People ripped from homes, families torn apart, surveillance, checkpoints, the sound of boots. Whether it’s Ramallah or Los Angeles, Gaza or Chicago, we are witnessing a transnational architecture of control engineered not by coincidence, but by design. The mass deportations currently happening in the United States and the ongoing genocide of Palestinians are not separate crises, but two expressions of the same system of violence: one rooted in white supremacy, settler colonialism, and the pursuit of domination through racialized state power.
In the United States, the latest immigration crackdown has escalated into an all-out assault. The Trump administration’s second term has opened with a surge of deportations, tripling daily ICE arrest targets and expanding detention capacities to unprecedented levels. Over 200,000 migrants have already been deported this year according to a Reuters report from early June. Meanwhile, immigration courts are clogged with rushed cases and judges admit openly that their roles feel more punitive than judicial. For many, it’s not just undocumented status that puts them at risk. People with valid visas, Temporary Protected Status, or even those married to U.S. citizens have found themselves suddenly, violently uprooted.
The logic of these removals in America mirrors what Palestinian scholar Fayez Sayegh once identified as a key mechanism of Zionism: “displacement as redemption.” Just as the Zionist state justifies Palestinian expulsion as a pathway to national rebirth, the U.S. frames mass deportation as a necessary purging for safety, sovereignty, and order. But the underlying logic is the same: cleanse the land, criminalize the native, erase the past.
The state’s obsession with “purity” and “protection” echoes an older logic—the same one that fueled the Trail of Tears, Japanese internment, and Jim Crow. It’s the logic that Frantz Fanon, writing from the shadows of French colonialism, called “a world cut in two.” A world where one half is governed by force and justified by myths of civility, and the other half exists only as something to be controlled, displaced, eliminated if necessary.
Palestinians have lived this reality for 76 years. Since the Nakba in 1948, when over 750,000 Palestinians were forcibly expelled from their homes, the Zionist Israeli project has operated not just as an occupation but as a colonial experiment in erasure. What is unfolding in Gaza today is, put plainly, a genocide.
Hospitals are bombed, water is cut, journalists are killed in plain sight, and people are denied not only life, but the narrative of their suffering. Edward Said, in Culture and Imperialism, warned of this silencing; how empires operate not only with weapons, but with language. “The power to narrate,” he wrote, “or to block other narratives from forming and emerging, is a crucial component of culture and imperialism.”
The parallels between the U.S. deportation machine and the Israeli occupation are not symbolic. They are material, tactical, and ideological. The border wall at the U.S.–Mexico boundary is built with technologies pioneered by Israeli defense contractors. ICE agents train alongside Israeli police. Counter-insurgency manuals used in Gaza inform policing strategies in American cities. When American universities expel students for organizing sit-ins for Palestine, when ICE deports a pro-Palestinian activist citing “national security concerns,” we are seeing the convergence of repression.
Even the narratives used to defend the oppressed are shaped by the systems that dehumanize them. In both cases, there’s a compulsion to justify life and prove worthiness. We are told to stand up for immigrants because they are “hard-working” and “pay taxes,” as though dignity must be earned through labor. Similarly, calls to end the bombing of Gaza often hinge on the fact that the victims are “women and children,” as though the lives of men—or resisters—are somehow less sacred. In both cases, the moral argument becomes contingent and conditional. The baseline truth is that these are human beings, entitled to exist simply because they are. Liberation cannot be built on the logic of exception. As long as we plead for scraps of empathy, we reinforce the very hierarchies that treat our lives as negotiable. The Palestinian farmer, the undocumented single father, the refugee teenager: none should need to audition for the right to live. Their existence is the argument.
Of course, we can’t ignore the foundational role anti-Blackness plays in structuring both American and global systems of control. The afterlife of slavery lives on through mass incarceration, police violence, and the disposability of Black life not only in the U.S., but wherever extractive capitalism and imperial policing stretch their reach. The Black radical tradition—from Angela Davis to Cedric Robinson—has long argued that the violence experienced by migrants, Palestinians, and colonized peoples around the world is not separate from the historical subjugation of Black people, but deeply entangled with it. It’s no accident that the same prisons that warehouse Black Americans also hold undocumented migrants, or that the tear gas fired in Ferguson is the same brand used in the West Bank.
This convergence isn’t new. As American scholar and prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore once succinctly said, “capitalism requires inequality and racism enshrines it.” The global systems we live under—of extraction, surveillance, mass displacement—depend on racial hierarchies to function. It’s why Palestinians are described as “human animals,” and migrants as “invaders.” It’s why a bomb in Rafah is called a surgical strike and an ICE raid in Texas is called “law enforcement.”
This is the intersection, not of issues, but of systems. Settler colonialism, border imperialism, racial capitalism: these are not abstract academic terms. They are names for how power works in the world we live in. They are the connective tissue between the burning ruins of Rafah and the detention buses in Arizona. Between the Palestinian child denied medical care and the Honduran teenager turned away at the border. The struggles may wear different masks, but the face underneath is the same.
To understand this is to move beyond allyship into solidarity not as sentiment, but as strategy. Solidarity means recognizing that Palestinian liberation is not a distraction from immigrant justice but it is inseparable from it. That dismantling ICE is part of dismantling apartheid. That the right of return and the right to remain are twin demands, echoing across different terrains but harmonizing in their vision for a future without cages, checkpoints, or colonial borders.
In this moment, it is not enough to say “we stand with Palestine,” or “no human is illegal.” We must recognize that we are fighting the same beast. The same logic that razes homes in Khan Younis tears apart families in El Paso. The same indifference that lets children die in the rubble of Gaza lets asylum seekers drown in the Rio Grande. These are not separate injustices, but nodes in a single, sprawling system of domination.
And yet, people are resisting. Across the U.S., students have turned their campuses into encampments, demanding an end to university complicity in apartheid. In sanctuary cities, communities are creating networks of care, shielding their neighbors from ICE raids. In Palestine, even under blockade and bombardment, people continue to write, to farm, to teach, to mourn, to dream, to exist, despite it all.
Fanon wrote that “decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.” But violence is not just the blood spilled in the streets, it is the slow violence of bureaucratic cruelty, of hunger, of exile, of being denied your right to name your pain. And decolonization is not merely political independence, it is the unraveling of the colonial imagination, refusing to accept borders drawn in our bodies, and it is, as American writer and professor Audre Lorde reminded us, insisting that caring for ourselves and each other is political warfare.
To stand against genocide and deportation is to stand for a different world where freedom is not negotiated through the terms of empire. A world where the refugee is not criminalized, the colonized is not erased, and solidarity is not performance, but practice. To stand with Gaza is to stand with every undocumented worker crossing a desert. And to fight for migrants is to fight for the right of return, because until we are all free, none of us are.
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