CHAPTER 7

Understanding Race and COVID-19 in the United States: State Violence as Compound Disaster

Vivian Y. Choi

In early June 2020 my mother, my sister, my nephew, my sister’s dog, and I squeezed into my car to leave New York City and head back to my home in Minneapolis. We were leaving the city after enduring a harrowing spring there where, at its worst, more than eight hundred people a day were dying of the novel coronavirus. We were lucky to be together and, more significantly, well enough to travel. Both my mother and my sister were recovering from contracting the virus. My mother, with her history of chronic lung disease, was sent to the hospital. She was discharged after only a few days; she was still quite sick but did not require oxygen assistance. The hospital, I was told, had to prioritize space for those having trouble breathing. My sister, on the other hand, had miraculously survived a much more serious case. As this was early in the pandemic, much was still unknown about the virus’s effects on the body and how to treat it. Treatments (that we now know are not effective) did nothing to improve her difficulty in breathing. As a last resort before putting her on a ventilator, the doctors thought to treat her as if she had a blood clot, a COVID symptom that doctors were initially unaware of. Their intuitions were right. As her CT scans revealed, her lungs were full of blood clots too numerous to count. After this brush with death and several weeks of rehabilitation, she too was finally able to leave the hospital. I holed up with my sister’s son, also a medically fragile infant with pulmonary issues. We didn’t dare go outside, a world awash with fear and virus.

A few months earlier, I had driven frantically to New York from Minneapolis in March to look after my nephew while my sister and my mother were in the hospital. As I sped across Interstate 90, the panic that I felt was heightened as I drove through several red states and rural middle America alone. Anti-Asian racism, fueled by othering references to the “China-virus,” was visibly on the rise. I carefully planned my stops in larger towns. I declined a friend’s offer to mail me a taser. Instead, I brought with me a small spray can of mace.

April 2020 in New York was a blur of nerves, exhaustion, tears, phone calls with doctors, nurses, and hospital staff (all of whom were wonderful, dedicated, and caring) and the constant wail of ambulance sirens. The news was disparaging. We were eager to leave New York. By the time everyone was well enough to finally travel, George Floyd had been killed by Derek Chauvin, igniting protests across the United States and the world. We left one so-called hotspot for another. We arrived in Minneapolis just as curfews had been imposed by Minnesota governor Tim Walz. Nearing the broader Twin Cities metro area, we saw more and more boarded-up storefronts. The streets were empty, but helicopters hovered loudly above the city. When we arrived at last, exhausted, we stayed in to quarantine. We stayed in because of the 8 p.m. curfew. Disaster, it seemed, was multiplying.

Mass mourning and grief turned into masked rebellion, and once again a light—for literally cities were ablaze—was cast onto police brutality in the United States. Because of the brave documentation of seventeen-year-old Darnella Frazier, many bore witness to George Floyd’s murder at the knee of Derek Chauvin and the Minneapolis Police Department. However, fewer people knew that at the time of his death, he was also positive for COVID-19.1

George Floyd’s murder and his COVID-19 diagnosis made my stomach sink. These fraught and tragic dynamics were a stark reminder of the intersections of the ongoing pandemic and generations of anti-Black state violence—the enduring disasters of white supremacy and racial capitalism that have long structured life in the United States. The hashtag #pandemicwithinapandemic became popular,2 referring to racism and COVID as two “dual pandemics.”3 Other organizations and publications, including the American Psychological Association,4 the New York Law Journal,5 and the New York Times,6 would also refer to the “pandemic of racism” in an effort to highlight the persistence and depth of racism in the United States, which the coronavirus laid bare. As Errin Haines, editor of the nonprofit news organization The 19th, pointed out, to call racism a pandemic induces both response and responsibility, foregrounding basic questions: What is the cause of this outbreak? What needs to be done to change and fix the pervasiveness of racism?

