Wellfleet Puplic Library

Immigration Enforcement, ICE, and the Border Patrol: An American History with Rachel Ida Buff

Since 2025, the Customs Border Patrol (CBP) and Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE) have expanded radically to become the largest agencies in the US federal government. Communities around the country, in Minneapolis, Portland, OR, Chicago, and Maine, have experienced "surges" of masked federal agents targeting immigrant communities. Licensed by the Supreme Court to stop people based on their "foreign appearance,," these operations have resulted in thousands of detentions and deportations. They have taken legal permanent residents as well US citizens working to protect immigrant neighbors. This talk considers this current reality from a historical perspective, tracing the evolution immigration enforcement and the militarization of the US- Mexico border from the nineteenth century into the present. In addition, it discusses the long history of immigrant rights advocacy.

Rachel Ida Buff is a writer, immigrant rights advocate, and working historian currently teaching at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee. She has published in a wide variety of public-facing as well as academic outlets, her most recent book being the bilingual glossary of terms, A is for Asylum Seeker: Word for People on the Move/ A de Asilo: Palabras para Personas en Movimiento. Currently, she is working on a book entitled The Gangster Buffs of Charleston: Jewish Safety in a 20" Century Appalachian City.