In the span of two weeks, three scenes unfolded that captured the new face of law enforcement in America. In Memphis, National Guard troops and federal agents arrived under the banner of the Trump Administration-backed Memphis Safe Task Force, setting up a staging area and vowing to “restore public safety and order.”
In Chicago, a pre-dawn raid on a South Shore apartment building left dozens arrested, children detained, and families displaced, as neighbors described a military-style operation that tore through their community. And in Portland, protesters faced federal officers wielding batons, firing tear gas, and rounding up demonstrators as part of a renewed effort to assert control over the city’s ICE detention center.
Read more: Mayor Keith Wilson: Portland Doesn’t Need or Want Federal Troops
Together, these moments signal a growing normalization of armed, federalized policing inside American cities. In their wake, many Americans are justifiably alarmed and shocked by the scale of government force. Citizens are uneasy about how far Trump and his administration are willing to go in the name of law and order.
It’s a fear that’s existed in the souls of Black Americans for centuries.
Trump’s reliance on federal power and the National Guard follows a playbook as old as the country itself. When faced with fear or perceived disorder, government leaders have repeatedly turned to law enforcement as the primary, and often sole response. Their target, however, has usually been the Black community. What’s happening now simply makes that old equation visible to everyone else.
American history traces this painful legacy back to slave patrols, groups of armed white men, often sanctioned by local governments, who were tasked with tracking, capturing, and punishing enslaved people in the American South. These patrols, which expanded in the 1700s, represented one of the earliest formalized systems of state-backed surveillance and control over Black bodies.
Read more: Policing’s Illusion of Safety
After the Civil War, the model evolved into militias and groups like the Ku Klux Klan. During Reconstruction, they often operated with support from local officials and terrorized freed Black citizens who were exercising their political rights. Their goal was to restore white dominance and undermine Reconstruction governments by targeting Black voters, officeholders, and communities. These groups often blurred the line between civilian and state violence. Local sheriffs and former Confederate soldiers were regularly among their ranks, and their actions helped lay the groundwork for the modern relationship between law enforcement, racial control, and political power in the South.
By the 20th century, the weight of law enforcement on Black communities became unmistakable. During the height of the civil rights era, the government often treated Black activism and urban unrest as a threat that needed to be contained. In the long, hot summer of 1967, uprisings broke out across more than 150 cities after years of police abuse, segregation, and neglect. The federal response was not empathy or reform, but occupation. National Guard troops and police poured into Black neighborhoods under the banner of restoring order, which was a mask for control.
That instinct hardened under President Richard Nixon’s war on drugs. What began as a political slogan became a 50-year campaign of punishment in Black communities, carried out through surveillance, racial profiling, stop-and-frisk, and the rise of specialized police task forces. Later administrations expanded the same playbook, flooding cities with narcotics units and federal task forces that treated Black communities as war zones.
The fear and mistrust many Americans are voicing now about being targeted, watched, or swept up by state power is the same fear Black people have carried for generations. What feels like a new anxiety for much of the country has been the daily cost of survival in Black America.
But it’s not just the actions that echo the past, it’s the language. Trump and his administration have revived familiar, misleading claims that crime is “out of control” in Democratic cities, and that America is under siege from within. It’s the same politically motivated, fear-driven rhetoric used by past presidents to justify crackdowns and surveillance, from Nixon’s call for law and order to Reagan’s declaration that “We must make America safe again.” The difference now is who’s listening and who’s beginning to feel the weight of those words.
Normalizing the level of state power on display right now threatens everyone’s civil liberties, not just those on society’s margins. That’s what Black communities have warned about for generations. Unchecked policing power never stays contained. What begins as targeted enforcement in certain neighborhoods will eventually expand until the entire public is subject to the same surveillance, aggression, and fear. The alarms that went unheard in the past are now blaring across the country.
We must confront America’s long history of using policing as an instrument of control, rather than protection. This reckoning can’t wait until these same tactics engulf the entire nation. It needs to happen now, while there’s still time to pull back from a path that threatens the very idea of democracy.
What we’re witnessing is more than a law-and-order campaign—and it threatens to normalize the use of state power to quiet every social problem, every protest, every perceived threat. Black communities have carried the weight of that power for centuries.
If the country refuses to listen now, this won’t be a moment of crisis, it will be a turning point. The new norm of militarized, politically-driven law enforcement will no longer just define one people’s history. It will define America’s future.
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