The United States has long been afflicted by the disease of racism. The urgency of characterizing racism as a pandemic certainly resonates in this ongoing COVID-defined moment.7 Yet I also offer that characterizing racism as such could risk positing it as an external, isolable agent rather than a constitutive dimension of necropolitical state power.8 While racism does indeed erupt and break out in spectacles of violence—as it did with George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Tyre Nichols and Atatiana Jefferson and so many more—racism is also a fundamental structure of experience and existence in the United States. George Floyd’s death and his COVID diagnosis illustrate the violence of state care, state neglect, and state-sanctioned killing. As Steven Thrasher asks, “had the police not killed Floyd, would the virus—the biggest killer of Black men at the time—have done so? And had city and county financial resources been made available to people who lost their jobs in the pandemic, like Floyd, would he have used that questionable $20 bill at that convenience store?”9 State-sanctioned killing of Black people has become normative, the “weather,” in “this so-called democracy,” according to Christina Sharpe: “Transatlantic slavery was and is the disaster. The disaster of Black subjection was and is planned; terror is disaster and ‘terror has a history.’”10

Sharpe’s exegesis on Black subjection offers a disaster analytic to think through the twin pandemics of COVID and anti-Black racism. In particular, her conceptualization of Black subjection as disaster is acutely insightful, expanding notions of what may be termed “compound disasters”—concurrent disasters or multiple disasters through which the effects are amplified.11 Indeed, not all disasters are acute and must be considered alongside the existence of ongoing structural forms of violence, including capitalism, racism, and colonialism.12 As such, state terror as disaster offers another analytic lens that attends to the multiple dimensions and processes of disaster,13 or, as will be discussed in this chapter, the intersections of racism and the pandemic. That is, state violence is not merely invoked or emergent during or after disaster and thus is a social variable to consider in the aftermath but is also a constitutive, compound disaster. In my research, where I have examined the intersections of civil war, state violence, and natural disasters,14 I consider historical and political conditions not just as prefigurations of risk and vulnerability but also as disasters that continue to beget disasters.15 State terror has a history. State terror has a process. State terror is eruptive, isolated, and pervasive.

This chapter examines the compound disaster of state terror by focusing on the structuring logic of war and national security to manage COVID in the United States. As the virus spread, the language of war and martial metaphors abounded, including by the Trump administration. In response, many critiqued the use of war metaphors in the “battle” against the virus.16 Such rhetoric has the effect of marking enemies, militarizing citizens into soldiers, galvanizing nationalisms, and, more generally, oversimplifies complex social and political issues. These critiques were certainly warranted, and I extend them by moving beyond rhetoric or metaphor, by suggesting that war is the logic that undergirds and drives the state’s management of the pandemic, justifying forms of violence, racism, and dehumanization, if necessary, to ensure national security and the preservation of vital economic infrastructures.17 That is, war legitimizes forms of state terror. Care does not necessarily preclude violence and certainly does not preclude racism.18

The War on COVID: Pandemic Nationalism

On December 14, 2020, as critical care nurse Sandra Lindsay received the first coronavirus vaccination in the United States, now-disgraced New York governor Andrew Cuomo remarked, “This vaccine is exciting, because I believe this is the weapon that will end the war. We have planes, trains, and automobiles moving this all over the state right now. We want to get it deployed, and we want to get it deployed quickly.”19

While Cuomo had his share of clashes with President Donald Trump during his first term over the management of the pandemic, they did share their use of militaristic terminology and approach to confront and “end” the war with COVID-19. After all, on March 13 after disregarding the severity of COVID-19 for months, Trump finally declared the pandemic an official national emergency and proceeded to call himself a wartime president. Shortly after in a press conference, he referenced World War II, calling upon citizens to sacrifice for the good of the nation to defeat “the invisible enemy”: “Every generation of Americans has been called to make shared sacrifices for the good of the nation. . . . And now it’s our time. We must sacrifice together because we are all in this together and we’ll come through together. It’s the invisible enemy. That’s always the toughest enemy: the invisible enemy. But we’re going to defeat the invisible enemy. I think we’re going to do it even faster than we thought. And it will be a complete victory. It’ll be a total victory.”20

But who or what was this abstract invisible enemy? Was it solely in reference to the virus? Trump attempted to galvanize national support and action by identifying a foreign viral enemy to battle. The problem, according to his designation, was located outside US borders. He continued referring to the coronavirus as the “China virus” (and variously the “China flu” and the “Wuhan flu”). He shrugged off accusations of racism and the increasing numbers of attacks and discrimination against Asians across the country, alleging that in doing so he was only pointing to the origins of the virus. This is not a new tactic, however. The United States has had a long history of associating foreigners with disease and contamination.21

