Marcus Kelley, founder of The ChangeUp: Midnight Coalition, says Black residents should join the fight to protect undocumented immigrants from deportation. Other politically engaged Black residents are saying otherwise. Photo: Samuel Robinson
There’s a debate over African Americans’ role in defending noncitizen migrants facing the threat of removal during President Donald Trump’s mass deportation effort.
The conversation largely playing out online in the comments of viral social media posts is revealing the different attitudes of Black Detoriters— who are surrounded by immigrants within and around the city’s borders — including some elected leaders and grassroots organizers.
What resources undocumented immigrants receive in contrast to what is made available by the city and state for Black residents is an ongoing question posed by Shannon Slayton, co-founder of the Detroit Grassroots Coalition. Slayton has played an active role in offering feedback to the city’s reparations task force, and strongly opposed the city restarting its municipal ID program in 2022 for those unable to attain other forms of ID due to their citizenship status.
Slayton said in an interview she doesn’t agree with the sweeping nature of Trump’s deportation effort, a signature campaign promise, but does believe illegal immigration is a problem.
“If you’re in the grass you know there’s a growing number of people who feel the same way I do — especially Black Americans,” Slayton said. “Other Black Americans and I who are descendants of chattel slavery and have had boots here for 400 years, feel like they’re pitting us against other Black immigrants who want us to join their fight to help them to stay here.”
At the heart of her refusal to support undocumented immigrants seeking permanent residence in the United States is Slayton’s feeling that resources for the city’s neediest people are already worn thin.
“You hear liberals welcome everybody through the door, but they never welcome these immigrants in their suburban neighborhoods,” said Slayton, who voted for Cornel West in the 2024 presidential election.
Slayton doesn’t support all of Trump’s actions, but typically sides with Republicans on the issue of immigration enforcement.
“Snatching babies and ICE with masks, that’s starting to feel a little fascist,” she said.
Former state representative and Detroit school board member Sherry Gay-Dagnogo expressed a similar sentiment on Facebook: “No disrespect, but what we’re not about to do is turn the focus of #Juneteenth to immigration! Nobody helps us; stop waiting on us to save everyone else!”
She warned her Facebook followers to mind their business.
“If the FB & the I, handcuffed a sitting Senator, the only ICE I want you to be messing with is the one in your freezer,” Gay-Dagnogo said.
Marcus Kelley, founder of The ChangeUp Midnight Coalition, came to the federal courthouse after he heard from a friend at Michigan United that migrants were arrested by immigration officials outside of a courtroom following a hearing.
Federal immigration agents arrested at least four Venezuelan migrants outside a Detroit courtroom Wednesday morning just moments after a judge dismissed their asylum cases, Outlier Detroit reported.
Also last week, Detroit state Senators Stephanie Chang, and Sylvia Santana called on ICE to release a Detroit Public Schools student detained by immigration enforcement weeks before he was set to graduate high school. The student’s attorney is asking the federal government to allow him to self deport after receiving his high school diploma.
“I feel like if they come for your brothers and sisters at night, they come for us in the morning,” Kelley said in an interview outside the courthouse Wednesday. “If we allow them to do that to our neighbors, then it’ll keep continuing to happen to us.”
Kelley blames the sentiment from those who feel differently on White Supremacy and “a lack of education.”
“It is also that we’ve been suffering injustices in this country and all over the world for hundreds of years and few stand with us while we support everybody else’s movement,” Kelley said. “But we can’t change who we are as a people, we have to see the humanity in everybody, it’s not an either-or.”
State Rep. Tyrone Carter, who is challenging Gabriela Santiago-Romero for District 6 City Council seat, agreed with Kelly that it’s in Black people’s fabric to support other groups facing persecution.
In an interview on the Michigan House floor Thursday, Carter compared Trump’s deportation efforts to the 1994 Crime Bill, which targeted Black Americans with racial profiling tactics he says aren’t too far off from how ICE agents are operating in Hispanic neighborhoods.
“They’re going through what Black folks went through 40-50 years ago,” Carter said. “Trump said they’re going after criminals, yeah right. You’re getting people at work and in laundromats.”
Carter said he’s also heard the sentiment from some Black residents who say we shouldn’t care about noncitizen migrants, some with pending immigration cases, facing deportation.
“It’s bullsh*t,” he said. “We’ve always stood up for folks that wouldn’t stand up for us because we understand humanity. I do understand why it’s hard for some to reconcile with that when 46% of Latino voters voted for this man.”
Exit polls conducted by Edison Research found that 55% of Latino men voted for Trump, compared to 38% of Latinas.
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