White by Design: The United States’ Long Enduring History of Family Separation: A Call for Intervention by Oriel María Siu, PhD
Deportation as a tool for controlling and removing people of color from –and within– U.S. territory is nothing new. The act of forcibly removing and separating non-white families, making people of color disposable, unwanted, and deportable, dates back to the very birth of this nation. That birth does not begin in 1776, as the master narrative of white settler colonialism would like us to believe, but rather in 1492 –in the very act of genocide, slavery and white settler colonialism in the Americas; that is, in what historian David Stannard so accurately calls, the “American Holocaust.”
The foundational race rules disproportionately affecting U.S. communities of color today and governing the current U.S. deportation and immigration system, were set during the first 100 years of the European occupation of the Americas, from 1492 to1592. Following a politics of extermination and removal of those whom were thought to obstruct colonization, land-grabbing, and Christianization, European occupiers brutally decimated Native populations during that century, reducing America’s population of 110 million people in 1492, to 2.5 million by 1592. In this holocaust, entire families were removed from their land by way of annihilation, while others were separated from each other for generations to come.
A woman hangs herself and her child to avoid the dogs white people used to massacre Indigenous populations during the initial stages of the European occupation of America. Illustration by Theodore de Bry to 1598 edition of Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, Brevísima Relación de la Destrucción de las Indias. Engravings appeared in Narratio regionum Indicarum per Hispanos quosdam deuastatarum verissima by Theodore de Bry in 1598. Source: Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
Enhanced by ideas of white superiority and theories of “civilization” and “progress,” from the beginning, white settlers in what later became the United States, made it clear that the right to decide who could move where –and how– was to be determined by a system of racialized dominance, setting the foundations for the federal deportation regime that developed in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Whites’ invented concept of race –a concept born out of the European occupation of America and based on the idea that humans could be divided into two main categories –full humans (whites), and less-than-human humans, or non-humans (people of color)– was foundational to white supremacy as the new system of domination in American societies beginning in 1492. Under this new logic, non-whites were not capable of, nor should they have the right to, make their own decisions about place of residence, or movement. Whites were. And, in fact, did.
Throughout the 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, and up to the early 1900s, whites freely moved from Europe into the American continent, and from East to West of the United States. These white settlers stole and occupied Native lands slaughtering all that frustrated their land-grabbing ventures, including the more than 30 million bison that freely roamed northern America during that time. As part of the process of this occupation, settlers began writing whiteness into law, importing and imposing the European concept of property itself, and self-granting themselves the right to possess and privatize land, animals, and people. Property, as a concept, was inexistent in the Americas prior to Europeans invading and occupying it. Privatizing the right to movement, while depriving people of color of it, was central to instituting and consolidating white settler colonialism in the United States.
Two US Army officers stand atop and bottom of the skulls of massacred bison, mid 1870s. Photocredit: Wikipedia.
Scientific research stemming out of U.S. and European universities during the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s produced research and implemented curricula that rationalized this racialized movement regime. This “research” furthered the argument of the inferiority of Black populations and Natives, their ways of knowing and existing, and inversely, the superiority of the white man. In reasoning white superiority, these “men of letters” measured the skulls of diverse world populations putting forth theories that supported the racist classification of human populations as “distinct races” stemming from “different origins,” and thus, according to that logic, “possessing different qualities,” or lack thereof. These so-called men of letters lived to prove that the racial inferiority of people of African, Pacific Islander, Asian, Caribbean, and Indigenous descent, justified conquering them, enslaving them, exterminating them, exploiting them, segregating them, removing them, and/or occupying their lands. Through these racist theories, whites justified their occupation of what is now the full territorial map of the United States, the establishment of its borders (fully established by the late 1800s with the U.S. take-over of Puerto Rico and Guam, alongside the Philippines and Cuba), and their occupation of lands south of these borders, as well as overseas where U.S. and European imperialism was hard at work particularly during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Science in defense of American slavery. From Types of Mankind (1854) by J.C. Nott, and Geo. R. Gliddon. In arguing for the superiority of whites, scientists claimed that the world’s “races” had different “origins” and were therefore different “species”. Photo by APS Museum.
