By Musa T. Bey

This is not a mistake. This is not a glitch.

This is the naked face of the settler state, revealing what many already knew: that U.S. citizenship is not a shield but a lie—conditional, revocable, and soaked in white supremacy.

Under the fascistic regime of Donald J. Trump, the United States did not simply escalate its war on immigrants—it turned its guns inward, deporting its own citizens in a calculated campaign of racial terror. This wasn’t a bureaucratic error. This was a strategy. A declaration that even birthright is no guarantee when your skin is dark, your accent is thick, or your name is not European. The message was clear: in this empire, whiteness is the only real passport.

This article is not an appeal to morality or legality. It is an indictment. A revolutionary call to strip away the illusions of democracy and face the reality of the U.S. as a racialized police state. Citizenship, in the hands of empire, is a weapon of control. Under Trump, it became a blunt instrument of expulsion—used to banish Black and Brown bodies from the heart of empire, to exile the very people this country has always feared: the poor, the colonized, the Other.

Citizenship on Trial in the Belly of the Beast

Let us be clear: the deportation of U.S. citizens did not begin with Trump, but under his rule, the contradictions of liberal democracy reached a breaking point. Trump didn’t invent the carceral state—he simply unleashed it with full fascist energy.

His regime militarized ICE and CBP into open-air gestapo units. It erected concentration camps at the border, separated children from their families, and flooded detention centers with bodies. But what went largely unreported was that among those kidnapped and deported were U.S. citizens—people born on U.S. soil, people with U.S. passports, people whose only crime was being Black, being Brown, being poor.

Take Peter Sean Brown, a Black man born in Philadelphia, nearly deported to Jamaica. Or Francisco Galicia, an 18-year-old citizen detained for weeks and almost expelled to Mexico. Or Mark Lyttle, a mentally disabled U.S.-born citizen deported to Central America, forced to wander without food, documents, or shelter. These stories are not anomalies—they are blueprints. They reveal a system that never saw us as citizens in the first place.

Trump’s America did not deport people—it disappeared them.

The Racial Logic of Disposability

The state always reserves the right to exile. And under racial capitalism, that right is exercised not based on law, but on lineage. The vast majority of wrongfully deported citizens were Black and Brown. This was no coincidence—it was design.

The settler state has always determined belonging through whiteness. From the Chinese Exclusion Act to Operation Wetback, from COINTELPRO to ICE raids, the U.S. has never extended full citizenship to the colonized. It merely grants temporary passes—revocable upon dissent, poverty, or difference. Citizenship, then, is not a contract. It’s a leash. And under Trump, that leash was yanked tight.

Every deportation under Trump was a form of internal exile. A racial purge. A political cleansing. These were not isolated acts of cruelty—they were structural. The deportation machine, refined under Democrats and Republicans alike, became a tool of ethnic removal. It is no accident that while white insurrectionists walked free after storming the Capitol, Black and Brown citizens were being quietly shipped across borders by a state that never considered them part of the nation to begin with.

Deportation as Domestic Warfare

What we witnessed was not immigration policy—it was domestic warfare. Trump’s deportation apparatus was part of a larger counterinsurgency strategy aimed at criminalizing and eliminating the surplus populations created by racial capitalism.

In this war, citizenship is irrelevant. What matters is class, race, and resistance. The poor are criminalized. The Black are policed. The Brown are caged. The undocumented are hunted. And even citizens—if born into the margins—can be erased. This is not accidental. It is the logic of empire protecting itself from the very people it exploits.

Under Trump, ICE and CBP became paramilitary forces operating with impunity. The line between prison and border disappeared. Detention became indistinguishable from incarceration. And for Black and Brown citizens, the threat of deportation became yet another weapon in the arsenal of state terror.

No Reform, Only Revolution

Let us kill the lie of reform. This system cannot be fixed. It must be destroyed. The answer is not better training for ICE or “humane” border policies. The answer is abolition—of ICE, of borders, of the settler colonial regime that made them possible.

We must build a new world where citizenship is not used as a tool of division, where people are not disappeared by bureaucrats in body armor, where the legacy of empire is not stamped on birth certificates. This world cannot be built through elections or courtrooms. It must be built through revolutionary struggle—through organizing, through uprising, through a relentless assault on the institutions of white supremacy and capitalist domination.

We demand the return and full restitution of all U.S. citizens deported by the Trump regime. We demand the dismantling of the deportation machine. We demand liberation—not documentation.

Reclaiming Belonging, Rebuilding Power from Below

Our fight is not for recognition by empire. Our fight is to end empire. To reclaim our belonging not through their laws, but through our resistance. The revolution begins when we no longer beg to be let in—but instead build a world of our own, beyond their borders, beyond their prisons, beyond their fake promises of inclusion.

To the deported, the disappeared, the dispossessed: you are not forgotten. You are not alone. You are the frontline of a global resistance. You are the evidence of this system’s collapse—and the seeds of its rebirth.

Let us rise with the memory of the stolen.

Let us organize with the fury of the exiled.

Let us tear down every cage, every checkpoint, every wall.

And let us build, together, a future where no human being can ever be deported from their own land again. For the disappeared. For the banished. For the world we must win.