Keep or Toss? – African American and Asian American Incarceration vs. Deportation in the United States

Trends of African American and Asian American incarceration and deportation in the United States continue to reflect the hierarchy of race established throughout history in social, political, and economic systems.

Who do you think of when you encounter the terms incarcerated or deported? According to Google Trends which tracks and collects search frequencies for these terms, most Americans believe incarceration is synonymous with African American and deportation refers to “illegal immigrants” from all over Central and South America. Most notably, the search rate for each of these terms has met an all-time high with Trump’s incoming administration. In terms of incarceration and deportation, Trump is determined to implement the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 which entails “blueprints” for a conservative remodeling of government processes throughout his upcoming presidency. Among other alarming plans for the future, Brianna Seid investigates in her analysis for the Brennan Center for Justice how Trump plans to dismantle the boundaries between Department of Justice personnel and the White House which were originally established after Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, remove expert prosecutors and investigators who served under both parties to replace with “party loyalists”, and expanded the crimes which the federal government would punish with the death penalty. Nicole Narea further dissects in her Vox article how Trump is utilizing his initial executive orders in 2017 where he banned entry from seven historically Muslim countries to create newer and harsher travel bans to ensure “those who come to enjoy our country must love our country” and keep “foreign, Christian-hating communists, Marxists, and socialists out of America.” Trump’s restructuring of the DOJ and the death penalty along with looming threats to “eliminate illegal immigrants” begs the question of — who belongs in America. Major misconceptions about which minority groups, such as African Americans and Asian Americans, “should” or “should not” be concerned about their potential to be incarcerated or deported perpetuates the hierarchy of race and the color line which places White Americans on one side and all other “non-White” Americans on the other. These negative stereotypes have real consequences such as unequal distribution and access to resources and support, dragging out of dire situations due to under coverage of experiences, or the opposite where certain races are defined as the “textbook” definition for these dehumanizing processes.

Indeed, African American men are disproportionately overrepresented in the incarcerated population of America. The Pew Charitable Trust, which is an independent non-profit, non-governmental organization that collects and analyzes data, found that as of 2000, Black people made up almost half of state prison populations even though they make up around 13% of the actual U.S. population. After 20 years, Pew emphasized that Black adults were still imprisoned up to five times more than white adults. In 2021, the Sentencing Project utilized the US Bureau of Justice Statistics to build upon Pew’s findings that “81 Black adults per 100,000 people in the United States are serving time in a state prison”. And in more recent findings, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) found as of last week that around 38.7% of federal inmates are Black. However, a statistic that is frequently overlooked by media coverage is the other groups represented among the incarcerated population because Americans have been socialized again and again to associate incarceration and the criminal justice process with African Americans. The BOP found in the same statistical review that 1.6% of federal inmates happen to be Asian and 2.9% of inmates are of Native American descent. Additionally, 56.8% of federal inmates are white. 

This apparent disconnect between the actual racial makeup and perceived makeup of incarcerated people can best be explained by sociologist Sharon Lee’s critique of the U.S. Census in her article “Racial Classification in the U.S. Census; 1890-1990.” Here Lee points to the inherently racist process of logging and categorizing people that the U.S. Census represents. Historically, classifications of race or color have appeared and disappeared on the census based on the political significance of the group at that time. Ultimately, the only category that remained the same was “White” while other ethnic classifications merged into large pan-ethnic race categories. Most recently, the creation of the “Asian and Pacific Islander (API)” category on the census condensed a massive group of vastly different cultures and ethnicities spanning hundreds of countries into one homogenous term, “Asian”. By creating this umbrella term, the stereotypes that traditionally marked people of Chinese or Japanese descent seeped into and eventually became the “American understanding” of Asians. An example of this includes the model minority belief that Asian Americans can succeed and achieve higher than any other minority group no matter their upbringing or circumstance. Therefore, because American society recognizes Asian Americans as an outstanding example of assimilating to American culture, negative stereotypes like incarceration do not seem to concern Asian Americans.

On the other hand, deportation is a potential reality attached to all people of color in the United States. In fact, before Trump’s new executive orders to create an even stricter travel ban on immigrants which in turn will lead to increased orders for deportation, the Department of Homeland Security threatened over 15,000 Southeast Asian refugees from 2021 to 2022 that they would face deportation due to past criminal records. Ultimately when Southeast Asian refugees came to America, they were placed in living conditions that mirrored the homes they left. Because they were subjected to living in bleak homes with low-paying jobs, some Southeast Asian youth found comfort in prominent Asian gangs that provided familiar culture and protection. However, involvement with these gangs inevitably ended with violence and crimes, which led hundreds if not thousands of young Southeast Asian refugees to grow up within the prison system. After the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, many Southeast Asian refugees who previously were sentenced now faced additional orders of removal which is referred to as “double jeopardy”. The cycle of targeting Asian and African immigrants has ramped up once again under the Trump administration as he has called to deport any undocumented Asian or African migrants in the United States to Panama. 

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva addresses the recategorization of Asian Americans in his article “The Latin Americanization of Racial Stratification in the U.S.” where he compares the developing tri-racial system in the United States to the one already present in Latin America. In this tri-racial system are “whites”, “honorary whites”, and “collective Black”. In terms of Asian Americans, Bonilla-Silva notes that Japanese Americans, Korean Americans, Asian Indians, Chinese Americans, and most multiracial people are considered “honorary whites” while Filipinos, Vietnamese, Hmong, and Laotians who recently came to the United States due to wartime with little to no existing communities are considered part of the “collective Black” category. Here, Bonilla-Silva also answers the question “Why now?”. Due to the “rapid darkening” of the Americas due to the influx of migrants entering the United States, Bonilla-Silva states that many White elites are realizing their countries were “becoming ‘Black’ or ‘Indian’ and devised a number of strategies to whiten their population and maintain White power.” Specifically, as Min Zhou and Jennifer Lee highlight in their article "Hyper-Selectivity and the Remaking of Culture: Understanding Asian American Achievement", Asian Americans previously accounted for less than one percent of the American population in 1960, but this number has now skyrocketed to 5.5% over the last 40 years. If the growth of the Asian American population continues steadily at this rate, demographers project that Asian Americans could constitute 14% of the U.S. population by 2065. 

Although all minority groups alike have been subjected to forms of physical or emotional trauma, many of Trump’s supporters have cited his “fixing” the criminal justice system as part of his successes. John Gramlich, an associate director at the Pew Research Center, found in 2021 that Trump reduced the number of federal inmates during his presidency by 5% alongside Obama's 10% decrease and Jimmy Carter's 34% decrease in federal inmates. However, Bonilla-Silva describes in his work “The Central Frames of Colorblind Racism”, that the minimization of racism or the suggestion that discrimination is no longer a central factor of minorities’ life chances is just another way of reestablishing the overarching system of racism that still exists today. 

Further, the Heritage Foundation’s and Donald Trump’s argument that deportation is necessary to “keep the peace” and cleanse the United States of “America-hating immigrants” is just a loose statement to cover the fact that they are scared of, as Eduardo Bonilla-Silva coins, the “blackening” of the United States. As Joseph L. Graves Jr. notes in his book The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America, “more dangerous are those who still actively use the social construction of race to advance their own economic, social, and political agendas… [who] never tire of advancing pseudo-scientific arguments to protect the concept of race, and to argue for its utility in solving the crucial problems in our society.”

Ultimately, the correlations that we draw between minority groups and certain negative government processes have detrimental effects on all “non-White” populations because it reestablishes the power “whiteness” has over the United States by barring access to minority groups who “don’t need it” or “need it less than another group” and creating lifelong negative stereotypes that are reproduced through history.