By the early 1800s, the possession of whiteness, –that is, the possession of white skin– in the United States, already directly meant the possession of the right to exclude, lynch, dispossess, rape, enslave, massacre, unite in mob violence against those very people made disposable, the right to write and define the law, the right to absolute legal and social impunity for taking away the life of those whose lives were deemed worthless, the right to separate families, and the right to forcibly remove people of color from lands they had inhabited for over 70,000 years.
Indeed, the first Federal U.S. Citizenship and Immigration law, signed in 1790 and known as the Naturalization Act of 1790, excluded Native Americans, free Blacks, and enslaved Blacks because whites regarded them as “property” and not as humans. In setting the platform for a nation to be governed by whites only, this 1790 law specified that only a “free white person” could become a citizen of the United States as long as “he or she lived in the United States for at least two years, and in the state where the application was filed for at least a year.”
The first official U.S. government policy of deportation came shortly after, in 1830, with the passage of the Indian Removal Act. Although already in practice since the arrival of the Spanish and English in what would become the United States in 1492, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 made the removal of First Nation peoples in North America official by way of Executive Order. This meant that enforcing the policy now officially required the U.S. Army use military force to restrict and determine the movement of peoples who had been living in north America for over thousands of years.
U.S. soldiers putting Indigenous people in a mass grave after they massacred them at Wounded Knee, 1890. Image: Library of Congress.
Surviving and resisting Native populations located in the Eastern part of the United States were at this point relegated to geographies not of their choice: reservations in the West. First Nations resisting these relocation orders were met with the latest military technology until the beginning of the 1900s. By the early 1900s white occupiers had forcibly removed most Native communities from their lands, and had separated thousands of Native children from their parents, by putting them away in atrocious boarding schools that had one main racist purpose: in the words of General Richard Henry Pratt, one of the proponents of the construction of these schools, to “Kill the Indian and Save the Man.”
Native children separated from their families at Carlisle Indian School, Pennsylvania (c. 1900). This school was only one of the hundreds of schools run by the U.S Government in an attempt to forcibly assimilate Native children into becoming “American.” Photo Credit: Getty Images.
In these known 357 boarding schools, white men and women not only deprived Native children of seeing their parents for years –sometimes life–, they also separated them from their siblings, forced them to speak English, cut their hair, removed all of their cultural signifiers from their daily life, and replaced their names with European ones to further “civilize” and “Christianize” them. The experience of these schools left intra-generational traumas persisting to this day. For many children, the experience was even deadly. It is estimated that these schools had mortality rates of up to 42%. Recent research also reveals countless cases of sexual, physical, and mental abuse that occurred mostly within the Christian church-run boarding schools. These Boarding schools for native children existed well into the 1970s in the United States. They also existed in Canada and Latin America –everywhere where Europeans practiced white settler colonialism in the Americas.
The jail/stockade at Carlisle Indian Boarding School where Native children were locked up for various minor infractions, such as "stealing" food from the kitchen because they were so hungry from starvation diets, or running away because they wanted to go home. Photo Credit: Dr. Michael Yellow Bird.
Thus, up to the 20th century, white colonizers who self-granted themselves the right to movement in the Americas, violently stripped First Nations from their lands, pushing them into reservations and Boarding schools, all the while forcibly transferring Africans to lands all throughout the Americas where they were made to labor for whites. It has been well documented that slave-owners sold the children of enslaved Africans at will, and parents could do little to stop the sale and theft of their children, often never seeing them again.
Sketch of a slave auction. Photo Credit: Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The experience of family separation lies at the core of how the United States came to be: genocide, slavery, and the forced removal of “obstructive” living beings on lands white settlers stole, and since then, occupied.
From the beginning, the U.S. Federal Deportation regime has been a racialized system, meaning only people of color have been systematically subjected to transportation and forced removal from U.S. territory, within U.S. territory, or into U.S. territory. Indeed, the tactics used by white settlers to remove Natives from their land were outstandingly similar to those used in the late 19th century Chinese cases, when the U.S. government instituted the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1880. It is important to remember that the Chinese were the first non-European descent immigrants to arrive in large numbers to the United States. Prior to the Chinese arriving, the population in occupied northern America consisted of Natives, Blacks, and Whites. Yet Chinese started arriving to the U.S. in the 1850s for the very same reasons many whites continued to do so during that same time period. Political unrest and economic pressures at home prompted thousands of Chinese to move to the western regions of the U.S. in search of work. Despite having to endure racism in the workplace, Chinese took whatever jobs were then available to them. They worked the low-skilled underpaid jobs in construction, agriculture, and in the gold mines. Under the framework of white supremacy, these non-white immigrants were considered racially and culturally inferior to white immigrants; a “yellow peril” believed to be “too different” to assimilate into the white constructed sense of Americanness.
