Editor’s Note: The following article was originally published by Erin Aubry Kaplan on Truthdig on July 2, 2025.
The spirit of the worst Supreme Court decision in history lives on in immigration threats, raids and deportations.
Recently, I was driving with the radio on, listening idly to a commercial, when I realized that Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem was speaking. In a twisted version of a public service announcement, with ominous crime-drama music in the background, Noem issued a stern warning to immigrants who are here illegally: “Leave now. If you don’t, we will find you and we will deport you. You will never return.”
Noem’s warning exempted those with documents, but it’s clear from recent raids and her increasingly hysterical rhetoric that all immigrants are suspect, not because of questions about their residency but because of who and what they are. They all pose an existential threat to the nation, and the only way for our nation to survive is by purging the population of those President Donald Trump and his MAGA cronies don’t see as belonging here.
That was the afternoon that it hit me: the whole heated anti-immigrant campaign that’s boiling over now mirrors exactly what happened in the U.S. leading up to the Civil War.
The concern of existential threat is now overwhelmingly focused on Latino immigrants.
This moment echoes the turmoil of the 1850s, when America was nearing the end of a long struggle to decide the future of slavery in the South and its expanding frontier. Among the many laws that fueled the debate was the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which said Black slaves who had escaped to freedom had to be returned to bondage, nullifying the freedom offered by Northern states and territories and imperiling free Black people who had never been in bondage. (See the 1853 memoir “Twelve Years a Slave,” about a Black resident of New York who was kidnapped and taken South.) Beneath the slavery debate was a deeper anxiety about the existential threat that Black people, whatever their status, posed to white America. It’s the very same concern, now overwhelmingly focused on Latino immigrants, that is driving the current wave of ICE raids.
These fears about the survival of our nation are reviving the spirit of a legal landmark that went well beyond the Fugitive Slave Act: the Dred Scott decision of 1857, the Supreme Court ruling that is widely considered the worst in American history. It declared that Black people are ineligible for citizenship, and therefore had no constitutional rights that white people are bound to respect. In his ruling, Chief Justice Roger Taney said that the Constitution was obviously written for white people (lofty principles of equality for all notwithstanding), and was thus never meant to apply to those of color. This was a shaky legal argument, but it nonetheless established white supremacy, and Black inferiority, as a basic principle of American life — a kind of self-evident natural law about the way things ought to be.
Dred Scott was later nullified by the 14th Amendment, which passed in 1868 and granted newly emancipated Black people citizenship and due process. But the notion that white people are superior and free to treat non-whites as non-humans — as well as non-Americans who don’t belong here — has persisted through every generation since then. Rounding up others on a whim, from lynchings to the Japanese internments of the Second World War to Operation Wetback, has been a recurring theme of American history.
Anti-immigrant sentiment is built on the anti-Black tradition.
Now this theme is playing out with a kind of cumulative vengeance. Trump 2.0 has adopted the policies and practices of white supremacy in a way we haven’t seen since the rule of the Confederacy. The raids and the military deployment in Los Angeles may be glaringly unconstitutional, but they follow the Dred Scott dictate that anything done to contain populations deemed less-than by white people is warranted. Put another way, Latino immigrants have no rights that ICE is bound to respect. This was made abundantly clear last month when Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., the son of working-class Mexican immigrants, was face-planted and handcuffed by FBI agents for daring to ask a question at a press conference in Los Angeles held by Noem. The debacle happened on Padilla’s turf, but the MAGA message was that no immigrant in America has legitimate turf, including a U.S. senator. There are no safe havens.
Anti-immigrant sentiment is built on the anti-Black tradition. Anti-Blackness is what made possible all sorts of laws and social customs that have openly defied justice, operating as a kind of shadow America hiding in plain sight. But there are differences between the two: Despite the Trump administration’s flagrant disregard of the law and due process, immigrants do have constitutional rights, unlike the slaves of the 1850s who were considered mere property. The current crisis centers on the violation of these rights, not about the future of an institution that collectively oppressed an entire people based on their race.
Still, there’s no mistaking the same thread of racial animus. The raids confirm what we’ve known for years, that the word “immigrants” is flimsy code for brown people from Latin America and the Caribbean, despite MAGA arguments that this is not about race or color but ensuring national security and restoring “greatness.” And it goes deeper: anyone who aids and abets, or even sympathizes with, immigrants is becoming a target. For example, a Senate subcommittee headed by Josh Hawley, R-Mo., is now accusing several L.A. immigrant advocacy organizations of helping to orchestrate anti-ICE protests and thwarting the work of federal agents. Not coincidentally, the Fugitive Slave Act legalized fining people who harbored or helped Black people seeking sanctuary or freedom.
It’s worth noting that the anti-immigrant sentiment wasn’t always directed at non-whites. In the 1850s, the Native American Party (nothing to do with Indigenous people) — informally known as the Know Nothings — fiercely opposed the immigration of Catholics from Ireland, Italy and Germany on the grounds that “Romanists” threatened the status of American-born Protestants. The Know Nothings enjoyed a surge of popularity, even getting a candidate elected to the presidency, Millard Fillmore (though he later disassociated himself from the party and went on to champion the Fugitive Slave Act). The question of slavery ultimately split the Know Nothings, and it dissolved shortly before the Civil War. As a political and cultural force, though, white Protestant nativism made a successful debut through this short-lived political movement.
Dred Scott’s sweeping sanction of slavery and anti-Blackness was intended to settle the matter of slavery and Black rights for good. Instead, the national debate intensified, the narrow ground of compromise vanished completely, and the U.S. went to war with itself. Trump’s ICE raids and military occupations are meant to forcibly settle the question of whether immigrants are not just legal, but have inherent rights that formerly enslaved Black people fought to establish, including due process and a right to the broader American promise of equality and opportunity for all.
As with slavery, there is no middle ground on a controversy that speaks to our fundamental national character, as the growing protests and pushback on the raids and other forms of federal aggression are making clear. Fear of another civil war has been in the air for a long time. But the truth is we’re already in it.
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