After police in El Cajon, California shot and killed Alfred Okwera Olango earlier this week, dozens of demonstrators took to the street to protest. Olango has become yet another statistic in a long string of recent police-involved shootings of black men whose deaths have drawn serious concerns over allegations of brutality and systemic racism.
But the death of Olango— who came to the country 25 ago as a refugee — also resonates in a visceral way among immigrants whose deadly confrontations with law enforcement officials often do not get as much national attention.
Police said they fired because Olango refused multiple instructions to take his hand out of his pockets and assumed a “shooting stance.” But Olango’s family insist that he was having a mental breakdown when they called police to help respond to the mental health emergency.
Among those protesting Olango’s death include immigrant advocates who say his death was tragic because he had come to the country seeking safety, but was instead killed by U.S. police.
“It is impossible for our communities to rely on police officers for help when they shoot first and ask questions later,” Ginger Jacobs, Chair of the San Diego Immigrant Rights Consortium, said in a statement. “Communities of color and immigrant communities need to know that law enforcement agencies are here to serve and protect ALL people.”
Olango came to the country in 1991 after living in a refugee camp in Kampala, Uganda in search of better education and future in the United States.
In 2002, an immigration judge ordered Olango deported over a conviction for transporting and selling drugs. Uganda refused to issue travel documents to take him back, so Olango was released from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody in 2003, under an order of supervision. That’s because the U.S. Supreme Court Zadvdas v. Davis ruling bars foreigners from being detained indefinitely if their home countries refuse to accept them. Olango was again taken into custody in 2009 after he served a prison sentence for a firearms conviction, but ICE was again unable to deport him.
Olango’s death perhaps wouldn’t have sparked as much attention had he not been black. Though activists have been trying to get an “Immigrant Lives Matter” movement off the ground, it has been far more difficult to rally people to protest when police kill immigrants, particularly when they are Latino. There is virtual silence when Latinos are killed.
For instance, in the same week that Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were killed earlier this year, PBS reported on the lack of attention surrounding five Latinos who were killed by police. Last year, both Oscar Ramirez and Ricardo Diaz Zeferino were unarmed when they were killed by California police, in circumstances that generated “very little protest” last year, the Los Angeles Times reported. The same article pointed out that Latinos made up almost half of Los Angeles County’s population who were killed by police over the past five years. And a Texas police officer didn’t face criminal charges after he killed Rubén García Villalpando, an unarmed Mexican immigrant during a traffic stop after a high-speed car chase.
Of course, thanks to the complicated historical context of violent police-on-black interactions and lynchings that continue to reverberate out of this country’s heinous slavery past, it’s not a perfect comparison.
But in similar ways that speak to the profiling of people of color in this country, both black people and immigrants living in the United States are assumed to be dangerous and treated as criminals. In the current election season, for example, immigrants have been generalized as criminals, potential terrorists, drug dealers, and rapists.
But advocates, including founders of the Black Lives Matter movement, have increasingly been working to incorporate immigrants into the movement to address police brutality — particularly because black immigrants are disproportionately punished when they encounter law enforcement officials. In August, the Black Lives Matter movement adopted a 10-point platform that included a call to end deportations.