Earlier this year, for the first time in a quarter century, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a major piece of gun control legislation. Its provisions are modest at best — it would expand background checks, mandating them for all person-to-person sales, which would technically close the gun-show loophole — and the bill has stalled in the Senate.

But before the legislation was voted on, Representative Doug Collins of Georgia took the opportunity to sneak in an anti-immigrant provision. Capitalizing on the bill’s mandate for widespread background checks, Rep. Collins’a addition requires the background check system to notify U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) if an undocumented immigrant tries to purchase a gun.

Earlier this week, President Trump signaled support for the anti-immigrant provision, proclaiming via tweet that “Republicans and Democrats must come together and get strong background checks, perhaps marrying…this legislation with desperately needed immigration reform.” Trump’s call for for stricter immigration laws came in response to the mass shooting in El Paso that left at least 22 people dead. Notably, the alleged shooter posted a white nationalist and anti-immigrant manifesto online just before launching his attack.

Whether he knew it or not, Rep. Collins was tapping into a long political tradition when he “married” gun control legislation with racism and xenophobia. At several moments in American political history, gun control provisions like the one Rep. Collins added to HR 8 have been used to maintain white supremacy.

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, before the North occupied the South during Reconstruction, Southern states passed a series of laws known as Black Codes that served as mechanisms to regain control of newly freed black southerners. The laws established the system of indentured servitude that would ensure that black Southerners would again provide a source of cheap labor for plantation owners, but they also restricted former slaves’ freedoms and liberties — including the right to bear arms.

Fearing that former slaves would seek revenge on their masters, and knowing that many black Americans now had military experience under their belt from their war service, several Southern states passed explicitly racist gun control measures to disarm black Southerners. Mississippi banned black residents from owning guns or bowie knives. Alabama prohibited black residents from owning or carrying any “deadly weapon.” Florida required black residents to receive judicial authorization before acquiring guns.

Northern politicians took the threat of racialized gun control in the South seriously. When debating what became the Fourteenth Amendment, the purpose of which was to ensure formal racial equality for all Americans, one senator said the core purpose of the bill was to “restrain the power of the states and compel them in all times to respect these great fundamental guarantees…secured by the first eight amendments of the Constitution [including] the right to keep and bear arms.” Later that year, Congress passed the Freedmen’s Bureau Act, which provided relief to former slaves, protecting certain critical political and legal rights that Southern states were denying them, including their Second Amendment right to bear arms.

The proliferation of gun control laws designed to limit gun possession to whites continued into the early part of the 20th century, though now with the backing of larger interest groups. As Adam Winkler, a UCLA law professor and the author of Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America, explained in a 2011 article in *The Atlantic*, the National Rifle Association (NRA) was “at the forefront of legislative efforts to enact gun control” leading up to the Great Depression. The organization’s president, according to Winkler, even helped write a piece of gun control legislation intended to serve as an example for other state legislatures.