ICE AT THE WORLD CUP. Will it actually happen?

There are reasons to believe it will. After all, in February, ICE Director Todd Lyons, who has since announced he is resigning at the end of May, said at a congressional hearing that ICE would be a “key part” of World Cup security.

And there are reasons to be skeptical. One is that the high-profile ICE raids of the first year of the Trump administration sparked so much political backlash—especially after Homeland Security agents killed two American citizens—that they cost former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem her job, forced Border Patrol frontman Greg Bovino into retirement, and compelled the administration as a whole to switch to a lower-profile strategy. ICE, notably, did not show up at the Super Bowl—even despite the Bad Bunny of it all.

But what if the answer to the question falls somewhere in between? That’s what sources in national immigration politics and in Texas are bracing for. They told me they think the more likely danger isn’t that ICE sets up checkpoints on the way to or from World Cup matches, but that agents

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ICE FINALLY STUCK IT to one of their detainees. Except this person is no criminal, no murderer, no monster. She is a torture victim from Colombia, one who—as we wrote last year—was repeatedly beaten and raped by the police buddies of her ex-boyfriend.

Adriana Quiroz Zapata finally escaped Colombia with her life, only to find more mistreatment at the hands of U.S. federal agents.

Because the Convention Against Torture prevented her from being deported to Colombia, ICE instead packed her onto a bus and tried to abandon her in Mexico, a country where she has no ties. But Mexican immigration authorities declined to take her after hearing details of her harrowing journey.

I wrote that story last April. On April 16 of this year, Zapata was finally removed from the United States. Along with fourteen others, she was shipped off to the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)—once again, a country where she has no ties.

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Rep. Rob Menendez (D-N.J.) who counts Zapata’s family members as constituents, told me the Trump administration clearly wanted to dump her in Africa with no actual plan or respect for her ability to survive.

“There’s no limits to their cruelty and I think that’s what’s really important for the American people to know, there’s a complete misalignment with what they sold the American people,” he said. “Americans are being shot in the street, people with protected status are being removed to third countries in Africa. Think about the hypocrisy on so many levels: They said they had to cut $1 trillion in fraud, waste, and abuse yet they’re using taxpayer money to remove people with protected status and flying them to the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”

On the House floor, Menendez slammed Republicans for being “silent” and “complicit” with respect to Trump’s mass deportation campaign brutalizing our neighbors—and said of Zapata, “If we do not get her back she will die.”

Menendez’s office and Zapata’s lawyer, Lauren O’Neal, both told me that the medical issues we wrote about last year have only worsened. Zapata’s prediabetes became diabetes due to her diet in detention, and she has been prescribed medication that officials in the DRC told O’Neal cannot be provided. Zapata did not respond to my request for comment about how she is doing mentally and physically; O’Neal told me her client is “fragile” and “very sensitive” right now.

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In an April 23 letter to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services requesting Zapata’s expedited humanitarian parole back to the United States, O’Neal said that Zapata is being provided only bread and water, with escorted access to a convenience store. And O’Neal alleges that even the DRC may just be a way station: She says that DRC representatives, in conjunction with diplomatic officials from Colombia, have engaged in pressuring tactics. Their goal is apparently for Zapata, and other detainees like her, to sign documents agreeing to relinquish their rights—which, in Zapata’s case, would send her back to Colombia where she could be in grave danger once again.

“It seems the lawlessness is commonplace, it’s almost like I’m living in some twilight zone,” O’Neal told me. I pointed out to her that there seems to be some personal animosity in the actions of U.S. immigration authorities against Zapata, not just for filing a complaint in the past, which got an agent reassigned, but perhaps for how much she and her allies have fought for her release.

O’Neal agreed with the suggestion that Zapata was being targeted in that way, as did Menendez. O’Neal received a call from an ICE agent in the days preceding Zapata’s removal to the DRC where she learned Zapata was being given medical treatment. O’Neal asked if it was for an old broken arm injury or for her diabetes but was told Zapata was given a yellow fever vaccine—a prerequisite before being sent to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. O’Neal told me she could hear the “glee” in the ICE agent’s voice as they delivered the news.

Menendez said Americans should be horrified by the inhumanity of this situation, and by the affront to the rule of law that Zapata’s case represents. And he took a parting shot at Republicans who have stood by as Trump’s deportation forces have rampaged through communities only now wanting to moderate on the issue ahead of midterm elections.

“This is the same party that wraps themselves in religion, but they don’t say a word when a person is tortured in their country of origin, tortured here, then removed to the DRC,” he said.

O’Neal told me her Jewish background informs the slippery slope she sees for an administration that has come for immigrants now, here legally or not, and that could come for others later on.

“I want Americans to know what they should have known the whole time: that this administration’s utter and complete lack of due process of law should strike so much fear in us,” she said. “Today it serves their interest to do it to immigrants, but it shows how little you have to protect yourself . . . unchecked federal power is what our forefathers didn’t want.”

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THE SMOKE FROM ERIC SWALWELL’S POLITICAL IMPLOSION has not yet cleared from the California gubernatorial race, but one figure is deploying a giant political box fan to give himself some visibility. Billionaire liberal donor and environmental activist Tom Steyer’s recent ad buys total around $115 million, almost thirty times the total of his nearest Democratic competitor.

