Underground Lives: How Criminalization and Fear Build Hidden Societies
- nathan334
- 1 hour ago
- 2 min read
By Melanie Nathan, Oct 24, 2025
When governments criminalize identity—whether via immigration policy or sexual orientation laws—they coerce people into the shadows to flee danger, yet the underground offers no safety at all—only a stopgap for immediate survival. Under Donald Trump’s immigration crackdowns, thousands of immigrants, and even U.S. citizens of color, live under the constant threat of racial profiling, unlawful detentions, arbitrary arrests and deportation.
Raids, detentions, and the dismantling of legal protections create an atmosphere of fear so pervasive that entire communities go underground. Terrified people avoid work, hospitals, schools, reporting crimes, and even churches. In many cities, a hidden network of survival is taking root—one built on whispered information, mutual aid, and the quiet resistance of existing despite erasure.
In the process, constitutions—and the oaths sworn to uphold them—are breached, as power aligns with xenophobia and homophobia to police who belongs. These “fears,” manufactured through myths and lies that scapegoat the other, accommodate and justify the persecution that drives populations underground.
The current country conditions climate in the U.S.A. now mirrors what has long been happening across much of Africa, where LGBTQI+ people live under the threat of imprisonment, public outing, and mob violence. In over 30 countries on the Continent, such as Uganda, Ghana, Nigeria, Zambia, Cameroon, and Senegal, laws criminalizing same-sex relations and the so-called “promotion” of homosexuality have created entire underground societies.
Here too, fear drives secrecy: safe houses replace open communities; coded language replaces identity; and survival depends on invisibility. The criminalization of being—of simply existing—forces people into parallel realities beneath the surface of public life.
The parallel is chilling. In both cases, state power weaponizes law and propagandizes public outcry to regulate who belongs and who doesn’t. The targets, immigrants of color in America, LGBTQI+ people in Africa, are not simply punished for what they do, but for who they are. Both face police surveillance, ostracism, and state-sanctioned exclusion that erodes trust in institutions. Both develop underground systems of care, solidarity, and mutual protection, testifying to human resilience in the face of legalized hate.
Ultimately, these undergrounds are the unintended consequence of governments that choose control over compassion and abuse of rights over fostering rights. When belonging is criminalized, survival itself becomes an act of defiance.This needs your support:
For almost 15 years, African Human Rights Coalition has stood inside these hidden worlds—offering hope for survival and solutions; safe housing, meals, medicine, legal services, practical guidance, and advocacy, on both continents. As real pathways out remain rare and out of reach, survival must endure.
As U.S. policies drift from being a guardrail toward complicity with abuse, your support becomes the guardrail. Our resources are nearly depleted. Please give now as we continue to sustain life and dignity.
PLEASE DONATE HERE.
Many thanks to all for your ongoing support -
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