African Immigrants Being Deported at High Rates

Under the Trump administration, African and other Black immigrants have been deported at higher rates than other immigrants, and no one is paying much attention.  In 2015, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported 1,293 African immigrants, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security. Since the 2016 election, raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) on Black immigrant communities has revved up.

“For example, in January, 86 men and women were deported to Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, after being detained and imprisoned…In November, 108 immigrants were deported to Ghana and 20 people also were deported to Liberia, while 53 others were processed for deportation,” Atlanta Black Star reported. In February of this year, ICE deported 130 people to Senegal. This is six times the number recorded by the agency in 2016.

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Even though overall removals dropped from 240,255 in 2016 to 226,119 in 2017, the number rose for Africans—in many cases, more than doubling from the previous year, Quartz reported.

For the top 10 African countries on ICE’s list, removals increased by 140 percent from 756 in 2016 to 1815 people removed in 2017.

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There are 2.5 million African immigrants in the U.S., according to the Pew Research Center.  When including the Caribbean, Latin America, and other regions, there are as many as 5 million Black immigrants in America. People from Africa experienced the fastest growth rate of the immigrant groups coming to the U.S., 41 percent between 2000 and 2013, The Atlanta Black Star reported.

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Immigrants from Somali have been hit the hardest. Their removal more than doubled in one year. Somalia was one of the six countries that came under Trump’s Muslim ban in January 2017—an executive order that temporarily banned U.S. entry to anyone from six Muslim-majority countries.

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