Published Works & Media Features

My writing and perspectives have been featured in the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, the Georgetown Journal of Modern Critical Race Perspectives, Amnesty International, and Relevant Magazine.

For the Georgetown Law Journal of Modern Critical Race Perspectives, I wrote about the ongoing work of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI) and the burgeoning UndocuBlack Network.

The article discusses the detrimental, intersectional effects of immigration law and criminal law on Black immigrants, both with and without documentation. Anti-Black racism, deeply embedded in America’s criminal law system, funnels Black immigrants into the criminal justice system, and subsequently into removal or other punitive immigration proceedings. Black immigrants have long been missing, or purposely erased, from the national immigration narrative. Only a handful of organizations advocate for their particularized needs. As Black immigrant activism increases in visibility, opportunities for a new form of coalition building—known as “transformational solidarity”—must be adopted in order to protect and advocate for Black immigrants.

As of 2023, my seminal work has been cited in 35 academic articles and in an amicus brief filed with the United States Supreme Court by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. My article has also been cited by the Clark County Bar Association, the UCLA Law Review, Books and collections like The Immigration Law Death Penalty: Aggravated Felonies, Deportation, and Legal Resistance, Settler Colonialism, Race, and the Law: Why Structural Racism Persists, American While Black: African Americans, Immigration, and the Limits of Citizenship, Global Black Feminisms: Cross Border Collaboration Through an Ethics of Care, and Dreamland: America's Immigration Lottery in an Age of Restriction.

For the Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy, I wrote about the virtues and practice of Black rage in the face of systemic injustice.

“Breanne Palmer explores the polarization of nonviolent progress and Black rage against a backdrop of millennial youth activism. Spanning histories of movements past, influence of the Black Church, and political discourse of ‘radical’ leaders, she justifies the outrage of the Black lived-experience through situational irony and provocative truth.”
— Deloris Wilson, 2015 Editor in Chief, Harvard Journal of African American Public Policy

I wrote about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s often distorted legacy for Relevant Magazine:

“Throughout the continuing struggle to attain racial justice in America, and especially since the inception of the Black Lives Matter Network, too many ill-informed people turn to Dr. King as an example of a “model” activist. They operate using a narrow set of information that casts King as an inoffensive messenger of color-blindness, tolerance, and other relatively useless concepts, devoid of action. They Google the most readily available King quotes and cite to them completely out of context, unaware that his call for non-violent civil disobedience encompasses righteous anger and forceful rhetoric. The malicious misuse of King’s words and person does a disservice to him by warping his legacy to silence participants in the current struggle for social justice, an undertaking that has a direct lineage to King and his contemporaries.”

In the Media

I was interviewed as a Black immigration expert for Amnesty International’s September 2022 report titled “They Did Not Treat Us Like People”: Race and Migration-Related Torture and Other Ill-Treatment of Haitians Seeking Safety in the USA:

“Attorney Breanne Palmer told Amnesty International that a mixture of anti-immigrant and anti-Black sentiment, as well as unconscious enduring false stereotypes that paint Black people on the one hand as “dangerous”, and on the other hand as “incapable of feeling pain” are a big part of the problem, and part of the reason Black migrants are not seen as credible. “They (immigration officials and judges) don’t believe what the Black immigrant is saying” she said.”

I have been quoted in The New York Times, The Grio, PRI’s The World, The City, PRISM Reports, The Hill, USAToday, and Insider discussing my policy work at the UndocuBlack Network concerning:

  • Liberian immigrants and the historic but floundering LRIF program;

  • The August 2021 redesignation of Temporary Protected Status for Haiti;

  • The unjust detention of pregnant and nursing immigrants; and

  • CBP’s anti-Black violence against Haitian migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in the context of Title 42.