Statement on the 30th Anniversary of IIRIRA
30 Years of the 1996 Immigration Law: A Legacy of Detention, Deportation, and Family Separation
NEW YORK, NY — Thirty years after President Bill Clinton signed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) into law, Black migrant communities are still living with what it built: a system that turns criminalization into detention, deportation, and family separation.
IIRIRA expanded mandatory detention and the grounds for deportation while restricting opportunities for relief. For Black migrants, the law deepened the consequences of an already racist criminal legal system, strengthening the pipeline from police encounters to immigration detention and deportation.
The Black Alliance for Just Immigration’s (BAJI) analysis of 2022 data found that, excluding Haiti, 86% of Black migrants deported had come into contact with police, compared with just over half of the overall immigrant population. Haiti was excluded because the extraordinary scale and distinct pattern of deportations made it an outlier: deportations of Haitians quadrupled from 2021 to 2022, yet only 8% were on criminal grounds. These findings expose how Black migrants face both the consequences of disproportionate policing and an immigration system that targets them far beyond criminal convictions.
This machinery has operated across administrations of both parties. From Clinton’s drug-war policies and Bush’s War on Terror to Obama’s “felons, not families” framing, Biden’s focus on fentanyl at the border, and Trump’s promises to target criminal “aliens,” presidents have repeatedly invoked criminality to justify enforcement. The infrastructure stretches from police encounters and federal databases to ICE arrests, detention centers, surveillance systems, and deportation flights.
Our communities know what those policies mean beyond the slogans. A parent does not come home. A household loses an income. A family spends days calling detention centers, trying to locate someone they love. The government counts beds and deportations. We count the people missing from our lives.
Thirty years later, we do not need better cages or more efficient deportations. We need to repeal IIRIRA, end mandatory detention, restore meaningful due process, and end collaboration between police and immigration enforcement. We call for abolishing ICE, ending immigration detention, and redirecting public resources toward housing, healthcare, education, and community care.
Our people belong with their families and in their communities. Our demand is clear: Stop taking our people. BAJI will keep organizing across the Black diaspora until we are all free.
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