Colonial “Illegals”: Marronage Communities and the Ongoing War on Migrants
Since day one of Trump 2.0, undocumented immigrants, immigrants on work or student visas, and even U.S. citizens have been systematically targeted for harassment, arrest, and deportation. Fulfilling a central campaign promise, the administration has gone to great lengths to escalate immigration enforcement through high-profile raids.
Yet, a significant number of the undocumented migrants detained by the Trump administration have otherwise clean records. The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a project from Syracuse University that compiles immigration data, estimates that of the 51,302 people in ICE detention facilities as of June 1, about 44 percent had no criminal record aside from entering the U.S. without authorization.
These deportations have sparked national outrage and widespread protest. In June, demonstrators in downtown Los Angeles prompted the federal government to deploy nearly 5,000 Marines and National Guard troops to the area. According to The New York Times, it is likely that additional troops will be sent to other cities. Initially, U.S. officials insisted that these operations were "targeted" at criminals and public safety threats. However, the LA Times revealed that ICE targeted undocumented people—many of whom have no criminal record—across all sectors and industries, including farms, restaurants, factories, schools, and places of worship.
By early June, ICE had detained around 51,000 undocumented migrants, the highest number recorded since September 2019. While complete and current figures for immigration detentions since January 20 are not publicly available, White House officials stated their goal is to scale up to 3,000 arrests per day, compared to the 660 daily average during the first 100 days of Trump's presidency.
Despite these conditions, undocumented migrants continue to live and work in the U.S., often seeking refuge in communities where safety is rooted in cultural familiarity and mutual support. In Jackson Heights, Queens, migrants, both documented and undocumented, continue to arrive in waves, forming networks and communities with those who came before them. On street corners, vendors sell mangos and tall stalks of sugarcane pressed into juice. In Washington Heights, Dominican migrants find work in bodegas and supermarkets. As Jordan Salama writes for The New Yorker, many of the newest residents in these communities now come from Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador: “Such migrants line up each day at dawn at paradas—‘stops’—hoping to get picked up for day jobs, like tiling, roofing, or painting.”
These paradas exist all over New York City. In my early twenties, I worked for a beverage distribution company operating in Whitestone, Queens. My official job title was “helper.” It was a job for undocumented people. “Off the books,” as they say. Outside the beverage distribution company, undocumented workers, usually from central America, no matter the weather would gather as early as three in the morning on the off chance that one of the regular “helpers” called out sick or didn’t show up.
The ethnic composition of undocumented migrants in the U.S. is diverse. According to the Center for Migration Studies of New York (CMS), there are approximately 582,300 Black undocumented immigrants, representing 5.6 percent of the total undocumented population. No reliable national estimate exists for Indigenous undocumented migrants, as many are frequently undercounted, misclassified, or overlooked in broader Hispanic/Latinx categories. Ethnographic research, however, shows that “people in communities with relatively high indigenous populations are more likely to migrate as undocumented rather than documented migrants.”
The targeting of these populations echoes a longer history of persecution rooted in colonialism and racial capitalism. Migration in search of opportunity, or in flight from oppression, is not new. In fact, the political persecution of people of African and Indigenous descent in the Americas dates back to the so-called "discovery of the New World" with the arrival of Christopher Columbus, the enslavement of Arawak Taínos under Spanish Catholic rule, and the subsequent importation of enslaved Africans.
Some of the first politically and physically persecuted migrants during Spanish colonization were the enslaved Taínos and Africans on the island of Hispaniola. Beginning in the fifteenth century, enslaved Africans fled the brutal conditions of sugar plantations in Hispaniola by migrating to the island’s interior and to other islands, where they established Maroon communities with their own economic and cultural practices. As Richard Price notes in Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, Maroon societies were established in Hispaniola as early as 1502. These groups, often aided by Taíno allies, formed self-governing communities that resisted colonial authority.
