If I said a child fled with his family to a foreign land to escape hostility and persecution, the story would be as old as time. I could be referring to baby Jesus, who fled with his parents to Egypt, singer Freddie Mercury, who fled to Britain to escape the Zanzibar Revolution or five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, who was allegedly detained as “bait” to lure his father amid a pending asylum case.

In 2026, many are not safe from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—refugees, green card holders, immigrants with pending asylum cases and even citizens are being targeted and detained every month. Why is the Bowdoin administration not outraged enough? Amid Trump’s efforts to phase out Delayed Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and other policies in 2017, Bowdoin student activists made several demands of the College, like making Bowdoin a sanctuary campus with concrete policies that protect at-risk immigrant students. That did not happen. The administration assured that vulnerable families would get Bowdoin’s best legal specialists. So here we are, nearly a decade later.

Today, many American institutions regurgitate liberal platitudes praising immigrants while trying to uphold the illusion that progress has been made for them. But when the call of the common good comes, the Bowdoin College administration has nothing good to say—not about livable wages, victims of apartheid, free speech and peaceful protest or even international students.

The reality is that America has historically been unkind to immigrants, especially immigrants of color. It was unkind when a group of white American miners massacred its Chinese immigrants where a Chinatown stood in Wyoming. As Ellis Island permitted a massive influx of European immigrants into the US, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was designed to keep nonwhites out and even prevent existing nonwhite residents from obtaining citizenship. America was unkind during “La Matanza,” where scores of white Texan vigilantes and Texas Rangers lynched Mexican Americans in the hundreds, if not thousands.

Not long ago, certain white people could get it too—well, when they were not quite “white.” The series of Philadelphia Bible Riots in 1844 highlights a 19th century pattern of anti-Irish and nativist mobs killing Irish immigrants and burning their Catholic churches. Five Points, Manhattan in the 19th century was an underserved, overcrowded district reserved for Black Americans and the Irish, who combined their dance traditions to create tap dance in one of America’s earliest instances of racial integration. Sadly, tensions rose to spark the 1863 Manhattan draft riots when the Irish took the bait of blaming Black folks for their discontents. Irish rioters hanged Black men from lampposts as mobs set the borough ablaze, leaving behind ash where their Black neighbors’ homes, businesses, dance halls and orphanages once stood. Substituting their own alienation for the alienation of Black people is, in part, how the Irish became white.

The U.S. has not only terrorized its immigrants as civilians but also oppressed them as prisoners in detention centers, prisons and concentration camps. The U.S. has had an ugly habit of blaming immigrants for everything from disease outbreaks to rising crime rates to losses in battle. The U.S. government detained thousands of Italian and German nationals as “enemy aliens” in the 1940s. Things escalated when the race was different. After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. detained nearly 100,000 Japanese American citizens in concentration camps without concrete evidence of disloyalty to the U.S. Many lost their homes and businesses. So drunk on white supremacy, the government even forcibly removed thousands 0f Japanese residents in Peru and sent them to U.S. camps to allegedly be “bargaining chips.” Ironically, the U.S. government forced people to be “illegal aliens” against their will.

Scapegoating immigrants of color has been politically advantageous for both sides of the political spectrum, but this presidential administration has been excessive. Wanting immigrants of color to be “doing it the right way” was just coded language because the mechanisms to adjust status are nearly broken and ICE agents have been waiting by courthouses at immigrants’ scheduled hearings to detain them. They were never “lazy,” since ICE comes to their workplaces to detain them. It isn’t about “criminals,” as most of the people detained have no criminal history. They weren’t “hurting the economy” or “using up social services” when many of them were paying taxes into the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Social Security and other services that they’ll never benefit from. Based on Senate Foreign Relations Committee estimates, the deportation of one person can cost as much as $1 million of taxpayer funds, with third-country military flights costing over $32,000 per hour. The government reportedly paid $7.5 million in flight expenses to deport seven people to Rwanda, and $5.1 million to deport just 15 to Eswatini.

It is sobering to see values of the common good and the Offer of the College crumbling from the top down, but I am proud of the Bowdoin students keeping hope alive and standing up against injustice. As Dr. King famously said, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” If his warning wasn’t clear enough, remember this: They’re coming for you.

Osa Fasehun is a member of the Class of 2018.