Xenophobia extended beyond speech.22 Tracking with the long history of state-legitimated anti-Asian violence in the United States and, in particular, immigration and citizenship bans as the so-called commander in chief of the war against COVID and in the name of national security, Trump increased border restrictions. In the presidential debates with his successor, Joe Biden, Trump often bragged about his decisive move to ban travelers from China, averring that in doing so he saved “millions of lives.” On top of the fact that these alleged numbers could not be proven, in reality the “ban” still allowed for hundreds of thousands of travelers via direct flights from China to the United States.23 By March 12 when the president banned travelers from Europe, the virus had arrived and had begun to spread.

Following the declaration of the state of emergency in March 2020, the Trump administration also used the pandemic to further its anti-immigration agenda, which continued in the Biden administration. Using emergency powers and under the auspices of a public health emergency, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines (Title 42) can prohibit the entry of individuals that may introduce communicable diseases in the United States. As a result, migrants have been turned away or expelled at the southern border without the opportunity to seek asylum. From March through December 2020, more than two hundred thousand migrants were expelled,24 at least thirteen thousand of whom were children.25 Though Title 42 finally ended in May 2023, the Biden administration introduced restrictive asylum policies, “repackaging” Trump-era immigration policies.26 The pandemic led to the suspension of many immigration court hearings and limited the functioning of the few courts that remained open or were reopened. Meanwhile, Congress left millions of immigrants and their families out of legislative relief, leaving many people struggling to stay afloat in a time of economic uncertainty. Though Trump’s Migrant Protection Protocols, which suspended hearings for asylum seekers and abandoned nearly seven thousand asylum seekers in Mexico,27 was terminated by the Biden administration in 2022, states such as Texas and Missouri filed a lawsuit to keep the protocols active. Moreover, tens of thousands of people remained in immigration detention despite the high risk of COVID-19 transmission in the crowded jails, prisons, and detention centers that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses to hold noncitizens. The Biden administration failed its campaign pledges of immigration reform and closing or downsizing for-profit detention centers.28 As the numbers of detainees rise, so do the percentages of those held in private detention centers,29 usually under squalid, abusive conditions.30 The Trump administration also increased the speed of border wall construction since the start of the pandemic by classifying the work as essential, filing twice as many lawsuits to seize land while waiving environmental and contract oversight laws. Biden used executive power to move forward with building a new section of the border wall in Texas, waiving twenty-six federal laws protecting the environment.31

Trump compared his COVID battle plan, Operation Warp Speed, with the Manhattan Project. Former Health and Human Services secretary Alex Azar claimed that “if we can develop an atomic bomb in 2.5 years and put a man on the moon in seven years, we can do this this year, in 2020.”32 The structure of the organization consisted mostly of military officials employed by the Department of Defense, outnumbering civilian scientists in the development and distribution of the COVID vaccine. With his executive power, Trump also invoked, with the assistance of the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security (the administration that oversees the Federal Emergency Management Agency), and the Department of Health and Human Services, the Defense Production Act, a Cold War–era enacted federal law to produce and source more materials and to order private companies to produce needed supplies. President Biden continued to use the act under his power in order to facilitate the production of more vaccines.

It is clear that this all-out war effort never quite controlled the virus. Even with accessibility to vaccines, coronavirus cases surged in the United States, especially in southern states with low vaccination rates. In a premature celebration of gaining the upper hand on COVID, Biden was humbled by the surge of the highly infectious Delta variant in 2021. In response to that surge and the possibility of attaining herd immunity, an internal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention document commented that the war had changed. While alternative less militaristic metaphors have been offered, ultimately they do not change the messy and violent reality of what is unfolding.

