Gambiaj.com – (Banjul, The Gambia) – A leading U.S.-based civil rights group has sounded the alarm over the misclassification of Black immigrants—including Gambians—by U.S. immigration authorities, accusing them of deliberately concealing racial data to evade accountability for systemic discrimination.
The Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), an organization that champions the rights of Black migrants, has called on the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after newly revealed documents showed the agency has been inaccurately recording the racial identity of detained migrants.
Among the most glaring findings: only 50% of Gambian immigrants held in ICE detention were categorized as Black, despite U.S. census data showing that 98% of Gambians self-identify as Black.
BAJI obtained the records through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed in 2021, uncovering what it describes as years of ICE’s secretive and misleading racial data practices.
The organization claims the agency has been “whitewashing” race data to obscure disparities in how Black immigrants are treated in detention centers—many of which are located in the U.S. South, a region already notorious for racialized violence and incarceration.
“Detention and the disappearing of Black people is a continuation and extension of this country’s slavery and mass incarceration legacy,” BAJI Executive Director Nana Gyamfi said in a statement.
She emphasized that many immigrants—particularly Black ones from The Gambia, Senegal, Mauritania, Haiti, and Mali—are detained under harsh conditions in facilities that routinely ignore racial bias in their treatment.
In one example highlighted by BAJI, 86% of all detainees in a New Mexico immigration detention center were classified as white—even though a significant number came from predominantly Black nations in Africa and the Caribbean.
This racial mislabeling, advocates say, distorts public perception, shields ICE from accountability, and hampers efforts to address racial disparities in detention conditions, use of force, and solitary confinement.
The revelations have struck a nerve among Gambian rights defenders and diaspora communities, who have long voiced concern over discriminatory immigration enforcement practices in the U.S. Many see the misclassification as part of a broader pattern of institutional neglect and racial erasure.
So far, neither ICE, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), nor Customs and Border Protection has responded to BAJI’s findings or their call for reforms, including the establishment of transparent, standardized racial data collection systems.
The findings come just weeks after BAJI’s Executive Director met with U.S. officials at the White House, where she presented a policy brief outlining the stark racial inequities affecting Black migrants at the border.
But according to BAJI, the Biden Administration has failed to take meaningful action to deliver on its promises of racial equity. In fact, the group says conditions for Black migrants have deteriorated since 2022.
For many Gambians in the United States and at home, the revelations raise fresh concerns about how Black lives—particularly African immigrant lives—are devalued and rendered invisible within American systems of power.
BAJI and the American Immigration Council have vowed to continue pressing for justice and transparency. Meanwhile, Gambians in the diaspora are watching closely, demanding that their identity—and humanity—not be erased behind bars.
