Potter’s field in Eagle Pass for unidentified bodies found along the border area. Photo courtesy of Witness at the Border delegation, March, 2025
This past spring I traveled with Witness at the Border to the border town of Eagle Pass, TX. I wanted to take a firsthand look at ground zero of the latest domestic militarization project dressed up as a national security measure. Eagle Pass had been in the national headlines since December, 2023, when a local group erected a field of crosses to represent the 700 lives lost that year due to increasingly lethal border barriers. One month later Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott flipped the script and sent the Texas National Guard to occupy the city’s riverfront park and protect Texans from an “immigrant criminal invasion.” It was a direct challenge not only to local efforts to humanize the global immigrant crisis, but to the Biden administration. Abbott’s charge that the President had failed to safeguard the nation made for good election-year headlines, and the scaremongering fed into Republican anti-immigrant bombast throughout the 2024 election season. And Abbott’s National Guard deployment has now been imitated by Trump in Los Angeles, CA and Washington, DC.
When I arrived at Eagle Pass in March I expected to find the river with its barbed-wire-coil shoreline, the cemeteries for the unidentified whose bodies had failed them in the arid scrubland or the river, the infamous Wall, and the general air of military occupation—but what I didn’t expect were the Kickapoo. Ultimately it was the sign for the Kickapoo Lucky Eagle Casino on the outskirts of Eagle Pass that led me to rethink the place of the current war on immigrants in US and global history.
The Ghosts of Indian Removal
I had read UIUC historian Kristin Hoganson’s 2019 saga of the Kickapoo Indian nation in The Heartland: An American History, but it hadn’t been real until that moment. The Kickapoo, displaced multiple times over the 1800s, fractured into settlements scattered from the central US into northern Mexico. One group eventually settled on the banks of the Rio Grande in the shadow of the international bridge that crosses from Eagle Pass to Piedras Negras. On this marginal—and, for most of the twentieth century, unregulated—borderland, a few Kickapoo lived until the 1980s.
Members of the Witness at the Border delegation examining changes to the detention center and wall outside El Paso, TX. Photo by Amerika Garcia Grewal, The Border Vigil, FB.com/BorderVigil, used by permission
Our delegation walked across that same bridge in March on our way to meet with men and women recently deported from the US. As I crossed, I could look down on Texas National Guardsmen patrolling ground that had hosted the Kickapoo in their exile. The two chapters of American dispossession began to merge in the deportation machinery before me. The ICE raids, the detention centers, and the shackled deportees are the twenty-first-century face of Indian removal.
The National Guard fortifications in the city park that once was the site of a Kickapoo settlement, viewed from the International Bridge. Photo courtesy of Witness at the Border delegation, March, 2025
Inconvenient Lives and Bureaucratic Solutions
Superficially, the two processes appear distinct. Indian removal targeted resident peoples to make way for new European immigrants, while today’s war on immigrants targets the new arrivals. But at the basic level the two campaigns share the assumption that less powerful and inconvenient bodies can be methodically eradicated through deliberate statecraft.
That assumption, so familiar today, was a novel idea in the nineteenth century, when Indian removal policies recast frontier violence as a tool of the state, not a marker of the ragged edges of state control. In Indian removal the US brazenly pioneered a centrally controlled, legally sanctioned, government-led process of human extermination, cloaked in the garb of orderly governance. The state took the shiny new vocabulary of officialdom, with its land titles and census records and coalescing legal and security norms, and turned those elements into tools of brutal dispossession. Although some of those targeted survived, overall it was mass murder dressed up in bureaucracy.
Orderliness was an illusion only possible at the center of the Indian removal endeavor. On the receiving end were guns, shattered communities, and the physical insults of forced marches and incarceration masquerading as a civilized transition to the reservation system. The Potawatomi watched their Indiana homes burn before they were marched by armed volunteer militias through the East Central Illinois towns of Danville, Homer, Sydney, Sadorus, and Monticello in September, 1838, burying their children along the way as they succumbed to heat and illness. Today one can visit markers along the route, but few do.