“Battling” COVID-19 engenders a “fetish of national unity,” implicating powers of the state to strengthen borders and legitimate ongoing forms of structural violence against racialized others.33 As illustrated by the Trump administration’s excitations of xenophobia and fear (and the Biden administration’s continuation of these policies) and its actions deployed toward securitizing the United States from an “invisible enemy,” war is more than metaphor; it is the logic that undergirds and drives the state’s management of the pandemic disaster. But a militarized response to disaster is not new in the United States. Recall the federal response to Hurricane Katrina, which contracted Blackwater and deployed National Guard troops to “secure neighborhoods”—a military response, rather than a humanitarian one—revealing a deeper history of state-sponsored racial injustice, violence, and ongoing intensifications of disposability.34

Enduring State Violence/Disasters

Early on in the pandemic, it was clear that the US health infrastructure was woefully unprepared and overwhelmed. There was a dire lack of equipment, including personal protective equipment, as well as ventilators and tests. As anthropologist and epidemiologist Thurka Sangaramoorthy points out,35 this failure was decades in the making—that is decades of underfunding our public health system by billions of dollars.36 As Sangaramoorthy recounts, “In 2017, public health represented just 2.5 percent of all health spending in this country. Some of this shortfall has been covered by the Prevention and Public Health Fund established under the Affordable Care Act. But this fund has been consistently used to fund efforts not related to public health. In 2012, it was cut by $6 billion, in 2018, it was cut by $1.4 billion. These issues (along with others) deeply impact the ability of public health to actually prevent risk or to respond to health emergencies in a timely manner.”37

Furthermore, it is well documented that existing social inequalities in the United States have shaped the specific experiences and outcomes of the pandemic. Popular media, medical and health policy experts, and social scientists have also acknowledged and problematized how the coronavirus has disproportionately impacted Black, Latinx, and Indigenous communities. As the COVID Tracking Project shows, nationwide, Black and African American people are dying at 2.3 times the rate of white people.38 This has elicited much public concern, highlighting the pandemic within a pandemic affecting the United States.

Racism is a public health issue, creating health disparities especially those that put Black, Latino, and Native communities at risk. Scholars of environmental (in)justice have long observed and highlighted these racialized geographies of toxicity and the toxic exposures that lead to risk factors complicating health and creating vulnerabilities.39 The National Center for Environmental Assessment, for example, finds that Black people are exposed to about 1.54 times more particulate matter than white people, and in general, the magnitude of emissions from individual factories appears to be higher in minority neighborhoods.40 These racialized geographies of toxicity stem from legacies of redlining and racial segregation.41 As Mel Chen and Tim Choy offer, COVID does not necessarily create new structural inequalities but instead intensifies them.42 COVID casts a spotlight on these already racialized spaces of slow violence and death, exposing and intensifying the precarity that constitutes them. An added layer of surveillance and policing of Black and Brown communities further creates conditions of insecurity—or, as Sze and Dillon write “the conditions through which breath is constricted or denied.”43

Combined with the wealth of data that evidence racial disparities in not just accessing health care but also equitable care, racism is fundamental to the ways that COVID-19 has unfolded. And as such racism is endemic—a fundamental structure of experience and existence in the United States. As Saidiya Hartman writes, “Black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that was entrenched years ago . . . [and] skewed life chances, limited access to health and education,” and contributed to “premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.”44 The afterlife of slavery, Black subjection, according to Christina Sharpe, is disaster. Disaster, then, cannot simply be characterized or understood as event (violence), rupture, or outbreak. Disasters have history. If, following Ruth Wilson Gilmore, racism is “the state-sanctioned and extralegal exposure of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death,”45 then, extending Sharpe, how might we consider anti-Black state violence as disaster in relation to the COVID disaster?

This brings me, finally, to the murder of George Floyd.

At the time of Floyd’s death in May 2020, Black people constituted 14 percent of all COVID cases and 33 percent of deaths in Minnesota while making up only 6 percent of the population. During a pandemic that attacks the respiratory system and disproportionately affects Black populations, George Floyd would call for his mother and utter his last words: “I can’t breathe.”

George Floyd’s murder is a tragic yet sadly unfamiliar constellation of the violences of the racist, carceral, militarized state—the disasters begotten by a state apparatus with the powers and capacity to take lives. In the days preceding the administration of the first coronavirus vaccine in the United States, Brandon Bernard and Alfred Bourgeois, both Black men, had just been federally executed on December 10 and December 11, respectively. In July 2020, the Trump administration, under the direction of Attorney General William Barr, lifted a seventeen-year hiatus on federal executions. After Trump lost the November 2020 election, his administration accelerated execution schedules to ensure that they would be carried out before the incoming Biden administration could intervene. With lethal injection drugs sparse, the “Justice” Department updated protocols allowing for other forms of execution, including firing squads and poisonous gas. Of the thirteen federal executions (including the first woman, Lisa Montgomery, since 1953), the six that took place in those five months were more than in any other presidency in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries combined. The executions occurred while the Bureau of Prisons struggled with exploding cases of COVID across the country, including members of the execution team testing positive for the virus. While Attorney General Merrick Garland paused federal executions in July 2021, the government is far from ending the death penalty altogether.

