Recently, a mother was taken into custody by ICE officers while dropping off her child at a bilingual preschool. That this happened at a preschool should alarm all of us. It signals that there are no longer any spaces considered off-limits and reveals a chilling absence of concern for the human cost of enforcement. What should have been a moment of care and routine was transformed into terror, not only for one family, but for an entire community watching and learning that safety is conditional.
Liam Ramos, a five-year-old child, was taken into custody. He is among 3,800 children who have been imprisoned by ICE in the last year. What possible threat do these young children pose?
This escalation of fear directed at immigrants of color reflects racial profiling taken to its logical extreme. Fueled by disinformation and political opportunism, the current administration has targeted Black and Brown communities through grotesque narratives of criminality and invasion. President Trump has repeatedly used dehumanizing language to describe migrants, particularly those from Mexico, Central America, and Black-majority nations, language that does not merely offend but shapes policy, justifies violence, and normalizes cruelty.
Racist and xenophobic surveillance of Black and Brown bodies is not new. Throughout U.S. history, people of color have been excluded, criminalized, and denied rights based on race and country of origin. Immigration enforcement has long functioned as a proxy for racial control, selectively wielded to reinforce a hierarchy of human value.
What distinguishes this moment is not only the cruelty but the ambition. The administration is not simply attacking immigrants, many of whom are tax-paying, deeply rooted in their communities, and have lived in the United States for decades, but is also seeking to eliminate birthright citizenship. This represents a direct assault on the 14th Amendment and the fragile legal framework that has, however imperfectly, expanded citizenship beyond whiteness.
Attempts to obscure this history by deleting or sanitizing federal records cannot erase reality. The United States was founded on genocide, slavery, and racialized exploitation. While white children were largely presumed citizens by virtue of birth, it was not until the ratification of the 14th Amendment in 1868 that birthright citizenship was explicitly extended to nonwhite people. Before then, citizenship, and the rights it conferred, was deliberately withheld to ensure a permanent underclass denied access to education, land, wealth, and political power.
The effort to undermine birthright citizenship is not an anomaly; it is an attempt to resurrect an oligarchic system that depends on racialized labor without rights. Rendering the 14th Amendment meaningless, whether through courts or executive power, would revive a social order sustained by exploitation and enforced invisibility.
History offers ample evidence of how citizenship and representation have been strategically withheld to maintain racial hierarchies. Black men were granted the right to vote in 1870, yet were systematically disenfranchised for nearly a century through violence, terror, and legal obstruction. Chinese immigrants were barred from voting until 1943. Native Americans were not recognized as citizens until 1924, and many tribes remain unrecognized today. Even when rights existed “on paper,” meaningful access was denied until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Rights alone have never guaranteed justice.
Japanese American incarceration provides one of the clearest examples of how quickly citizenship can be stripped of meaning when racialized fear is mobilized by the state. During World War II, more than 120,000 people of Japanese descent, two-thirds of them U.S. citizens, were forcibly removed from their homes and imprisoned without evidence of wrongdoing. Entire families lost their livelihoods not because of what they had done, but because of who they were presumed to be.
That history makes one truth unmistakable: Citizenship has never been an absolute shield for people of color. When nationalism, war, or political expediency demand a scapegoat, legal status can be suspended, rights revoked, and entire communities sacrificed in the name of “security.” The language of wartime necessity echoes today in appeals to “law and order” and “border security.”
The denial of citizenship and political representation remains one of the most enduring tools of racial control. It allows those in power to determine who belongs, who counts, and who can be discarded. Immigration enforcement functions similarly, marking certain bodies as perpetually suspect, removable, and undeserving of safety.
This regime of surveillance mirrors what Michel Foucault described as the panopticon, a system in which the possibility of constant observation disciplines entire populations. Through public arrests, data tracking, and racial profiling, immigration enforcement instills fear not only in those directly targeted but in everyone watching.
As Foucault argued, surveillance need not be constant to be effective. Once people internalize the threat of being watched, they begin to police themselves. Families avoid schools. Parents skip medical appointments. Communities withdraw from public life. Terror becomes self-sustaining.
The arrest of a mother at preschool drop-off is not an isolated incident. It is a warning. If we accept this as normal, if we avert our eyes, we become complicit in a system that thrives on fear, separation, and silence. The question is not whether this could happen to “anyone,” but whether we are willing to defend the humanity of those it is already happening to, before another family is torn apart.
Jamie Cho, Ph.D. is a consultant, educator, and scholar specializing in equity and justice in education. She previously served as Assistant Teaching Professor of Justice in Early Learning at the University of Washington and as Director of Public Education for the Beloved Community Initiative at Seattle University. Currently, she prepares current and future educators in higher education and consults with nonprofit organizations to advance equitable, justice-driven systems change.
Joyce Shui is an attorney and business executive. She earned her A.B. from Harvard University and her J.D. from NYU School of Law. She most recently worked as senior legal counsel and a senior director of compliance for SAP. Her public service has been in furtherance of racial and gender equity, having served on the Bellevue School District Board and engaged in extensive pro bono legal work. Her opinions are her own.
