In January, a five-year-old American citizen named Génesis Ester Gutiérrez Castellanos was deported from Austin, Texas, to Honduras — a country she had never visited. The deportation order against her mother, who did not have legal status, was issued in 2019. Génesis was born in the U.S. in 2020.
Her mother kept telling the agents: “The girl was born here.” Under the Constitution, that fact alone automatically conferred American citizenship on her. The agents did not care.
They held the mother and child in a San Antonio hotel for nearly a week, denied them access to a lawyer, and denied them a hearing before a judge. Then, they put both of them on a plane bound for Tegucigalpa.
Polls show the public doesn’t like President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown. From Washington to Los Angeles, protesters have demanded immediate change. The public is treating this as a new crisis.
It is not new. It is four centuries old. And the legal architecture that produced it was not built at the border. It was built at the altar, in the courthouse, and in the womb.
‘Irish’ Nell and Charles Butler
I study the legal construction of whiteness. I have documented over 400 years of court verdicts, statutes, and colonial records that trace how American law learned to control which families are permitted to exist and which children belong to whom.
In 1681, a white Irish indentured servant named Eleanor Butler — known in the colonial record as “Irish Nell”— stood before Charles Calvert, the third Lord Baltimore, Governor of Maryland. Nell was told that if she married Charles Butler, an enslaved Black man she loved, she would enslave herself and her posterity. Her children would be born into bondage.
Nell’s response, documented in the depositions of May 27, 1767, was defiant: “She would rather have Charles than have your lordship.”
A priest named Father Hubbert married Nell and Charles in a Catholic ceremony at Major William Boarman’s plantation in Charles County, Maryland, along the Potomac River. A large crowd attended.
Within a month, the Maryland legislature had passed a new law.
Criminalizing Interracial Marriage
“Foreasmuch as, divers free-born English, or white women,” they wrote, “sometimes by the instigation, procurement or connivance, of their masters, mistresses, or dames, and always to the satisfaction of their lascivious and lustful desires, and to the disgrace not only of the English, but also of many other christian nations, do intermarry with negroes and slaves…” their children would be slaves, too.
That law criminalized interracial marriage and condemned the children of such unions to lifelong bondage. The deranged, pathological institutional obsession with Black men intimately involved with white women is well-documented. The law codified it.
The mechanism that decreed Eleanor Butler’s children born into bondage has changed. The architecture — now deporting children because their parents crossed an invisible border without permission — has not.
The laws did not police morality. It was eugenic governance — a determination to maintain racial purity and ironclad patriarchy, enforced through terror.
But Maryland did not act alone. Virginia invented the mechanism in 1662, when the colony passed a statute that reversed centuries of English common law, under which a child’s status followed the father.
“All children borne in this country shalbe held bond,” the state declared, “or free only according to the condition of the mother.”
The legal term is partus sequitur ventrem: the offspring follow the womb.
Butlers’ Freedom Struggle
In one sentence, the Virginia legislature made slavery hereditary through the maternal line. Slaveholders could father children with enslaved women and claim those children as property — rape codified as profit. It created multigenerational bondage with no temporal endpoint. And it transformed the womb itself into an instrument of the state.
Intimacy became infrastructure for caste. What better way to disincentivize freedom, after all, than to target children?
Eleanor and Charles Butler had seven or eight children. All were born into slavery. Their oldest son, Jack, escaped to southern Virginia and purchased his own freedom. The rest remained enslaved.
And so began one of the longest family freedom struggles in American legal history.
In 1770, Mary and William Butler, Eleanor and Charles’ descendants, filed freedom suits. Their argument: their maternal ancestor was a freeborn white woman. The law that enslaved her had been repealed. Other descendants filed suits in 1786 and 1787. In 1786, Maryland finally accepted the testimony of African Americans in freedom suits.
Mary Butler’s daughter won her freedom the following year.
One family. Over one hundred years in court, to undo what one law did.
And then, in 1793—six years after the Butlers won—the testimony of Black people in freedom suits was once again prohibited.
This is the pattern. This is what the documented record shows. The system does not merely create injury. It closes every door opened to repair it.
System Working as Designed
Now consider what is happening in 2026.
Génesis Gutiérrez Castellanos, five years old, deported on a removal order issued before she existed. Keith Porter Jr., a forty-three-year-old Black father of two in Los Angeles, shot three times and killed by an off-duty ICE agent on New Year’s Eve—his daughters, ages nine and twenty, left without their father. The agent was never arrested.
Four Black Haitian women deported from Puerto Rico — identified because the government handed ICE the names of immigrants who had registered for driver’s licenses under a program that promised them safety — were found decapitated near the Haiti–Dominican Republic border. The U.S. State Department classifies Haiti as too dangerous for Americans to visit. ICE sent them there anyway.
ProPublica has documented at least 170 American citizens detained by immigration agents. The libertarian Cato Institute think tank has confirmed the federal government is engaged in racial profiling. The number of detainees under ICE control now exceeds 70,000 — the highest in the agency’s history — and 41 percent have no criminal record.
The mechanism that decreed Eleanor Butler’s children born into bondage has changed. The architecture — now deporting children because their parents crossed an invisible border without permission — has not.
The system that existed in 1681 was not reformed or repaired. It was renamed, given new offices and new uniforms and a new acronym. And it continued, across centuries, from colonial times to modern day.
The system is working exactly as designed.
Dante King is the author of Diagnosing Whiteness & Anti-Blackness and the forthcoming The Psychopathy of Whiteness. He is an anti-racism consultant and legal expert witness whose institutional clients include Mayo Clinic, Stanford Medicine, Johns Hopkins, UCSF, and the San Francisco Police Department. He is the Executive Director of Blackademics and a recipient of the Carter Godwin Woodson Service Award.