Disappeared: How the U.S. Violently Disappears People

Recent victims of state-sponsored censorship and political attacks range from Palestinian liberation activists to working-class immigrant mothers. Albeit morally bankrupt, this is not an unusual characterization of the United States and its policies on civil disobedience, immigration, and racial justice. The U.S. has a longstanding history of disappearing people—whether it be activists, immigrants, students, or foreign state actors—you name it, they’ve done it. But how?

In March of 2025, I published a Twitter thread on how the U.S. enacts violence on those they are politically motivated to harm. Specifically, this thread covered the violence enacted on six protestors of the Ferguson Unrest in relation to outrage surrounding the disappearance of Palestinian-solidarity activists like Mahmoud Khalil or Rumeysa Ozturk. Before unfurling unto the current moment, I think it’s important to also recognize the ongoing history of Black radicals and activists “disappearing” in less obscure terms. I offer you to turn your attention toward the misinformation and propaganda given to you as a child about civil rights leaders like Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Their deaths, still being contested and fought to this day in the case of Malcolm X, are a form of long-term propagandized disappearance.

In most public school systems around the country, we are taught that these two figures had radically different views and ideals, and were subconsciously taught that one death was justified (if you learned about it at all) and the other was the start of the multiracial cosmopolitan society we know today.

The lessons we learned in school in the midst of adolescence are obviously fabricated in some sense, but why? Shortly before King’s assassination, he spoke with prolific artist Harry Belafonte and said that he felt as if he were integrating his people into a burning house. This came after his infamous speech at the March on Washington in 1963, where the words “I have a dream” are touted every February as if U.S. lawmakers said it themselves.

“Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today,    signed the Emancipation Proclamation… But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later the Negro is still languished in the corners of American society and finds himself in exile in his own land. And so we’ve come here today to dramatize a shameful condition” (King 1963).

King is describing the feeling of never belonging, which I argue makes it easier to disappear—or be disappeared.

Considering the long history of assassinations of political figures and activists, xenophobic and discriminatory laws, and a fight for the right to misinform, I’d like to explain the act of disappearance today in three categories: Black Activists in 2014, Student Protestors in 2023, and ICE/Xenophobic Immigration Laws.

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2014 marked the birth of the Black Lives Matter Movement. Organizing came out of the tragic murder of Trayvon Martin and continued as more and more young Black men were faced with the same fate. In August of 2014, Ferguson police shot and killed then-18-year-old Michael “Mike” Brown. The protest in Ferguson, Missouri, dubbed the “Ferguson Unrest,” led to the deaths of six protestors.

The most famous images to come out of these protests were those taken of the deceased Edward Crawford Jr. Crawford was found dead in his car with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His uncle did not think he killed himself, telling CNN, “I don’t want people to think it’s some conspiracy theory,” “I don’t believe my nephew killed himself either, maybe it was an accident.” It would be less conspiratorial if Crawford were the only one, however, following Crawford's death came Darren Seals, who was found in a burning car, with a bullet in his head. Seals was noted as extremely outspoken against imperialist politicians like Barack Obama and clashed with many other leaders in Black liberation movement work.

Seals often criticized Black leaders and officials who contributed nothing positive toward the conditions of Black people in this nation. Identity politics is something politicians choose to hammer in on, especially as it’s geared toward the Black community. Seals' defiance and rejection of Black leadership went against the grain of major surrogates and fellow organizers at the time of the unrest and the rise of BLM. Whether or not Seals or Crawford self-inflicted the wounds that led to their deaths, the ideals of radical Black action had been stolen and tucked away alongside their physical embodiment of them. Instead of Black communities banding together to make abolition a reality, we settle for memes of former Vice President Kamala Harris and allow Joe Biden to tell us we weren’t Black if we were not voting for him. In this case, not only were our community members and activists disappeared, but so were the ideals and moral convictions that led us to engage in abolitionist work.

The reason I made my thread to begin with was to highlight the injustices faced by Palestinian student activist Mahmoud Khalil. I had spent the greater parts of 2023 and 2024 organizing in Palestinian solidarity groups, so the immediate and rapid disappearances of figures like Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, and Mohsen Mamdawi brought up varying emotions and thoughts. Initially, in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, lawyers, politicians, and legal scholars rose up ever so slightly against the Trump administration for their illegal detainment of a legal permanent resident of the United States.

The argument being made for Mahmoud’s release was not done on the grounds of it being morally abhorrent to kidnap someone in plain clothes and deny them the right to speak to a lawyer, but on the basis that he had never committed a crime. I’m emphasizing this because the notion of legality as something that would give the United States a moral conscience is not only laughable but wholly untrue. Take the case of Turkish international student Rumeysa Ozturk—kidnapped in broad daylight by ICE agents for writing an op-ed—and Mohsen Mamdawi, kidnapped at his immigration hearing. Legality means nothing for the state to do what it does best: terrorize.

The students who have been detained go beyond the three mentioned in these stories, and as dissent continues to grow, the lines between legal and illegal will become more and more blurry. Legality is the cause of alienation and xenophobia, which is now fueling the separation of families and the mass detention of immigrants.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE, was birthed out of the Department of Homeland Security, which gave us the Patriot Act and TSA. In 2014, President Barack Obama built the cages Americans would associate with the Trump administration in 2018. In an article published by The Washington Post, Obama’s vision for the ‘crisis’ at the border is laid out, stating:

“The Obama administration responded to the outrage by rushing to expand its capacity to handle the new migration wave at the border, to adapt an infrastructure built to handle single adult men, not families and children” (Miroff 2020).

This rhetoric is, at its core, American—that men can be kept locked away like animals and left to be dehumanized. This is one stage in the disappearance of a people: dehumanization. The United States has been masterful at laying the grounds for ethnic cleansing and genocide. In 1830 they passed the Indian Removal Act, 1882 it was the Chinese Exclusion Act, in 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt passed Executive Order 9066 which facilitated the Japanese Internment Camps, in 1877 they enacted racial segregation aka Jim Crow Laws, and in 2025 President Trump signed Executive Order “Protecting the American People Against Invasion” into law.

Disappearing people on the principle of ethnic and racial separation is not new, or even shocking—it is the core of this nation. It is not partisan, and it is not isolated to the executive branch. The SCOTUS, Superior Courts, and other judicial powers in this country have ruled against inclusion or humanity and toward disappearance. Whether that be a disappearance of rights, of ethnic history, of gender, or a disappearance of the imagined ‘freedom’ this country was propagandized to represent. Policy is a tool in the master’s house used to silence its people.

The United States deploys a mix of platforms, people, and government agencies to disappear people. As citizens, community members, and walkers of this earth, it's important for us to maintain an understanding of the country we live in and its conscience.

Stokely Carmichael said, “Dr. King's policy was that nonviolence would achieve the gains for Black people in the United States. His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That's very good. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.”

Although contextually different, this is still important as we engage in the world around us. Everything is political and therefore, everything can be contested, rebelled against, and fought—including our education. As it stands, there are thousands of bills in states across the country demanding Black history is taught inaccurately. This is an attempt to disappear the information and lineage of a people. This is violent. This is the same beast that has abducted Palestinian solidarity activists, driven Black liberationists to their deaths, and ripped families apart.

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