Consequently, when gold became harder to find in the mid 1800s, white Americans scapegoated Chinese workers and forcibly drove them out of the mines and the communities they had come to be part. At this time, Chinese were accused of stealing jobs, not acculturating fast enough, not speaking English and being “unfit” for citizenship. The Chinese Exclusion Act not only barred Chinese from immigrating into the United States, it also gave the U.S. government full permission to remove them using force. In 1885, the city of Tacoma, Washington, went as far as creating a method to remove Chinese from cities and towns in the region. Fully endorsed and ordered by the city’s Mayor, police and city officials, “The Tacoma Method,” as it was called, consisted of raiding Chinese communities out of town, placing them on trains bound south to Mexico, ravaging all of their established businesses, and burning shops and residences that formed the Chinese community along Tacoma’s waterfront.
Chinese women and children in a detention room on Angel Island, early 1900s. The prison held hundreds of thousands of Chinese and was considered ideal because of its isolated location, making it very easy to control Chinese migrants and enforce the new immigration laws. Image: Library of Congress.
The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1945, when the U.S. needed China as an ally for WWII. Countless families, however, were separated and unable to reunite in the process, affecting the generations that came and igniting Anti-Asian sentiments that would later, in the 1940s, allow for the inhumane placement of more than 120,000 Japanese immigrants and families in U.S. sanctioned internment Camps.
Japanese children being taken to a U.S. Government internment camp. California, 1942. Image: National Archives and Records Administration.
Contrary to the Chinese immigrant experience, throughout the 1800s and early 1900s, Northern, Southern, Western, and Eastern European immigrants were met with open door immigration policies. Although confronted with a series of hostilities on the basis of religious and cultural differences, and some of these groups even categorized as non-white upon their arrival (Greeks, Poles, Hungarians, Slavs, Irish, Jewish, Italians and Finish were not considered white upon entering the U.S.), immigration law never dictated their systemic or forced removal once inside the United States. In fact, if you were an immigrant from any part of Europe during the early 1900s –during the height of European immigration into the US–, neither a visa, nor a passport, nor any sort of paper, was required of you to enter, and stay, in the United States. A medical exam lasting approximately 2 hours was all that was required to enter for white, or soon to be considered white, groups. Large boats holding as many as 10,000 Europeans each, came to the U.S. during this open-door immigration policy period. Visas and passports were required until 1924, when more Eastern Europeans started arriving to the United States. As I tell my students, the possession of white skin was the only required form of documentation required for Europeans that entered the United States prior to 1924. Their skin served as their “passport.”
World War I, however, brought this open-door for whites-only policy to a halt. Coincidently, it was during this same time-period, in 1924, that Congress created the U.S. Border Patrol, at first to keep Asian immigrants out of the now established U.S. borders, but slowly thereafter, to control immigration coming into the U.S. from Mexico, or rather said, to control Mexicans.
Thus, when in 1929 the Depression hit and unemployment surged among whites, U.S. citizens who “looked Mexican” were now the ones scapegoated and made targets of forced removal. Ironically, however, not all Mexicans in the U.S. at this point, were in the U.S. by choice. Rather, they were in the U.S. because in 1848 the U.S. took over Mexico’s northern territory by dictates of the Treaty of Guadalupe de Hidalgo, and whites moved the border south, with Mexicans residing in all of what is now the Southwest. Thus, a large number of Mexicans residing in the U.S. during the Great Depression, had not crossed any border and were, in fact, legal U.S.-born citizens, although not by choice.
Despite of this, Depression-era whites claimed that Mexican Americans were “foreigners” taking away American jobs, overwhelming welfare offices, and draining charities set up for “real Americans.” It was under these pretenses that President Hoover pushed for the federal program, “American Jobs for Real Americans,” a program that helped create the logic for the U.S. government to raid and deport close to 2 million Mexicans during the Great Depression, 60% of whom were U.S.-born citizens. For the simple act of “looking Mexican,” Hoover’s administration raided Mexican U.S. citizens in parks, hospitals, markets and social clubs, later cramming and shoving them into trains bound south, to Mexico. As Francisco Balderrama documents in his book, Decade of Betrayal, 1.8 million Mexican families living in the U.S. were separated during this time.
