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This article is an adapted excerpt from Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism by Sonali Kolhatkar. This text was published by Seven Stories Press in September 2026, and has been reprinted here with permission.

MAGA’s ongoing fascist assault on the nation’s residents echoes past eras of U.S. enslavement, racial terror, dispossession, segregation, and exclusion. Historian and political analyst Robin D. G. Kelley, distinguished professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. history at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), has written several books examining this history, including his seminal 2003 book Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination. With his finger on the pulse of contemporary social justice movements, including global struggles for liberation, Kelley offered a sharp analysis of the federal assault on U.S. cities and the resulting resistance during this conversation, which took place in February 2026, for inclusion in Breaking ICE: Community Defense Against State Terror and MAGA Fascism, my new book of interviews with over a dozen movement organizers, lawyers, artists, labor leaders, and scholars, which was released today.

Sonali Kolhatkar: Throughout U.S. history, policing has been used as a tool of repression, and as a way to preserve racial capitalism. We are now in an era where immigration enforcement, in terms of resources and personnel, seems to be approaching what we spend on police forces. Where does immigration enforcement fit in and how does it differ from policing?

Robin D. G. Kelley: That’s a great question. First of all, immigration enforcement goes back to right after World War I. In 1924, the U.S. Border Patrol was established to police the southern border, but also the border with Canada. The oceans were also monitored, the Pacific especially, the Atlantic less so.

The idea of enforcing immigration through the definitions of citizenship is old. It’s part of a system of both domestic and international policing. Driving these policies was the state’s fear of radical insurgency. After World War I, sedition — that is to say left-wing, anarchist, socialist, and communist movements — were policed, especially those coming from Asia and Europe, and certainly those from the southern border. Border Patrol wasn’t just developed to keep so-called Mexican migrants out — though this was land twice stolen, first from Native American people and then from the sovereign nation of Mexico. It was also about keeping the Mexican Revolution on the other side of the border and ultimately destabilizing it.

Border Patrol and immigration policing have always been political issues. We saw an escalation of this kind of domestic and border policing during the Cold War. In 1952, we got the McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act, limiting Caribbean immigration and making it easier to deport or deny entry to leftists, labor organizers, and so-called “sexual deviants.” Two years later, the Eisenhower administration launched a mass deportation campaign dubbed Operation Wetback targeting Mexican workers and initiating the process of militarizing the border. Under the guise of protecting national security, Operation Wetback was really an effort to discipline an increasingly organized Mexican working class with the threat of deportation while appeasing and disciplining the naturalized U.S. labor force by mobilizing xenophobia, nationalism, and support for U.S. intervention in the hemisphere — all under the guise of anticommunism.

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At the same time, the U.S. expanded legalized temporary labor migration through the Bracero Program, which ran from 1942 to 1964, in order to recruit low-wage labor subjected to monitoring and vulnerable to deportation.

And then finally, the post-1965 expansion of immigration opened the door to further border militarization during the 1970s and 1980s. And that’s even before Ronald Reagan. Reagan, of course, escalated it, but border militarization was promoted under Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, a liberal Democrat.

What we’re seeing now is an escalation of border militarization, the internal domestic policing of those regarded as undocumented, and the targeting of people based on perceived racial differences. And in this case, I think what’s different is the level of terror and violence, and the scale of the attacks, which to me are intended as much as demonstrations of state power and authority as border enforcement.

And the border itself — its definition — has been expanded to include pretty much the entire country. That’s why we had Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis, nowhere near the border, killing U.S. citizens. There’s been a steady march toward that. It certainly wasn’t something that just happened under Trump, but he’s taking advantage of that redefinition to deploy Border Patrol troops everywhere.

That is true. I want to give credit to Harsha Walia, who wrote this amazing book, Border and Rule, which talks about border externalization and border internalization. That is to say, the border is not really a place — a strip of land or a line — but that “bordering” is a governance strategy, either through, say, interdiction offshore (externalization) or through racialized surveillance (internalization). The border is always being policed internally within the United States, within Europe, within Canada, and elsewhere. We’re seeing a deeper militarization of internal border security.

U.S. violence against Haitians has been exemplary of this kind of militarized policing. Under Reagan, we saw the interdiction of Haitians who were hoping for asylum in Florida being thrown in detention centers in Guantanamo Bay.

But then you also have the targeting of Haitians within the 48 states of the continental United States who are being arrested, detained, and deported. We saw that the vicious attacks on Haitians who had temporary legal status ultimately helped lead to Trump’s victory.

In Ohio, Haitians were racialized and targeted. A military was unnecessary since anti-Black racism was enough to generate mass opposition and panic over their presence. I also think that the escalation of ICE and CBP attacks in Minnesota, as well as Los Angeles, Memphis, New Orleans, and Chicago, was less about capturing undocumented workers........

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