Across the country, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are tearing families apart, terrorizing communities and upending businesses.
The architect of this anti-immigrant agenda, top Trump aide Stephen Miller, has demanded that ICE make 3,000 arrests like these per day—an arbitrary quota with no legal basis.
To meet this quota, masked, plainclothes ICE agents embrace violent and unconstitutional tactics to abduct people from courthouses, citizenship appointments, churches, graduations, restaurants, Home Depots, farms and other workplaces. There’s mounting evidence of ICE using racial profiling.
In one disturbing case in Chicago, ICE agents grabbed, handcuffed and forced Julio Noriega into a van as he stepped out of a Jiffy Lube in late January. ICE detained him for 10 hours before releasing him when they realized he was a U.S. citizen.
And in another instance, ICE forced two children, who are both U.S. citizens—one undergoing Stage 4 cancer treatment—onto their mother’s deportation flight to Honduras in April. The cancer patient is four years old, and ICE deported him without his medication.
The inhumane treatment continues in ICE’s sprawling network of private prisons and county jails. The U.S. spends more than $3 billion annually on the world’s largest immigration detention system, which is primarily operated by for-profit prison contractors like GEO Group and CoreCivic. These facilities are notorious for poor medical treatment, dangerous overcrowding, due process violations and preventable deaths.
If these attacks on immigrants were really about “following the law,” then immigrants fleeing war and persecution would be able to exercise their right to seek asylum—a human right long enshrined under international and U.S. law. Their due process rights would be respected.
People abducted by ICE are not numbers. They’re someone’s entire world. They’re cherished members of communities. And they’re on the frontlines of defending all of our civil liberties. We must stand together and demand that ICE leave our communities. We are a nation of immigrants, after all.
Farrah Hassen, J.D. is a writer, policy analyst and educator.
