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WHAT ICE SHOULD HAVE LEARNED FROM THE FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT  
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Jelani Cobb
January 30, 2026
The New Yorker
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_ Americans took to the streets to defend their neighbors in the
nineteenth century, too. _

, Illustration by Adam Maida; Source image courtesy Boston Public
Library

 

One measure of the numbing effect that the constant heedless and cruel
assault on democracy and on simple reason that Trumpism has imposed
upon American life is the fact that we no longer flinch at the word
“unprecedented.” Now, a full decade since Donald Trump’s arrival
on the national scene, we have reached a point where the violation of
norms has become a norm in itself. At the same time, however, there
has been a tendency to overlook the ways in which various of the
President’s policies are consistent with those of some of the darker
moments of American history.

Trump’s mendacity and conspiratorial reasoning, along with his
contempt for journalism, recall the attitudes of Senator Joseph
McCarthy—a connection that some early Trump observers attributed to
the fact that the Senator’s chief counsel in the Army-McCarthy
hearings, Roy Cohn, became something of a mentor to Trump in the
nineteen-seventies. Trump’s incendiary populism mirrors the
tradition of reactionary populists from Senator Thomas Watson to
Governor George Wallace. The aggressive xenophobia of Trump’s
immigration policies shares DNA with the anti-immigration raids
launched by Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer during the Presidency
of Woodrow Wilson. The point is not simply that so much of what Trump
represents is unprecedented as that, where his actions have echoes
from the past, they are almost universally troubling.

 

Difficult history has been particularly significant in recent weeks,
as the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration crackdown in
Minneapolis has come to increasingly resemble an armed occupation. The
upheaval there is notable not only for the violence of federal agents
who killed two American citizens—one of whom, Renee Good, was
unarmed, and the other of whom, Alex Pretti, appears to have been
disarmed of a gun he was legally permitted to carry before agents
fired off at least ten shots—but for the recalcitrance of residents
who braved below-zero temperatures to protest the government’s
actions. The protesters’ sense of democracy, as they articulate it
in interviews, the signs they carry, and the graffiti on public
buildings, is all strikingly local. Note the frequency of the use of
the word “neighbor” in people’s explanations for why they’ve
taken to the streets. As a witness to Pretti’s death explained in a
lawsuit filed against the D.H.S. Secretary, Kristi Noem, and others,
“I’ve been involved in observing in my community because it is so
important to document what ICE is doing to my neighbors. Connecting to
your local community and knowing who your neighbors are is something I
profoundly value.” This is not, of course, the first time that the
enforcement of a federal detention policy has collided with a
community’s sense of responsibility for its members, though the
precedent is not comforting.

 
During the tumultuous period that preceded the Civil War, the United
States passed a series of bills that came to be collectively known as
the Compromise of 1850. The Compromise allowed for California’s
entry into the Union as a free state, and outlawed the slave trade
(but not slavery itself) in the District of Columbia. The most
controversial element of the legislation, however, was the Fugitive
Slave Act. Article IV of the Constitution already required that an
enslaved person who escaped into a free state be returned to bondage,
but the 1850 law created a federal bureaucracy to facilitate it. As
the historian Andrew Delbanco notes in his book “The War Before the
War [[link removed]],” a history of the
national conflict over fugitive slaves, the Compromise “was meant to
be a remedy and a salve, but it turned out to be an incendiary event
that lit the fuse that led to civil war.”
 
The law was heavily weighted, in that it offered a fee of ten dollars
to magistrates who ruled that an individual should be returned to
slavery, but only five to those who ruled that the person should
remain free. Even more controversially, it charged federal
commissioners with enforcing the law, and they worked with loosely
regulated agents, who made it their own business to track down
fugitives and return them to slavery. These so-deemed slave catchers
had a long reputation for conducting rogue operations. As Delbanco
notes, “Even free black people in the North—including those who
had never been enslaved—found their lives infused with the terror of
being seized and deported on the pretext that they had once belonged
to someone in the South.” Given that as many as a hundred thousand
people escaped slavery and found refuge in free states in the
nineteenth century, fugitives represented a population residing
illegally within largely sympathetic communities—a fact that
incensed hard-liners on the slavery issue. Seeking a middle ground,
Senator Henry Clay, of Kentucky, who introduced the Compromise,
imagined that the law would placate irate Southerners who fumed at the
monetary losses that escaped slaves represented, but few lawmakers
foresaw the impact that it would have in the North.

