Why Black Americans Should Be Paying Attention To ICE Raids And Global Criminal Networks In Oklahoma

Most Americans don’t know that two completely different crime stories are unfolding in Oklahoma at the same time. 

One is transnational, violent, financially sophisticated, and tied to global underground banking, labor exploitation, and organized criminal networks operating across multiple states and countries. The other is domestic, highly visible, politically theatrical, and playing out through federal immigration enforcement operations, sweeping up Indigenous folks who shouldn’t even be inside the legal imagination of deportation in the first place.

And if you put those two stories side by side, existential questions emerge: Who does this country actually see as “criminal,” and who does it see as a population to be managed?

First, let me give you some history.

Oklahoma isn’t just a place. It’s a collision site of multiple stolen sovereignties and a convergence zone of federal power, racial violence, land theft, jurisdictional chaos, and state-sanctioned vulnerability that includes Indigenous removal, settler expansion, prohibition-era bootlegging crackdowns, carceral experimentation, and later racial terror regimes layered on top of each other like sediment.

Oklahoma is where the United States has repeatedly stress-tested how far it can push legal contradictions when it comes to race, sovereignty, and state violence.

Long before marijuana legalization debates, Oklahoma was already a laboratory for prohibition enforcement. Alcohol bans built black markets and organized crime pipelines. They built enforcement systems that expanded state surveillance and policing power, while rarely dismantling the financial structures that drive the trade. The topsy-turvy history of this state has shown us how criminalization doesn’t erase demand. It just reorganizes who profits, and who gets policed.

But Oklahoma’s contradictions didn’t begin with prohibition. They were baked into the land long before it officially became a state in 1907.

During Indian Removal, enslaved Black folks were forced west along the Trail of Tears alongside the very tribal nations that enslaved them. Several tribes fought to preserve slavery, and after emancipation, Black Freedmen communities were left navigating a violent landscape where freedom existed alongside exclusion, broken treaties, and shifting definitions of racial identity, citizenship, and belonging. Some Black families built land wealth anyway. In fact, Oklahoma once held something almost unimaginable in American history: Black children who were legal landholders.

Then white terror came for that, too.

Thousands of Black landowners were swindled, defrauded, and violently pushed off their property through guardianship scams, legal manipulation, and outright violence, including schemes that specifically targeted Black landholding children. And then came Tulsa. The destruction of Black Wall Street wasn’t just a riot. It was also organized theft and the coordinated erasure of one of the most economically powerful Black communities in the country, backed by state indifference and, in many cases, state participation.

This is the soil Oklahoma is built on: removal layered over slavery, layered over Black land theft, layered over prohibition criminal markets, and layered over modern enforcement expansion.

Now, flash forward to 2026.

As you read what I’m going to tell you about what is happening in Oklahoma today, I’m not just talking about isolated policy debates. What we are about to look at is a place where the United States has historically tested how far it can stretch law, power, and racial violence across different populations.

Two stories are unfolding.

Back in 2024, ProPublica published an investigative report that will blow your wig back. It laid out in devastating detail how Oklahoma has become one of the most important hubs in the illicit cannabis economy in the United States. 

Law enforcement officials and investigative journalists have documented thousands of illegal grows linked to foreign criminal networks, with a significant percentage connected to Chinese organized crime groups. These networks are not operating like street dealers. They are operating like multinational corporations with criminal portfolios that include marijuana production, money laundering, underground banking, human trafficking, migrant smuggling, prostitution rings tied to labor control, document fraud, and large-scale financial schemes that intersect with Latin American cartel drug money. 

We are talking about billions of dollars and an underground financial architecture capable of moving money across continents. We are talking about networks so disciplined that federal officials have openly marveled at how little internal conflict exists, given the amount of money involved.

Since that ProPublica investigation, authorities say they’ve launched crackdowns, shut down hundreds of illegal grows, seized massive quantities of product, and made arrests tied to these networks. But officials also acknowledge that even with those crackdowns, the networks are highly adaptive, shifting locations, cycling through straw owners, and rebuilding almost as quickly as operations are dismantled.

Congressional hearings have raised alarms about the national security implications of transnational criminal finance flowing through the cannabis black market. Law enforcement officials have warned that the scale of the underground economy tied to illicit marijuana in Oklahoma alone reaches into the tens of billions of dollars annually. In other words, enforcement pressure hasn’t eliminated the infrastructure. It has, at best, slowed parts of it down.

Many of the workers inside these illegal grow systems are themselves victims, including smuggled migrants, debt-bondage laborers, people working under surveillance, behind fences, under armed guards, and sometimes living in conditions so bad that law enforcement described walking through what they thought was mud and realizing it was human waste. This is not just “drug crime.” This is global labor exploitation and criminal finance infrastructure running in plain sight inside the American heartland.

Now hold that next to what federal immigration enforcement is doing in and around tribal communities.

Oklahoma’s Indigenous tribal leaders are warning that federal immigration enforcement is stopping, questioning, and in some cases detaining Indigenous citizens on or near tribal lands. ICE is forcing Native communities to tell their own people to carry documentation proving who they are, just to avoid getting swept up in immigration operations on land their nations have governed since before the United States even existed.

