The Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) is calling for a Department of Justice investigation into Immigration Customs Enforcement after records revealed that it has been lying about its racial data collection practices and classifying Black immigrants as white.
For years, BAJI and other organizations have demanded that ICE collect and publish racial and ethnic data about the thousands of migrants it detains each year in order to disclose and address racial biases. The Department of Homeland Security has responded that it does not collect such data. However, information BAJI obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit reveals that immigration agencies do maintain racial and ethnic data—but inaccurately so.
BAJI said multiple ICE detention facilities classify just 50% of Gambian immigrants as Black, even though the American Community Survey suggests that 98% of people from Gambia self-identify as Black. The American Immigration Council also reported that ICE classified 86% of immigrants in custody at a New Mexico detention facility as white, even though BAJI said many of those detainees were Black immigrants from countries including Mauritania, Haiti, Senegal, and Mali.
In a statement released Tuesday, BAJI accused ICE of secretly and intentionally collecting, manipulating, and “whitewashing” race data to avoid accountability for the disparate treatment of Black immigrants.
DHS, ICE, and Customs and Border Protection did not respond to requests for comment on BAJI’s findings and other recommendations.
BAJI and the American Immigration Council filed the FOIA lawsuit in 2021 after ICE did not respond to requests for records about its use of force, solitary confinement, and other conditions at eight different immigration detention centers across the American South.
“Immigrants are oftentimes detained in state prisons and jails in the South that have already been condemned for the horrible conditions underpinned by racial and gendered violence,” BAJI Executive Director Nana Gyamfi said in a statement to Prism. “Detention and the disappearing of Black people is a continuation and extension of this country’s slavery and mass incarceration legacy.”
BAJI’s findings come just over a month after Gyamfi spoke at a White House human rights meeting. At the meeting, she outlined racial disparities at the border and provided policy recommendations to address them, the first of which was to implement systematic race data collection.
Gyamfi claimed the Biden Administration is yet to make meaningful progress on its purported commitment to advancing racial equity, based on a BAJI report that conditions for Black migrants have gotten worse since 2022.