In this chapter, I have traced the structuring logic of war and national security to illustrate the compound disaster of state violence and, in particular, anti-Black state violence. By examining this racist, militarized logic and its vicissitudes in the United States, I show that both racism and COVID are more than simply “twinned” viruses or “a pandemic within a pandemic.” Rather, state violence is the enduring compound disaster that structures and shapes the experiences of life today in a still COVID-stricken United States.

Notes

1. 1.  Scott Neuman, “Medical Examiner’s Autopsy Reveals George Floyd Had Positive Test For Coronavirus,” NPR, June 4, 2023, https://www.npr.org/sections/live-updates-protests-for-racial-justice/2020/06/04/869278494/medical-examiners-autopsy-reveals-george-floyd-had-positive-test-for-coronavirus.
2. 2.  It should be noted that “pandemic within a pandemic” was also used to describe the rise of domestic and intimate partner violence. See Paula J. Whiteman, Wendy L. Macias-Konstantopoulos, Pryanka Relan, Anita Knopov, Megan L. Ranney, and Ralph J. Riviello, “Violence and Abuse: A Pandemic within a Pandemic,” Western Journal of Emergency Medicine: Integrating Emergency Care with Population Health 24, no. 4 (2023), https://doi.org/10.5811/westjem.58405.
3. 3.  Errin Haines, Interview with MSNBC, June 1, 2020, https://www.msnbc.com/morning-joe/watch/parallels-between-68-and-now-and-a-pandemic-within-a-pandemic-84171845787. See also “Tamara Keith and Errin Haines on Trump and Race, Pandemic Politics,” PBS News, June 29, 2020, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/tamara-keith-and-errin-haines-on-trump-and-race-pandemic-politics.
4. 4.  American Psychological Association, “‘We are Living in a Racism Pandemic,’ Says APA President,” news release, May 29, 2020, https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2020/05/racism-pandemic.
5. 5.  Kevin J. Curnin, “Racism Is a Pandemic Inside a Pandemic,” New York Law Journal, June 11, 2020, https://www.law.com/newyorklawjournal/2020/06/11/racism-is-a-pandemic-inside-a-pandemic/?slreturn=20240010181121.
6. 6.  Sheryl Gay Stolberg, “‘Pandemic within a Pandemic’: Coronavirus and Police Brutality Roil Black Communities,” New York Times, June 8, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/07/us/politics/blacks-coronavirus-police-brutality.html.
7. 7.  At the time of writing, November 2023, COVID is still very much a global concern. As such, I refer to it in the present tense.
8. 8.  In discussing necropower, Achille Mbembe highlights the “subjugation of life to the power of death” (39–40), featuring “the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not” (37). Mbembe historicizes this dynamic of disposability in cases of colonialism and apartheid in South Africa and in the contemporary occupation of Palestine, which, at the time of writing, is experiencing “maximum destruction of persons”(40) in a contemporary “state of siege” (30) by the Israeli state. This is not to equate various experiences of colonial and state violence. Rather, the connection with colonialism matters in thinking about the technologies of death and disposability in the context of necropolitics and racism and the logic of war and security in the United States, as will be further discussed in the chapter. Achille Mbembé, “Necropolitics,” translated by Libby Meintjes, Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): 11–40.
9. 9.  Fran Fried, “Journalist and Social Justice Advocate Steven Thrasher Addresses ‘Viral Underclass’ in Poynter Lecture,” Yale School of Public Health, October 13, 2022, https://ysph.yale.edu/news-article/journalist-and-social-justice-advocate-steven-thrasher-addresses-viral-underclass-in-poynter-lecture/.
10. 10.  Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016), 5.
11. 11.  Susan L. Cutter, “Compound, Cascading, or Complex Disasters: What’s in a Name?,” Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainable Development 60, no. 6 (2018): 16–25.