When cheap labor was needed to fill the void left in the agricultural fields during WWII, however, the U.S. Government brought back Mexicans through a program that allowed for their legal exploitation. Starting in the 1940s, despite believing them inferior, the U.S. government legally entered Mexican “Braceros” –or “arms” as the dehumanizing term signifies–, as temporary workers. The US agribusiness too, through its labor demands, entered an even larger pool of undocumented Mexican laborers through its back doors. Once WWII U.S. veterans returned, however, Mexicans were again made target of deportation. This time, through “Operation Wetback,” a federal deportation order that forcibly removed over one million Mexicans from the United States in 1954, a great number of whom were U.S. citizens, or whom had arrived under the Bracero Program. No action has ever been taken against the Border Patrol for the hundreds of Mexican families separated during this operation.
“Operation Wetback” 1954. Photo Credit: U.S. Border Patrol Museum
Despite the direct intent to expel Mexicans from U.S. soil however, undocumented migration from Mexico only increased after 1965. Push factors in Mexico, and pull factors in the United States, continued encouraging Mexicans to move north. Yet, beginning in 1965, entering the U.S. became a very different experience. As Aviva Chomsky documents in her book, Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal, in 1965, the U.S. government made drastic changes to immigration law by establishing equal immigration quotas on all countries, essentially creating the problem of illegality for people from Mexico and later Central America, the regions pushing the largest number of undocumented immigrants into the U.S. during the second half of the 20th century. Consequently, “illegal” people started existing in 1965 not because new immigrants were doing something white immigrants prior to 1924 didn’t do, but because the law now ascribed them a term that simply didn’t exist before, “illegal.”
Coincidently, by 1965, it was no longer white Europeans who made up the bulk of the incoming immigrant population arriving to the United States. It was now people of color. Besides Mexicans who sought work that the United States offered, millions of war refugees and immigrants coming from countries where, in the majority of cases, the U.S. had actively contributed either financially, politically, or militaristically, to the conditions provoking the mass emigration of its citizens, now made up the core of the immigrant population into the United States; half (51%) of incoming post-1965 immigrants were from Latin American countries (after Mexico, mainly from the Dominican Republic, Cuba, El Salvador, Guatemala), and one-quarter were from Asia (Vietnamese, Koreans, and Filipinos being among the majority, after Chinese and Indians). The drastic rise in the migration of unaccompanied children coming from Central America in the 2000s, has been but a continued example of the United States’ long interventionist history abroad and the lasting consequences of such interventions.
Unsurprisingly, when the Obama administration entered the White House in 2008, Mexicans and Central Americans made up 80% of the undocumented population in the United States. Europeans, Asians, and to a lesser degree Africans, comprised the other 20%. 97% of those targeted by Obama for what became historical record-breaking deportations, however, were Black and Brown immigrants from Latin America, mostly from Mexico and Central America.
From the beginning, Obama set the record straight. He would legally sustain and expand the long-enduring war against immigrants of color by revamping deportation, border enforcement, and inhumane immigrant detention and separation. Like preceding Democratic and Republican presidents who, since 1979, started normalizing the detention of undocumented immigrants by building new and more immigrant prisons, Obama too, followed suit. But Obama differentiated himself from those previous administrations by one key factor: he expanded immigrant detention and enforcement to the point of generating private immigrant prisons and military technology corporations billions of dollars from the historical practice of separating families. No other president had facilitated such revenue for these privatized companies, clearly taking a decisive turn towards profiteering from family separation, detention, and deportation. With all the groundwork having been laid by his Democratic predecessor Bill Clinton, however, this new business model for imprisoning undocumented immigrants came as no surprise to human rights activists and immigration advocates who understood the systemic effects of Clinton’s 1996 act.