 

Even in the free states, attitudes toward slavery were complicated. A
raft of economic, social, and religious dynamics had resulted in the
abolition or prohibition of slavery, but that did not automatically
mean that the entire population favored racial equality or abolition
in general. (When Northern states began abolishing slavery after the
American Revolution, many slaveholders opted to sell their chattel to
buyers in the South rather than manumit them.) At the same time, the
Fugitive Slave Act replaced the more complicated questions about the
institution with a single, less complicated one: Were Northerners
prepared to watch their neighbors, many of whom had lived in their
communities for years, be violently removed from their homes or
grabbed off the streets? For many, the answer was no.

Attempted enforcement of the law met with immediate resistance. In
1851, an armed mob surrounded a group of agents led by a slaveholder,
Edward Gorsuch, in Christiana, Pennsylvania, who were attempting to
return four fugitives to his farm, in Maryland; Gorsuch was shot and
killed. The four, along with others who participated in the standoff,
escaped, and some reached Canada with the assistance of Frederick
Douglass. In Syracuse, New York, Oberlin, Ohio, and other cities,
crowds swarmed jails where captured fugitives were held in other
successful efforts to free them, at the risk of their own prosecution.
(In 1854, fifty thousand people filled the streets of Boston, a center
of abolitionist resistance, to protest against returning Anthony
Burns, a Black man who had escaped from slavery in Virginia, to that
state. (When that effort failed, a group privately purchased Burns’s
freedom and facilitated his return to Massachusetts.)

The significance of this history is twofold. The Fugitive Slave Act
was rhetorically useful for a certain element of the political class,
but for most people it took an issue that they may have felt
ambivalent about—or hadn’t much thought about at all—and gave
them a direct, visceral reason to feel very strongly about it. Slavery
might have been an abstract national concern, but the fate of a
neighbor, whom people may have depended upon as a part of their
community, was very much a personal one. Something akin to that
reaction is occurring in communities across the U.S. now, as
social-media feeds fill with images of children being harassed by
_ICE_ agents as they leave school and of a five-year-old boy being
detained, and of adults being shoved to the ground and pepper-sprayed
or pulled from their cars after agents smash the windows. The Fugitive
Slave Act is remembered by historians for its ironic effect: designed
as a means of cooling the simmering regional tensions over slavery,
the law effectively made it the most contentious issue facing the
nation. It pushed Americans toward the realization that the nation was
bound in what William Seward later termed an “irrepressible
conflict.”

 
In Minnesota, the distance between the past and the present is small.
Americans hold complex views
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on immigration and deportation, but as early as last summer more than
sixty per cent of Americans opposed undocumented immigrants being sent
to the _CECOT_ facility in El Salvador, where they were likely to
suffer abuse. (It’s significant that the Administration’s campaign
in Minneapolis began amid renewed discussions of the reported torture
that detainees experienced after being deported there.) In this
regard, many Americans are asking themselves the same question that an
earlier generation asked a hundred and seventy-six years ago. Judging
by the bundled, frostbitten crowds that return to the streets day
after day despite the violence directed at them, they have come to the
same answer. ♦
_JELANI COBB has been contributing to The New Yorker since 2012 and
became a staff writer in 2015. He writes frequently about race,
politics, history, and culture. His books include “__Three or More
Is a Riot: Notes on How We Got Here, 2012-2025_
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and “__The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of
Progress_
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He is an editor, with David Remnick, of “__The Matter of Black
Lives_
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an anthology of New Yorker writing on race in America. He won the 2015
Sidney Hillman Prize for Opinion and Analysis Journalism, for his
columns on race, the police, and injustice. He is the dean of the
Columbia Journalism School._

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