cycle that functions the same whether the cage is labeled a jail, a prison, or a detention center.¹⁷

The recent state-led incursions into cities like Los Angeles, D.C., and Chicago, alongside the aggressive maneuvers of Governor Abbott in Texas, expose a violence that transcends nationality.¹⁸ It is no longer a matter of immigration enforcement for the foreign-born and policing for the citizen. Instead, the historical lines between police, sheriffs, ICE, and federal task forces—barriers that never truly protected the Black migrant—have effectively dissolved for all people of color, regardless of their status. These agents of the state grab people of color from the sanctuary of hospitals, campuses, and workplaces and force them into jails, prisons, and detention centers. The system is fueled by corporations that profit from incarceration and politicians who use entire communities as laboratories for authoritarian control.

This total social and physical erasure is the ultimate expression of state power. And it reveals the state to be a regime where the struggle for immigrant rights and the fight for Black liberation are inextricably bound.

Funding Fascism

Despite reform promises, the Biden administration increased CBP and ICE funding to $25 billion in 2024,¹⁹ fueling a “surveillance state” that treats Black bodies as data points. This was eclipsed by Trump’s July 2025 “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (OBBBA), a $170 billion investment²⁰ that industrializes the “prison-to-deportation pipeline.” By merging local policing with federal enforcement, this record capital infusion aims for one million deportations annually.

The OBBBA allocates a staggering $45 billion to expand detention capacity to “potentially more than 100,000 people per year”; 84 percent²¹ of the funding flows to private prison corporations for “mega-centers. Additionally, $30 billion doubles the ICE agent force, while $14.4 billion modernizes “deportation flight” fleets.²² To maintain the pipeline, $13.5 billion incentivizes local police to act as federal auxiliaries.

While the state pours billions into this “deportation-industrial complex,” it has capped the number of immigration judges and introduced “pay-to-play” fees for asylum seekers, ensuring legal backlogs remain a trap.²³ By defunding civil rights oversight, the OBBBA prioritizes an enforcement-only regime, centered on the surveillance, incarceration, and removal of Black and Brown bodies without health care or due process.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the true violence of the 1994 Crime Bill and the 1996 Immigration Act lies in their calculated destruction of the Black family unit.²⁴ When the state deports an individual for a decade-old minor conviction, it is not merely “enforcing the law”; it is deliberately engaging in social engineering to destabilize Black communities and erode their collective power. These laws are the structural architecture of a fascist logic that has moved beyond mere policy failure into the realm of illiberalism, where racial “purity” and “law and order” justify the systematic suspension of human rights and the denial of personhood.²⁵

The 1994 and 1996 laws serve as the functioning blueprints for a proto-fascist society that manages the “problem” of Blackness through the binary of domestic cages and permanent exile. This framework creates a “permanent emergency” that treats Black people—migrants and citizens alike—as an inherent threat to the state, authorizing their physical and social erasure from the American landscape.

To truly undo this harm, we must reject incremental reform, which only serves to modernize the machinery of the carceral state.²⁶ Instead, we must demand an abolition—dismantling these repressive systems entirely to build a society centered on the radical freedom of movement and the principles of reparatory justice.²⁷ 

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1. Timantha Goff, Zack Mohamed, Ronald Claude, Moussa Haba, Famyrah Lafortune, Amanda Diaz, and Andrew Quirk, Uncovering the Truth: Violence and Abuse Against Black Migrants in Immigration Detention. Movement for Black Lives, The War on Black Bodies: From the 1994 Crime Bill to the OBBBA (M4BL Policy Research Collective, 2024). ↩︎
2. T. Golash-Boza, Deported: Immigrant Policing, Disposable Labor, and Global Capitalism (New York University Press, 2025). ↩︎
3. Juliana Morgan-Trostle, Kexin Zheng, and Carl Lipscombe, The State of Black Immigrants: Part II—Black Immigrants in the Mass Criminalization System. ↩︎
4. Nathan James, Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS): In Brief. ↩︎
5. American Civil Liberties Union, How the 1994 Crime Bill Fed the Mass Incarceration Crisis. ↩︎
6. U.S. Department of Justice, The Federal Death Penalty System: A Statistical Survey (1988–2000) (Government Printing Office, 2000). ↩︎
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8. Human Rights Watch, Forced Apart: Families Separated and Immigrants Harmed by United States Deportation Policy. ↩︎
9. Emily Ryo and Ian Peacock, The Landscape of Immigration Detention in the United States. ↩︎
10. American Civil Liberties Union, How the 1994 Crime Bill Fed the Mass Incarceration Crisis. ↩︎
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12. Juliana Morgan-Trostle, Kexin Zheng, and Carl Lipscombe, The State of Black Immigrants: Part I: A Statistical Portrait of Black Immigrants in the United States. ↩︎
13. Morgan-Trostle, Zheng, and Lipscombe, The State of Black Immigrants: Part I. ↩︎
14. Goff, Mohamed, Claude, Haba, Lafortune, Diaz, and Quirk, Uncovering the Truth: Violence and Abuse Against Black Migrants in Immigration Detention. ↩︎
15. Goff, Mohamed, Claude, Haba, Lafortune, Diaz, and Quirk, Uncovering the Truth. ↩︎
16. Goff, Mohamed, Claude, Haba, Lafortune, Diaz, and Quirk, Uncovering the Truth. ↩︎
17. Morgan-Trostle, Zheng, and Lipscombe, The State of Black Immigrants: Part II. ↩︎
18. Black Alliance for Just Immigration,. Beyond the Border: A Call for Radical Solidarity in the Face of State Violence. ↩︎
19. Mark Akkerman, Global Spending on Immigration Enforcement Is Higher than Ever and Rising. ↩︎
20. Margy O’Herron, Big Budget Act Creates a “Deportation-Industrial Complex.” ↩︎
21. O’Herron, Big Budget Act Creates a “Deportation-Industrial Complex.” ↩︎
22. Congressional Research Service, The One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA): Summary of Appropriations for Border and Interior Enforcement (CRS Report No. R48000) (Government Printing Office, 2025). ↩︎
23. The Advocates for Human Rights, Asylum Access Policy Brief: Seekers Priced Out of Safety. ↩︎
24. Timantha Goff, Ronald Claude, Dr. Amara Enyia, and Chijindu Obiofuma, Criminalizing Blackness: An Analysis of the Impacts of 1994 Crime Bill on Black people and Policy Recommendations to Address the Harms Caused. ↩︎
25. Goff, Mohamed, Claude, Haba, Lafortune, Diaz, and Quirk, Uncovering the Truth. ↩︎
26. Movement for Black Lives, Vision for Black Lives: End the War on Black People. ↩︎
27. Goff, Mohamed, Claude, Haba, Lafortune, Diaz, and Quirk, Uncovering the Truth. ↩︎