Let me put this more bluntly: At the exact moment officials are warning about global criminal enterprises moving billions through sophisticated underground networks, Indigenous citizens in Oklahoma are being told to keep their papers on them in case federal agents question whether they belong here. If that contradiction doesn’t stop you in your tracks, it should. Because this isn’t just about organized crime. And it’s not just about immigration. It’s about who this country instinctively sees as a threat, and who it treats like a population that needs to constantly prove it has the right to exist inside its own borders.

Tribal leaders say they were not notified when federal immigration operations moved into or near Indian Country. They say they learned through social media posts from their own citizens that ICE agents were stopping people, questioning them, and in some cases detaining them in ways tribal officials say border on racial profiling. 

Tribal governments are issuing statements reminding federal authorities that tribal citizens are not subject to immigration jurisdiction. Intertribal councils are demanding formal government-to-government consultation. Some tribes are advising citizens to carry Certificates of Indian Blood at all times. This is a directive, by the way, that lands differently for Black Freedmen descendants, who have spent generations battling efforts to use blood quantum and “by blood” citizenship rules to push them out of tribal rolls, even though their ancestors were enslaved by those same tribal nations and forced west along the Trail of Tears.

In 2026, Indigenous citizens are being told to carry documentation proving who they are to avoid potential detention by the federal government.

The legal absurdity here is obvious. There is no lawful destination to deport Indigenous U.S. citizens. There is no “back” to send them to. But the deeper issue isn’t the logistics of deportation. It’s in contact with state power. It’s the fact that federal enforcement activity is structured in ways that make Indigenous communities feel like they are inside the risk zone of immigration enforcement at all.

This is where the contradiction stops looking like policy inconsistency and starts looking like a pattern. Because at the same moment that federal, state, and local officials are warning about transnational criminal networks generating billions in illegal revenue, exploiting migrant labor, laundering cartel money, and building underground financial systems that threaten national security, the most visible enforcement footprint ordinary people are seeing is ID checks, sweeps, and detention infrastructure planning that is touching Native citizens.

Now, let’s be very clear about something. Different federal agencies have different mandates. ICE is not the DEA. Financial crime investigations are not the same as immigration enforcement operations. Complex transnational criminal cases can take years to build. All of that is true. But that doesn’t erase the public contradiction. Because what the public is being told is that enforcement is targeting “the worst criminals.” But what the public often sees is mass-contact enforcement playing out against populations rather than the slow, invisible dismantling of criminal financial systems.

Visibility is its own form of power. Sweeps create numbers, headlines, and images of enforcement in motion. Financial investigations into transnational crime create case files, wire transfers, and sealed indictments that the public rarely sees. One becomes political proof of toughness. The other becomes invisible labor inside the system.

Layer history on top of that, and the contradiction gets even sharper. The United States is a settler state enforcing immigration law on land taken from sovereign Indigenous nations. So when Indigenous citizens begin to feel like they have to prove they belong here to avoid detention, it exposes a foundational tension this country has never fully resolved, which is: Who decides who belongs inside borders that were built on top of nations that never immigrated here in the first place? That is a lived reality when tribal leaders are issuing public warnings about potential racial profiling and sovereignty violations.

There is also another danger in telling these stories separately. When organized crime stories involving Chinese networks are covered without equal emphasis on labor exploitation and trafficking victims, those stories can be weaponized into xenophobic narratives rather than structural crime narratives. And when immigration enforcement stories are framed purely as public safety without historical or sovereignty context, those stories can erase the civil rights and jurisdictional stakes for Indigenous communities.

Meanwhile, the economic landscape underneath all of this is enormous. Oklahoma’s cannabis boom reshaped land markets, water use, electricity systems, the housing market, and labor flows. At the same time, detention facility proposals reshape local economies through federal contracts, construction, and carceral employment pipelines. These are two very different forms of federal footprint shaping the same geographic region at the same time.

So where do Black folks fit into all of this?

Right in the middle of it, whether we want to be or not.

Because Black Americans understand something this country keeps pretending is new: systems that claim to target “criminals” almost always expand until entire communities are treated as administratively suspicious. We have lived inside that logic for centuries. From slave patrols to Black Codes, to vagrancy laws, to the war on drugs, to predictive policing, gang databases, and “high-crime area” surveillance,  the language is always about crime. The reality is always about managing populations.

That is why what is happening in Oklahoma is not just an Indigenous story. And it is not just an immigration story. It is a reminder that this country has never built an enforcement system that stayed confined to its original target.

Oklahoma has always been a place where the United States experiments with layered dispossession. Indigenous removal. Black enslavement was carried west during the Trail of Tears. Black Freedmen communities fighting for land, citizenship, and recognition. The theft of Black oil wealth from landholding Black children through guardianship scams. The destruction of Black Wall Street in Tulsa. Prohibition expanded policing power while organized crime adapted and scaled. Every era uses a different language, but the structure stays the same.

That is why Black Americans should be paying attention when Indigenous citizens are told to carry documentation to avoid detention on land their nations governed long before the United States existed. Not because our histories are identical. Because the logic is familiar: belonging becomes conditional. Citizenship becomes performance. Documentation becomes survival.

Once a society normalizes the idea that entire populations must constantly prove they belong, it never stops with just one population. And if you are watching all this madness unfold and you still think this isn’t our fight, you don’t know history.

History has never spared Black people just because we thought we were standing on the sidelines.

SEE ALSO:

Less Than 14% Of ICE Arrests Have Violent Criminal Histories

At Least 50 Arrested During Anti-ICE Protest Outside Federal Building