12. 12.  Alexa S. Dietrich, “Pollution, Health, and Disaster: Emerging Contributions in Ethnographic Research,” Environment and Society 12 (2021): 44–65; and Yarimar Bonilla, “The Coloniality of Disaster: Race, Empire, and the Temporal Logics of Emergency in Puerto Rico, USA,” Political Geography 78 (2020): 102181.
13. 13.  Scott Gabriel Knowles, “Slow Disaster in the Anthropocene: A Historian Witnesses Climate Change on the Korean Peninsula,” Daedalus 149, no. 4 (2020): 192–206.
14. 14.  Vivian Y. Choi, Disaster Nationalism: Tsunami and Civil War in Sri Lanka (Duke University Press, 2025).
15. 15.  On the limits of “vulnerability” as an otherizing and “outdated” category of disaster research, see Elizabeth K. Marino and A. J. Faas, “Is Vulnerability an Outdated Concept? After Subjects and Spaces,” Annals of Anthropological Practice 44, no. 1 (2020): 33–46, https://doi.org/10.1111/napa.12132.
16. 16.  See, for example, David Isaacs and Anne Priesz, “COVID-19 and the Metaphor of War,” Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health 57, no. 1 (2021): 6–8, https://doi.org/10.1111/jpc.15164; and Constanza Musu, “War Metaphors Used for COVID-19 are Compelling but Dangerous,” The Conversation, April 8, 2020, https://theconversation.com/war-metaphors-used-for-covid-19-are-compelling-but-also-dangerous-135406.
17. 17.  Andrew Lakoff, “The Generic Biothreat, or, How We Became Unprepared,” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 3 (2008): 399–428; and S. J. Collier and A. Lakoff, “Vital Systems Security: Reflexive Biopolitics and the Government of Emergency,” Theory, Culture & Society 32, no. 2 (2015): 19–51.
18. 18.  Miriam Ticktin, Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France (University of California Press, 2011); and Adia Benton, “African Expatriates and Race in the Anthropology of Humanitarianism,” Critical African Studies 8, no. 3 (2016): 266–77.
19. 19.  “New York Coronavirus Vaccine Distribution Begins,” New York Times, December 15, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/14/nyregion/coronavirus-vaccine-new-york.html.
20. 20.  White House, “Remarks by President Trump, Vice President Pence, and Members of the Coronavirus Task Force in Press Briefing,” Press briefing, March 18, 2020, https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-vice-president-pence-members-coronavirus-task-force-press-briefing-5/.
21. 21.  See, for example, Banu Subramaniam, “The Aliens Have Landed! Reflections on the Rhetoric of Biological Invasions,” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 2, no. 1 (2001): 26–40. On describing immune systems using military language, see Emily Martin, “Toward an Anthropology of Immunology: The Body as Nation State.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 4, no. 4 (1990): 410–26.
22. 22.  For a discussion on immigration and xenophobia as the “structuring logic” of the Trump administration’s actions on the pandemic, see Jacob A. C. Remes, “COVID-19 in a Border Nation,” Items, July 23, 2020, https://items.ssrc.org/covid-19-and-the-social-sciences/disaster-studies/covid-19-in-a-border-nation/.
23. 23.  Thomas J. Bollyky and Jennifer B. Nuzzo, “Trump’s ‘Early’ Travel ‘Bans’ Weren’t Early, Weren’t Bans and Didn’t Work,” Washington Post, October 1, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2020/10/01/debate-early-travel-bans-china/.
24. 24.  “Nationwide Enforcement Encounters: Title 8 Enforcement Actions and Title 42 Expulsions Fiscal Year 2020,” US Customs and Border Protection, last modified June 17, 2024, https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/cbp-enforcement-statistics/title-8-and-title-42-statistics-fy2020.
25. 25.  ACLU, “District Court Blocks Trump Administration’s Illegal Border Expulsions,” press release, November 18, 2020, https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/district-court-blocks-trump-administrations-illegal-border-expulsions.
26. 26.  ACLU, “Immigrants’ Rights Advocates Sue Biden Administration Over New Asylum Ban,” press release, May 11, 2023, https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/immigrants-rights-advocates-sue-biden-administration-over-new-asylum-ban.
