Over the past months, I have been digging into my ancestry. My ancestors were here before Texas became a Republic. That history matters, because two hundred years of hate toward people who do not look like they came from the Europe of the Crusades has not disappeared. It has only changed uniforms, slogans, and office names.
This country was never White. Millions of Native people were already here when Europeans arrived. Those same Europeans then brought darker people across the ocean in chains and forced them to do the work they were too lazy, too proud, or too cruel to do themselves. They treated human beings as animals, then called themselves civilized.
And now, after all that theft, slavery, conquest, and hypocrisy, their descendants and imitators still point at us as if we are the invaders. They call us criminals, animals, poison in the blood. They talk about “remigration” as if this land ever belonged only to them.
But the poison was never us. The poison is the lie that America was White, that cruelty is law, and that people with badges and masks become righteous because the government gave them paperwork.
Too Much Has Not Changed
The Canales Investigation should feel like ancient Texas history, but it does not. In 1919, José T. Canales forced Texas to hear allegations that armed men, wearing the authority of the state, had terrorized Mexicans and Mexican Americans along the border. The names have changed. The uniforms have changed. The machinery is more federal now. But the old pattern is still recognizable.
First, the government identifies a people as a problem. Then it creates the language to make harsh treatment sound lawful. Then come the raids, the fear, the doors opened by force, the families separated, the officials explaining that it is all necessary.
That is why the phrase “Office of Remigration” matters. It does not sound like ordinary immigration enforcement. It sounds like a project: not just to remove individuals, but to reverse the presence of whole communities. Reports described it as part of a State Department restructuring tied to deportation policy, turning language that once belonged to the far right into official government vocabulary.
The old Texas Rangers did not say they were committing abuse. They said they were keeping order. Today, the words are different: enforcement, removal, administrative warrant, voluntary return, remigration. But the danger is the same when armed power moves through Mexican and immigrant communities with less accountability and more permission. Recent reporting on ICE described masked agents and a memo allowing forced entry based on administrative warrants, which critics say collides with Fourth Amendment protections.
So the lesson of Canales is not that nothing has changed.
It is worse than that.
The lesson is that the old system learned new words.