Colonize Then, Deport Now

Robert Goldsborough, a Maryland lawmaker, rose one Friday early in 1826 to clinch what he fancied a good deal for his state. Goldsborough informed his fellow legislators that a private entity had “incurred an expense in a late deportation of 150 free people of color to the African settlement in Liberia.” Given that “twenty of those free people of colour [sic] were from the state of Maryland,” he directed the state’s treasury to reimburse the cost of their removal.

The recipient: the American Colonization Society (ACS). It was the ACS, composed of prominent white men, that founded Liberia as a colony where the U.S. could send its free Black populace. The self-styled colonization movement encompassed both abolitionists and enslavers. Many were ministers zealous to evangelize and “redeem” Africa. While the ACS disavowed any official position on slavery, its members insisted that free Black people had no place in their body politic.

Flash forward two centuries: Donald Trump is using mass deportation to plunge the U.S. into a tin-pot fascist police state. Jamelle Bouie has likened the horrors we now witness daily — masked agents abducting Black and brown people from restaurants and courthouses, street corners and schools — to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The comparison is right, but the roots of this catastrophic moment reach even further back. Mass deportation follows the anti-Black blueprint that white colonizationists had laid a generation before.

To be sure, Black immigrants, born both enslaved and free, came to Liberia seeking liberation. Many settlers embraced the proposition of returning to their ancestral homeland. Liberia’s motto remains “The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here.” But if Liberia promised escape from slavery and racism, the promise would be betrayed.

Though the ACS claimed no one would leave against their will, the choice was burdened. The ubiquity of American racism made emigration plausible in the first place. Some enslavers forced families to purchase their freedom on the condition that they sail for Africa. Many Black abolitionists, Frederick Douglass foremost among them, denounced the ACS. Long before Kristi Noem would dangle a poisoned offer of cash to incentivize “self-deportation,” colonizationists manufactured the illusion of Black people’s consent.

The colonization movement enveloped Washington, counting legislators, judges and presidents among its ranks. Those power brokers advanced ACS interests from public office. Then-President James Monroe, an enslaver and ardent colonizationist, became the namesake for Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, by securing funds for the fledgling colony. Long before contractors would build a concentration camp in the Everglades, the ACS used federal patronage for its eliminationist ends.

Goldsborough noted that of the 150 immigrants who had arrived in Liberia, 20 “were from the state of Maryland.” The remark admitted that the newest Liberians had spent their lives in his state. Goldsborough nevertheless urged their removal. Long before the White House would berate journalists for recognizing that Kilmar Ábrego García is a “Maryland man,” the ACS avowed that only white settlers could call the U.S. their own.

The ACS seized a stretch of African coastline, making no effort to bring immigrants where their ancestors had been enslaved. After the trade of enslaved Africans was outlawed, American warships took to patrolling the Atlantic. Upon intercepting slave ships, the Navy “returned” the captives aboard to Liberia — though most had been shackled along the Congo Basin. The term “Congo” now signifies all those who came, no matter their birthplace, to Liberia. The settlers would, in turn, establish Liberia as Africa’s first Black republic, a paradox in that the new nation colonized the land and oppressed its Indigenous peoples.

Today’s White House is disappearing detainees to “third countries,” a euphemism for nations where they have never set foot — and often face grave danger. Most notorious is El Salvador, whose right-wing dictator Nayib Bukele boasts a hideous pact with Trump. But the pair’s homegrown gulags are only one thread in an unfolding global plot.

Most countries facing pressure to take American detainees are African. In June, the U.S. Supreme Court authorized the expulsion of eight detainees, who had endured months inside a shipping container in Djibouti, to South Sudan. Flights to Eswatini and Rwanda have followed. The White House is eyeing Liberia — alongside Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Libya, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal and Uganda — for similar designs. (Honduras and Palau are also under duress.)

True to the infamous slur that Trump uttered in his first term, one African nation deserves “the worst of the worst” as much as any other. While governments might ask favors for holding detainees, the gutting of the U.S. Agency for International Development has deprived many, particularly Liberia, of leverage. What’s more, a travel ban now targets much of Africa — Afrikaner “refugees” exempted, of course. Little surprise that Trump was bewildered when Liberian President Joseph Boakai recently addressed him in English. The White House, to quote Swazi activists, takes the continent for “a dumping ground.”

The U.S. has no monopoly on perpetuating the global color line. Trump’s tactics resemble Australia’s removal of migrants to Papua New Guinea and Nauru. The United Kingdom still champions mass deportation, even after its misbegotten scheme to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda. That is to say nothing of Israel’s reported efforts to remove those who survive its genocide in Gaza to South Sudan — a chilling echo of the Nazi “Madagascar Plan.”

Rarely, however, is it grasped stateside that mass deportation is neocolonial — much less that colonial implicates the U.S. two centuries ago. Goldsborough and his ilk deemed free Black people an intolerable problem. They saw in Africa their salvation — the means, Norfolk colonizationists had declared weeks before Goldsborough spoke, of “putting away the whole of this black and menacing evil, gradually, safely, and most happily, from our land.”

The continent likewise seals the promise that returned Trump to power: deliver America from the migrant hordes that are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Venezuelan or Afghan or Haitian or Liberian — anyone who imperils the nation’s whiteness can be sent “back” to Africa.

“We do not mean to go to Liberia,” Douglass proclaimed in 1849. “Our minds are made up to live here if we can, or die here if we must; so every attempt to remove us will be, as it ought to be, labor lost.” His words were prophetic.

Two hundred years after the ACS came into being, Liberia endures as a sovereign republic, a diverse nation that represents freedom in all its complexity. Black America has gone nowhere. The colonizationist fantasy, to rule Liberia and to make America white, failed. So must its latter-day heir.