27. 27.  “The Migrant Protection Protocols,” American Immigration Council, January 7, 2022, https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/research/migrant-protection-protocols
28. 28.  Ted Hesson, “Exclusive: Biden Officials Kept Immigration Jails Despite Internal Cost Concerns,” Reuters, September 27, 2023, https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-officials-kept-immigration-jails-despite-internal-cost-concerns-2023-09-27/.
29. 29.  Eunice Cho, “Unchecked Growth: Private Prison Corporations and Immigration Detention, Three Years into the Biden Administration,” ACLU, August 7, 2023, https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/unchecked-growth-private-prison-corporations-and-immigration-detention-three-years-into-the-biden-administration.
30. 30.  Tom Dreisbach, “Government’s Own Experts Found ‘Barbaric’ and ‘Negligent’ Conditions in ICE Detention,” NPR, August 16, 2023, https://www.npr.org/2023/08/16/1190767610/ice-detention-immigration-government-inspectors-barbaric-negligent-conditions.
31. 31.  Valerie Gonzalez, “Biden Administration Waives Federal Laws to Allow Building of Border Wall in South Texas,” PBS News, October 5, 2023, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/biden-administration-waives-federal-laws-to-allow-building-of-border-wall-in-south-texas.
32. 32.  Dan Diamond, “The Crash Landing of ‘Operation Warp Speed,’” Politico, January 17, 2021, https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/17/crash-landing-of-operation-warp-speed-459892.
33. 33.  L. L. Wynn, “THE PANDEMIC IMAGINERIE: Infectious Bodies and Military-Police Theater in Australia,” Cultural Anthropology 36, (2021): 350–59.
34. 34.  Henry A. Giroux, “Reading Hurricane Katrina: Race, Class, and the Biopolitics of Disposability,” College Literature 33, no. 3 (2006): 171–96.
35. 35.  Thurka Sangaramoorthy, “From HIV to COVID19: Anthropology, Urgency, and the Politics of Engagement,” Somatosphere, May 1, 2020, https://somatosphere.com/2020/from-hiv-to-covid19-anthropology-urgency-and-the-politics-of-engagement.html/.
36. 36.  Simon F. Haeder, “Opinion: Even Before Coronavirus, U.S. Was Underfunding Public Health,” MarketWatch, March 17, 2020, https://www.marketwatch.com/story/even-before-coronavirus-us-was-underfunding-public-health-2020-03-17.
37. 37.  Sangaramoorthy, “From HIV to COVID19.”
38. 38.  “The COVID Racial Data Tracker,” The COVID Tracking Project, last updated March 7, 2021, https://covidtracking.com/race.
39. 39.  Lindsey Dillon and Julie Sze, “Police Power and Particulate Matters: Environmental Justice and the Spatialities of In/Securities in US Cities,” English Language Notes 54, no. 2 (2016): 13–23; and Anita Lam, “Criminal Anthroposcenes 2.0: Race, Racism, and Breath-taking Violence in the Time of COVID,” Crime, Media, Culture 19, no. 1 (2022): 3–19.
40. 40.  Ihab Mikati, Adam F. Benson, Thomas J. Luben, Jason D. Sacks, and Jennifer Richmond-Bryant, “Disparities in Distribution of Particulate Matter Emission Sources by Race and Poverty Status,” American Journal of Public Health 108, no. 4 (2018): 480–85, https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2017.304297. See also Christopher W. Tessum, David A. Paolella, Sarah E. Chambliss, Joshua S. Apte, Jason D. Hill, and Julian D. Marshall, “PM_2.5 Polluters Disproportionately and Systemically Affect People of Color in the United States,” Science Advances 7, no. 8 (2021), https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abf4491.
41. 41.  Christopher J. Schell, Karen Dyson, Tracy L. Fuentes, Simone Des Roches, Nyeema C. Harris, Danica Sterud Miller, Cleo A. Woelfle-Erskine, and Max R. Lambert, “The Ecological and Evolutionary Consequences of Systemic Racism in Urban Environments,” Science 369, no. 6510 (2020): 1–11, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aay4497.
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43. 43.  Dillon and Sze, “Police Power and Particulate Matters,” 13.
44. 44.  Hartman, cited by Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016), 5.
45. 45.  Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (University of California Press, 2007), 247.