The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), signed by Clinton in 1996, served as the legal architect for Obama’s own approach to immigrant detention. A solid pipeline for mass deportation, IIRIRA made more people deportable and fewer people legalizable by expanding the grounds of deportation to include not only serious crimes, but nearly any crime and misdemeanor (not returning a book to the library, for example, driving with a broken headlight, or petty theft). Comprised of a number of provisions, IIRIRA had one major goal: to increase penalties on undocumented and documented immigrants who had violated US law in some way –whether this was crossing the border without the possession of documents, or for other crimes or misdemeanors committed even by legal immigrants, even if those crimes or misdemeanors had been committed years before, and even if the crime had not been violent. IRRIRA worked retroactively and now subjected undocumented people to fast-track deportations; stripped them, and anyone apprehended within 100 miles of the border, from the ability to argue their case before a judge prior to deportation; mandated detention for immigrants undergoing removal proceedings; eliminated due process from the overwhelming majority of removal cases; erected multiple technical roadblocks to obtaining asylum, and among other provisions; created the 287(g) program which now allowed for state and local law enforcement agencies to engage in federal immigration enforcement activities, all in all, ensuring a constant flow of profit for the more and more privatized immigrant detention prisons being built since the 1980s.
Mass incarceration of entire families, mothers, and unaccompanied children for prolonged periods of time, became the official uninterrupted Obama response to the violent displacement of people arriving from Central America to the United States in 2014, when the media started documenting this migration. Prior to Obama, no other president had deployed higher number of border patrols, spent more on border militarization and interior immigration enforcement, deterred migrants into the hottest –and deadliest– areas of desert-lands along the US-Mexico border, or instituted mass trials of immigrant parents. Neither had any one president made it official policy to hold child migrants for prolonged periods of time, in various documented cases, even years. Under the Obama administration, roughly half-a-million U.S. citizen children experienced the apprehension, detention, and deportation of at least one parent between 2011 and 2013, with thousands of these children ending up entered into the U.S. foster-care system and separated from their parents, indefinitely. By 2012, the Obama administration was already spending 24% more money on immigration enforcement than in all other federal law enforcement agencies combined (the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Secret Service, U.S. Marshals Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives), reaching nearly $18 billion by 2013 –an unprecedented turn in U.S. immigration strategy, but one with solid legal and well-funded structures preceding and backing it up.
By the end of his term, Obama had deported more people than any other president in the history of the United States, reaching a record-breaking 3 million deportations by 2016, and leaving at least one million children traumatized from the separation from one or both their parents. It then became more than clear that Obama’s legacy would be the publically normalized subjection of children, and their parents, to long-lasting psychological trauma, all the while securing billions of dollars for the federally-contracted immigrant detention prisons built to benefit.
Documents obtained and made public by the American Civil Rights Union in 2018, attest to the gravity of the abuse and neglect inflicted upon detained unaccompanied immigrant children by Obama’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The report, which is based on 30,000 pages of documents dated between 2009 and 2014, details countless instances of children being punched and kicked by agents inside detention, agents sexually and verbally abusing children, agents leaving a premature baby and the minor mother in an overcrowded and dirty cell full of sick detainees against medical advice, agents throwing away birth-certificates belonging to children, children being held for longer periods of time than the one stipulated by law, children held in solitary confinement, children being coerced into deportation without due process, children being consistently denied medical attention, and the petrifying list of documented abuse inside Obama’s immigrant detention facilities goes on.
President Donald Trump’s (2017-2021) separation of more than 5,400 children from their parents at the border, thus, has precedence. Obama handed him a fully operational, well-funded, and sophisticated deportation machinery that he effectively used to deliver on his xenophobic campaign pledges to control migration from Mexico, Central America, Haiti, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia throughout his presidency. Trump never operated in a vacuum.
White by design, the U.S. Federal Deportation system has, from the beginning, been a racialized regime; that is, only people of color have been systematically subjected to transportation, mass detention, and forced removal from, within, or into U.S. territory. The practice of separating children from their parents in the United States is nothing new. It is as old as white settler colonialism in the Americas. The only difference now is, that it is undeniably and unavoidably visible. And it is way over time we intervened it.
Migrant and U.S.-born children playing on the Tijuana side of the U.S.-Mexico International Border during arrival of a migrant/refugee caravan attempting to enter the United States coming mainly from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, 2018. Photo credit: Dr. Oriel María Siu.
Dr. Oriel María Siu is the author of the children’s book series Rebeldita la Alegre and has taught and contributed to the field of U.S. Ethnic Studies for over ten years. For more on her work, please visit, www.orielmariasiu.com.