Swalwell’s exit from the scene appears to have benefited Steyer: He is leading at 20 percent in a new Emerson poll, with former congressman and HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra1 close behind at 19 percent, also enjoying a bump in support following Swalwell’s exit.2 Steyer also picked up a major endorsement from the influential California Teachers Association, which had supported Swalwell before he withdrew from the race.

But while some of Swalwell’s collapsed political presence has been recouped by other Democrats still in the race, much of it is now that swirl of political smoke: There is not yet a clear frontrunner, which gives rise to the distant possibility that Democratic disarray will allow two Republicans to sneak in to the gubernatorial runoff thanks to California’s jungle primary system.

Steyer is no dummy: While a Washington Post poll last fall found that 75 percent of Democratic voters and 60 percent of independents thought spending by billionaires on political campaigns is either bad or very bad, those voters also overwhelmingly oppose ICE, and Steyer has worked hard to position himself as the anti-ICE candidate. He has called for abolishing the agency and jailing its agents who have broken the law; in a blog post he published last week detailing these plans, he described ICE as a “violent extremist group.” Don’t just take my word for it (or his). New York Times opinion contributor Jean Guerrero, who last week moderated a California gubernatorial debate, wrote that while the Democratic candidates should be stronger on immigration, Steyer “came across as the boldest defender of immigrants” on the debate stage.

“We need immigration services, we need it absolutely, but we don’t need a criminal organization with masks and assault rifles terrorizing our citizens and racially profiling them, and it’s not right,” Steyer told me in an interview a week ago.

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For his efforts, Steyer has received the backhanded gift of Trump lashing out over Fox News’s coverage of his candidacy, which Trump worries could have the effect of “putting him [Steyer] ‘into play’” to win the race.

It wasn’t just Trump who bristled at Steyer’s rise. Elon Musk retweeted a screenshot of the opening to Steyer’s blog post about his five-point plan for ICE with a single word of commentary: “Wow.” The plan calls for not just abolishing ICE and forbidding all law enforcement agencies from racial profiling, but also creating an investigative unit to monitor ICE in California, as well as conditions in the agency’s detention centers. Steyer told me he also wants to create a legal-defense “superfund” for people who have been “kidnapped” by ICE—a plan modeled on an initiative he took on with his wife in 2018 wherein the couple provided around $3.3 million to cover legal representation for people under threat of deportation during Trump 1.0.

Steyer is proud of the criticism and alarm he’s elicited from Trump and Musk, and by all accounts, he’s serious about opposing ICE in California. But there is one thing that could trip him up in the lane he’s chosen for himself in this race—what some call his “original sin” on immigration.

“Is He Ready to Atone for Those Sins?”

In 2004, Steyer’s former hedge fund bought tens of millions of dollars’ worth of stock in the company now known as CoreCivic, a publicly traded detention company that has made hundreds of millions of dollars in contracts under Trump, tallying up allegations of poor medical care for sick detainees along the way.

Chris Newman, the general counsel for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) and an attorney for Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man who was wrongfully sent to a prison camp in El Salvador last year, rejects the idea that a billionaire should be elected in California. He told me Steyer is “obviously” trying to “buy his way into the immigrant rights champion lane.”

“The guy profited from investing in commercial prison companies—is he ready to atone for those sins?” he asked.

Steyer has called this investment a “mistake.” When we spoke I asked him about it again, noting that his opponents see it as fundamentally undercutting his anti-ICE position.

“We did invest in it—it was twenty-two years ago—I realized over twenty years ago it was a mistake and got rid of it,” he told me, noting that he has since been endorsed by the leading rehabilitative-justice organization in the state, Smart Justice. “But I didn’t just do that,” he continued:

We worked for the next twenty years to push not just for fair treatment of immigrants but also against the era of mass incarceration. We worked to make California a sanctuary state in 2019, which means that California law officers cannot cooperate with ICE legally except with regards for violent felons. We pushed also in 2019 to make sure the state could not have contracts with private prisons.

Steyer framed the decision to invest in private prisons back in 2004 not just as a mistake or failure of judgment, but as an important personal turning point—“a wakeup call” that “changed my life,” he said. “And there’s a reason I walked away from my business and billions of dollars: because I want to have a different life than that, and being in that situation puts pressure on me to do things I’m not willing to do.”

Hiring the Most-Sought-After Influencer in the Nation

Loyal readers of Huddled Masses may remember Carlos Eduardo Espina, the influencer whom every 2028 Democratic hopeful is courting thanks to his charisma, positive content, and platform of more than 22 million followers across Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.

Steyer, too, is hoping to benefit from Espina’s influence with Latinos and immigrants: The billionaire recently brought him aboard as a campaign adviser in the sprint to the June primary.

I asked the typically forthcoming Espina how much he’s being paid for his work on the campaign, and he said he would be happy to tell me—but contracts go two ways, so I would need to ask the campaign. Steyer’s team declined to share that juicy bit of info.

