Deportation is NOT Genocide

The difference between enforcement of immigration and twisting of historical atrocities

Op-Ed

By: Ollie Gray IV

Over the past week, thousands of Americans have protested ICE in the streets of Minnesota.

Students in Utah, Texas, and Kentucky staged walkouts in protest of ICE enforcement of

immigration policy. Recently, ICE has been called “the modern slave catchers” or “the new gestapo” under President Donald Trump’s regime. Despite concerns raised by various groups, deportation is not genocide.

There have been several claims made by media outlets as well as celebrities on social media

regarding ICE tactics. “ICE is going door to door, kidnapping people” and “America is becoming Nazi Germany, this is how it started”. In parallel, some pundits are using the term “immigrants” to encompass migrants who have come to America legally and illegally, which has caused

confusion.

In the years following World War II, the UN Convention defined genocide as “the deliberate,

systemic, and intentional destruction in whole or in part of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Raphael Lemkin, a polish born lawyer who escaped during the Holocaust and fled to the United States, came up with the word “genocide” to label the “crime without without a name”.

According to author Rupert Butler, the gestapo was the secret state police during Hitler’s reign in Nazi Germany. Their main responsibilities included deportations of Jewish people to

concentration camps and killing camps. Detention facilities are overrunning, which some

politicians have ignored as well as lack of acknowledgement that immigration is a crisis as it

stands. ICE is enforcing laws. A bus or plane ticket to one’s home country in deportation efforts is not equivalent to the extermination of a people. Detention centers are not gas chambers, to compare the two minimizes the atrocities done to the Jewish peoples in Nazi Germany.

Comparisons between ICE and slave catchers ignore the historical reality of American slavery. According to Virginia Humanities, “Fugitive slave laws provided enslavers and their agents with the legal right to reclaim runaways from other jurisdictions. Those states or jurisdictions were required to deliver the fugitives”. Slave catchers would also detain and attempt to sell men who were free. As a descendant of a long line of Foundational Black Americans, it is offensive that people who willingly enter our borders illegally, are being compared to slaves in America.Black

Americans were being treated less than human, forced to work for nothing, traded as a good.

The idea that illegal immigrants are in the same fight as slaves who were traded, packed into

ships against their will, and sold, is disingenuous. It is a slap in the face to those who came

before me, suffering and fighting to give us the freedoms we now have.