A view of Main Street, Eagle Pass with the Texas National Guard at the barricaded entrance to Shelby Park, once the site of Kickapoo homes; the International Bridge visible in the background. Photo by Amerika Garcia Grewal, The Border Vigil, FB.com/BorderVigil, used by permission
Today’s Whiskey Treaties
Today’s removals use more sophisticated methods of surveilling, targeting, and processing inconvenient bodies, but ultimately the deportation system resembles Indian removal in wrapping denials of status in administrative hokum. It’s worth noting that the byzantine and racialized US immigration system emerged a century ago as the younger brother to Indian removal in establishing demographic hurdles, not pathways to movement. US barriers to movement are hardly unique now; for the vast majority in the world who find themselves in need of relocation, the “right way to immigrate” has become a legal fiction that only justifies exploitation and the denial of rights across the planet.
The legal chicanery doesn’t begin when an individual arrives at the US border or any frontier seeking to be treated humanely, however: bureaucratic dispossession from one’s lands begins long before, just as it did in the nineteenth century. Communities lose access to their lands as a result of mining or logging permits, or the establishment of exclusive economic zones negotiated in distant capitals. The diversion of community water for hydroelectric dams or export agriculture is protected by investment contracts that disadvantage local users. The most egregious example of the power inequity that leads to dispossession from the land are the toothless climate agreements that hold no one accountable for the environmental damage that renders homelands uninhabitable and is forcing entire regions to enter the ranks of the exiled. These are the Whiskey Treaties—nineteenth-century dispossessions lubricated with alcohol pushed on the Indians—of the modern era, negotiated by outside investors with access to powerful international law firms and with influence at international trade and investment negotiations that handily legalize the dispossession of less powerful communities.
The Deportation Industry is Already a Bestselling US Export
Indian removal was not just a shameful chapter in US history; it premiered a model of state-led ethnocide quickly imitated by other countries, including Argentina (the Conquest of the Desert) and Mexico (the deportations of the Yaqui). Two unfortunate trends helped the US model of ethnic cleansing go global in the 1800s. First, reports of Indian removal were shared along the newly globalized information exchanges, over telegraph lines and steamship routes, to land in newspapers and journals and academic halls far from the US. Second, these accounts hit the public precisely as the US was emerging as a global power distinct in form from the ailing multicultural empires of Europe. The US blueprint for manufacturing racial space through bureaucratic dispossession fired the imagination of nationalist movements across the world, with tragic results.
The most famous campaigns of the last century to draw on the US example of administrative extermination were the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians in 1915, the Soviet starvation of Ukrainians and Poles in the 1930s, and Hitler’s Lebensraum approach to the Slavic lands to Germany’s east, which paved the way to the Final Solution for all those lives considered inconvenient to the Aryan vision. The history of the endlessly shrinking Palestinian space since 1948 is the latest ethnocide to follow the US playbook.
This latest chapter, the deportation mania, is already setting a model for other countries. Defiance of international asylum law, deportation to third countries, characterization of migrants as national security threats—all are contributing to a lowered global standard of human rights for the planet’s most vulnerable. Corporations profiting by providing ankle monitors, detention centers, and anti-immigration security contractors have gone global as well.
The world needs a better example than what we are offering, and soon. The last few decades have seen a growing increase in and correlation between the ability and need of humans to move, on the one hand, and the efforts of states to shut down migration and asylum pathways on the other. Hundreds of millions languish in the twilight zone of refugee status, or struggle as foreign laborers limited by lack of documents or restrictions that deny them full participation in the societies which they are building. The US has been one of the prime purveyors of environmental, economic, and security policies that contribute to the destruction of individuals’ livelihoods abroad; now the US is setting a dangerous precedent in dehumanizing those who must move to survive. Indian removal paved the way for the Holocaust—where will this latest export of ideas lead?
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