There is a bitter irony unfolding in America today one that reveals how power and prejudice often recycle themselves, merely changing hands and targets. For decades, African-Americans have been victims of systemic discrimination, institutional violence, and dehumanization. They have been profiled, brutalized, and killed for the color of their skin. They have fought, and still fight, for the most basic recognition of their humanity. Yet now, we find a growing number of African-Americans joining Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE, the very organization notorious for carrying out policies rooted in racial profiling, family separation, and cruelty against the Latino community.
This contradiction is painful to watch because it exposes the cyclical nature of oppression. The story of America has never been linear progress it’s a circle, and sometimes those who have been beaten down rise only to pick up the same whip that once tore their own backs. It’s not because they forget their history, but because the system they rise into rewards conformity, not solidarity.
ICE has long been a symbol of state-sanctioned fear. Raids that rip parents from children, deportations that shatter families, and the cold bureaucracy that turns human beings into case numbers. It’s a machinery of enforcement that operates under the illusion of legality, but its human cost is staggering. And within this system, some African-American agents now stand, wearing the same badge that represents to Latinos what the police badge once represented to their own grandparents: the face of institutional terror.
This is not to say that every Black agent joins with malicious intent. Many likely believe they are serving the country, upholding laws, or seeking stability and opportunity in a tough world. For some, a government job offers the rare promise of security, a paycheck, a pension, respect in a society that still treats Blackness as a threat. Yet that survival instinct, however understandable, places them in a tragic contradiction. They are enforcing the very ideology that once oppressed their own people: the belief that some lives are less American, less worthy, less human.
Racism is an adaptable virus. It doesn’t disappear when laws change or when victims of one era gain some measure of inclusion. It simply mutates, finding new hosts and new targets. The system that once excluded African-Americans now invites them in not to dismantle it, but to keep it running, to give it a new face, a veneer of diversity. “Look,” the system says, “we are fair. We have Black officers, Black ICE agents, Black leadership.” But what good is representation when it is used as camouflage for cruelty?
It is not enough to escape oppression; one must reject the tools of oppression entirely. Otherwise, the legacy of pain merely continues shifted from one group to another, perpetuated under a different flag. When African-American officers participate in raids that terrorize immigrant families, they are not just betraying the memory of their ancestors; they are also validating the false narrative that power equals justice.
There is a haunting symmetry here. The images of ICE agents breaking down doors in the early dawn mirror those grainy black-and-white photos of police dragging civil rights protesters off buses. The faces change, the uniforms change, but the energy, the cold authority of the enforcer remains. The targets today are not Black Americans sitting at lunch counters; they are Latino families hiding in fear, undocumented workers who built the houses and cleaned the offices of the very country that now hunts them.
How can anyone who understands the weight of racial injustice align themselves with an organization that profits from it? Perhaps the answer lies in a desperate human desire—to belong, to be accepted, to finally be seen as legitimate in a nation that has long denied legitimacy to people of color. For some African-Americans, joining the ranks of ICE may feel like crossing a threshold: from marginalized to official, from feared to respected. But the respect earned by enforcing injustice is hollow. It’s a fragile illusion of power built on the suffering of others.
We have to confront this uncomfortable truth: America does not fix racism by diversifying its oppressors. The presence of a Black ICE agent or a Latino Border Patrol officer does not make these institutions more humane. It only proves that the system is clever enough to use diversity as a shield. The question we should be asking isn’t “Who is enforcing the law?” but “What kind of law are they enforcing, and at whose expense?”
There is a moral responsibility that transcends uniforms and paychecks. If the Black struggle for freedom has taught the world anything, it’s that injustice anywhere truly is a threat to justice everywhere. It cannot be selectively applied. You cannot fight for equality on one street corner and enforce discrimination on another. The moral consistency demanded by history is unforgiving.
To the African-Americans now wearing ICE uniforms, one might ask: What do you see when you look into the eyes of the people you detain? Do you see “illegal immigrants,” or do you see reflections of your own grandparents, once branded “undesirable,” once told to “go back where they came from”? Do you hear the echo of your ancestors’ cries when you hear a child scream for their mother as she’s taken away?
This is not an attack on individual character but a plea for collective awareness. Oppression only survives when good people convince themselves that they’re simply doing their jobs. That was the excuse used in every dark chapter of human history, from the overseer’s whip to the segregationist’s badge. “I was just following orders” has never been an honorable defense.
If progress means repeating the sins of the past under new management, then it isn’t progress at all, it’s merely rotation. The moral challenge for African-Americans today is not just to climb the ladder of success, but to question what that ladder leans against. If it stands atop the backs of another oppressed people, then it leads nowhere worth going.
In the end, the story of justice in America is unfinished. It is written not by those who enforce power, but by those who resist its abuses. The real heroes are not those who find safety in uniforms, but those who stand in solidarity with the vulnerable. The dream that Dr. King spoke of wasn’t about integration into systems of injustice, it was about transforming them.
And until that transformation happens, the mirror of injustice will continue to reflect a painful truth: that the oppressed, when invited to join the oppressor, must choose whether to uphold the system that once crushed them or to finally break the cycle.
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