We might think of Hispaniola’s Maroons as the first political migrants of the Americas. Because of their legal status as runaways, they lived in the shadows of the state, perpetually criminalized and hunted. In Milagros Ricourt’s anthropological study, The Dominican Racial Imaginary: Surveying the Landscape of Race and Nation in Hispaniola, she explains that Cimarrones (the Spanish language root of "Maroon") “sought refuge in the mountains, forests, and adjacent islands, and they formed villages that survived for decades and even centuries." For Cimarrones, survival meant reciprocation of knowledge and self-reliance. As Sophie Maríñez argues in Spirals in the Caribbean: Representing Violence and Connection in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, “Indigenous allies guided Africans through the territory, showing them how to survive in the wilderness.” Maríñez explains that they traded instruments and knowledge about plants for food and medicine and where to seek shelter. Together, they also raided Spanish villages for supplies. These Maroon villages (known as manieles, quilombos, and palenques in Spanish-speaking Caribbean colonies) operated outside the reach of the Spanish military and political system. Their purpose was not only to escape bondage but also to create spaces of humanity and freedom.
Though Hispaniola witnessed the first instances of Marronage in the Americas, other colonized regions also saw the rise of Maroon societies and armed resistance to colonial rule. For instance, the Garifuna are an Afro-Indigenous people descended from Africans and Arawak Indigenous people who lived primarily on the island of Saint Vincent and migrated along the Caribbean coast of Central America. In the U.S., Maroons migrated to the Great Dismal Swamp, straddling North Carolina and Virginia, and the Bas de Fleuve region of Louisiana. Some Maroons organized direct confrontations with colonial authorities, while others resisted through acts of sabotage or unauthorized absences from plantations. Dominican historian Celsa Albert Batista’s Mujer Y Esclavitud: En Santo Domingo documents how enslaved domestic workers, particularly women, disrupted elite households by stealing provisions for runaways and, in some cases, murdering their enslavers, acts she categorizes as "cimarronaje domestico" (domestic cimarronaje).
Newspapers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reveal how common it was to criminalize maroons by casting them as people outside the law and imperial subjectivity. Reports frequently documented violent encounters between settlers and maroon communities. On March 21, 1796, the London Evening Mail covered the conclusion of the Second Maroon War in Jamaica (July 1795–March 1796), noting that “100 Blood-hounds, and 30 Spanish Chasseurs, had been brought from the island of Cuba: for the purpose of hunting the Maroons in their recesses.” A Liverpool paper, writing about Demerara (then a Dutch colony, now part of Guyana) reported that financial incentives were offered to those who captured maroons, including Indigenous people: “rewards paid on similar occasion to Indians, for bringing in a prisoners alive, were double in amount to what they received for killing a Maroon.”
The U.S. press likewise circulated depictions of maroons as fugitives or criminal bands. On October 28, 1857, the Pickens County Herald and West Alabamian reprinted a report from Matanzas, Cuba describing the seizure of “a desperate gang of runaway negroes, who had fortified themselves in the mountains.” The criminalization of Marronage in the U.S. was so widespread that a December 11, 1830 issue of the Niles’ Weekly Register (Baltimore) included, in its breakdown of a plantation’s annual expenditures, a routine line item: “Loss of slaves by death or marronage, valued at 7½ percent.” Other reported expenses included “report of sugar hours, loss of cattle, [and] repairs and renewal of carts.”
In this longer view, the raids and detentions of today are part of a centuries-old pattern of state violence targeting Black and Indigenous migrants who refuse dehumanization. Just as Maroons claimed their freedom beyond the reach of empire, today’s undocumented migrants build communities rooted in resilience, mutual aid, and the pursuit of dignity in the face of state violence.
In a moment such as this, the significance of historical thinking is paramount to our survival. Experience is our best teacher, and we must check time: remember what we have lost, who we have been, and commit to supporting, in whatever ways we can, the communities and networks of undocumented workers and migrants that the government refuses to protect and instead actively targets.
Historically, empires have never been, and will never be, the arbiters of morality or ethics, especially when it comes to migrants and border politics. History and historical thinking provide an epistemology for resisting and enduring long-established modes of oppression rooted in colonial inheritance. The old cliché that history repeats itself is useful here. As Gilles Deleuze reminds us, “repetition with a difference” builds on knowledge rather than negating it. This is an approach that, when applied to past episodes of persecution, reveals their devastating recurrence.
Some newspapers, as seen above, repeatedly depicted Cimarrones as outsiders to the social and political order, casting them as illegal subjects who operated beyond the boundaries of empire. Such representations worked to criminalize autonomy and reinforce the fiction of imperial sovereignty. The history of Marronage communities, however, teaches us that solidarity is necessary to survive a homogenizing empire. Oppressed communities, like the Cimarrones of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, have long depended on one another for knowledge, support, and collective resistance. We need to maintain this reciprocal exchange and support now, more than ever.