Since the inception of the United States, every expansion of state power has been presented as necessity. Yet however necessary these enforcement systems may seem, they carry dark histories with them. The current expansion of immigration enforcement, surveillance, and federal policing does not emerge from nowhere. It draws from two distinct lineages of carceral control: the slave patrol and the secret police, or Gestapo.
Slave patrols functioned as a domestic technology of racial governance. Their work centered on population management: restricting movement, breaking social ties, criminalizing presence, and preserving an economy built on coerced labor. Patrols were designed to terrorize while normalizing their dominion. And normalize, we did.
Secret police forces arose from the need to protect regimes via systems of surveillance, informant networks, bureaucratic detention, and political purification. Their power traveled through administrative channels just as viciously as through visible violence. Files, lists, violent interrogations, and disappearances characterized their reach and application.
ICE fuses these two traditions into a new form of domestic terror. It governs racialized mobility through an administrative campaign of detention, disappearance, and armed force. The agency polices identity through surveilled databases, remote detention centers, and interagency information sharing, all backed by masked operations in cities across the country. Record numbers of deaths in ICE custody and during enforcement actions reveal what happens when explosive expansion meets collapsing accountability. At least four migrants died in ICE custody in a single week in early 2026 following a record high of roughly 30 deaths in 2025, marking one of the deadliest back-to-back years in detention in decades.
Federal immigration enforcement has entered a dangerous new phase. Across 2025 and into 2026, immigration officers have fired weapons at people at least 16 times during interior enforcement operations. These incidents have produced multiple deaths and life-altering injuries. They include unarmed people shot during Chicago-area raids where toddlers were zip tied, a woman shot five times by border officers, a man killed while dropping his children at school, another father killed on New Year’s Eve, and a mother shot in the face three times during an operation in Minneapolis. These are not isolated breakdowns but the visible edge of an expanding law enforcement regime that is increasingly willing to use lethal force in civilian spaces. As federal deployments surge and emergency powers are openly discussed at the national level, the distinction between immigration enforcement and domestic military control continues to erode. The pattern is unmistakable, our enforcement authority is outpacing oversight and democratic restraint, producing a climate where state violence is normalized as an administrative tool.
Washington, D.C., has become prime terrain for this extreme shift to the right as well. The city concentrates one of the densest surveillance and federal law-enforcement environments in the country, embedded within a jurisdiction that lacks political autonomy. Congress controls the District’s budget and legislative authority as well, which enables federal agencies to expand their presence while leaving local reforms and democratic limits perpetually vulnerable.
This vulnerability carries consequences. D.C. was once over 70% Black. Today it remains a Black plurality city instead, as decades of displacement have reshaped our political leverage. Tens of thousands of Black residents have been priced out and pushed out of generational wealth. This trend has only been exacerbated by the recent federal job losses. Dozens of majority-Black neighborhoods have been gentrified, displacing Black equity for majority wealthy, white residents. Demographic change restructures leverage and as the Black share declines, so does the collective power to contest how public safety is defined, funded, and enforced on our streets. Majority-Black neighborhoods in D.C. have different ideas about how we want our communities run than what we are seeing happen currently in the District.
These shifts occur alongside one of the largest per-capita policing footprints in the country. Federal agencies, local police, transit police, park police, private security, and surveillance contractors operate within shared mandates. Security saturates our daily life. The capital increasingly resembles an occupation zone rather than a self-directing city.
Historically, communities have confronted similar architectures of power through a paired strategy: organizing for structural change while building mutual aid systems that reduce dependence on hostile institutions. During the Montgomery Bus Boycott for example, organizers constructed a citywide carpool network, maintenance system, and dispatch operation that allowed tens of thousands of people to move without having to submit to segregation. Civil rights organizing succeeded because logistical mutual aid sustained political resistance.
Black community survival programs facilitated food distribution, health clinics, childcare networks, and legal aid infrastructures that replaced the state’s claim to a monopoly over safety. Some communities are able to continue this tradition through rapid-response networks, court accompaniment, bail funds, community health collectives, and information hotlines. Practices that convert care into collective defense. Mutual aid can weaken enforcement power by shrinking the spaces where coercive systems can dominate our daily survival. This is the vision I have for D.C.
Statehood changes the game under which traditional strategies operate. Admission as a state would grant D.C. full legislative authority, budget sovereignty, and constitutional standing. Statehood would allow the District to set public safety priorities without congressional veto. It would expand the capacity to regulate surveillance, to negotiate federal presence, to fund housing and healthcare at scale, and to embed community-based safety infrastructures into durable policy. Not to mention the gain in Democratic voting demographics nationwide, D.C. could be a significant player in the future of our country.
Statehood would not dissolve enforcement institutions, but it would give residents leverage over them. It would shift D.C. from a managed territory toward a true political player. This shift would matter as ICE evolves into a hybrid force shaped by global counterinsurgency logics and domestic racial governance.
From slave patrols to secret police to contemporary enforcement agencies, control systems adapt to new political economies. D.C. is being reshaped by demographic change and the widening presence of surveillance technologies. Mutual aid and organizing remain key and statehood offers the structural capacity to carry those practices into law and long-term governance.
The future of the capital will either be administered or self-directed. We have the power to determine whether the city becomes a testing ground for enforcement or a center of democratic resistance. We must stay committed to D.C. statehood because anything less leaves our city vulnerable to congressional power that has repeatedly failed our communities. Statehood is how we secure the authority, dignity, and democratic power that D.C. residents have already earned.