Espina’s choice has given rise to some criticism among his followers over his decision not to instead endorse a Hispanic candidate like Becerra. (Espina told me he didn’t want to criticize Becerra during our call, but did acknowledge that the congressman’s time as HHS secretary under Biden—a role in which he oversaw shelters for migrant children—left a bad taste in his mouth.)

Espina, a Texas native, said he wasn’t sure about getting involved in California, but a large portion of his followers are from the state, and he counts Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) as a friend and was swayed by Khanna’s endorsement of Steyer, whose team soon pitched him on advising the campaign on Latino issues and engagement.

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Espina has already advised Steyer’s campaign to do more events in the Central Valley, Modesto, and Madera. And he’s been tapping his Californian followers to help hone Steyer’s policy focus: A Google form he posted with questions on the top issues they’re concerned about got close to a thousand responses, he told me. He learned that immigration and ICE raids are by far the number-one issue for these Latino Californians, followed by the economy.

Steyer described Espina as a “trusted ambassador” to a broad swath of Californians he hopes to reach through his campaign. And one of the things he wants to communicate is a position that will doubtless anger his MAGA critics.

“One of the questions has always been . . . should we be providing health care for people without documentation? The answer is: Yes, absolutely,” Steyer told me. “Health care is a right; the people of California need to have health care.”

Espina’s crowdsourcing also found that working-class Latinos tend to see the Golden State as increasingly unaffordable—another area where Steyer feels he has a valuable political message to offer them.

Latinos are the biggest group in California, Steyer said, and they disproportionately work in physically difficult and underpaid jobs. Helping them, he said, dovetails with his campaign’s commitment to affordability.

“When I’m talking about dropping the cost of rent, dropping the cost of health care, dropping the cost of electricity, putting a windfall profits tax on gasoline and sending it back to California directly, I’m talking about Latinos,” he said. “I’m talking about people who do the hardest jobs for the lowest money. . . . Anytime I’m talking about costs coming down, I’m talking about Latinos being able to afford the life they want. Anytime I’m talking about bringing in money so that we can have better education so our kids can do better, I’m talking overwhelmingly about Latino kids.”

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WHEN DONALD TRUMP, Kristi Noem, Ron DeSantis, and local Florida officials opened the Everglades detention center last summer, its harsh location and cavalier nickname—“Alligator Alcatraz”—gave rise to a lot of brutal joking about what awaited detainees at the facility, especially any who might try to escape.

But the jokes and the nickname weren’t funny to the native Miccosukee tribe, whose lands are adjacent to the detention facility grounds. They have joined lawsuits against state and federal authorities alleging that construction was greenlit without a tribal consultation or an environmental impact study, overlooking important lawful requirements, they argue, for such a project at the site.

“The Everglades is meant for our tribes, it protects life, it shields it. It’s not meant to detain life,” one member of the tribe said.

But detaining life is what it does—thousands of lives so far. The Everglades detention center is a key site for Trump’s mass deportation regime. So it makes good fractal sense, then, that Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), in an interview with me after an unannounced visit to the facility last week, described it as a “monument to cruelty.” The part reflects the whole.

One Cage, 32 Men, 3 Toilets, Zero Privacy

One of the first things Wasserman Schultz told me was that she wasn’t being provocative or inflammatory in calling the living quarters “cages”: It’s simply what they are. The congresswoman introduced the No Cages in the Everglades Act in the House last summer, but it never became law; she told me she saw 1,500 detainees housed in cages at the site, a cage area that smelled like urine, and one cage configuration where detainees appear to have no option but to go to the bathroom in front of everyone.

“It’s a vile, disgusting place that you would never want anyone you care about to spend five minutes in, let alone be warehoused in cages there,” she told me.

The facility, which was ordered closed by a district judge last summer due to the lawsuit from the tribe and others, before being reopened two weeks later by two Trump-appointed appeals court judges, already has a bad reputation for its poor treatment of immigrants. But often, things at the facility allegedly get even worse, sometimes declining for months at a time. This alarming pattern might owe to new guards coming in, or to more aggressive attempts to stamp out protests inside. That’s what I was told by Thomas Kennedy, a veteran Florida immigration activist who stays connected to the family members of detainees and has made it his business to bring what is happening at the facility to national attention.

New trouble began after a federal judge ruled in late March that the detention center must give free access to, as the Associated Press summarized the order, “timely, confidential, unmonitored, unrecorded outgoing legal calls.” Days later, guards cut off the phones entirely without warning or explanation. This happened on April 2, according to a Miami Herald report published this week. Things escalated from there. As the Herald put it, after the phones were cut off, “the beatings began.”

Raiko Lopez Morffi was dragged out of his cell and severely beaten, leaving him with a black eye, as seen in photos taken by his attorney and presented to the court as part of the lawsuit. (Morffi’s black eye can be seen in a screenshot from a Zoom call included in the Herald story.) He also sustained injuries to his shoulder and arm and was kicked in the head; at one point, an officer pressed a knee against his neck to restrain him. One of Morffi’s fellow detainees had his wrist broken. All men in the cage were pepper-sprayed, and one of the older men lost consciousness apparently as a result.

This was far from the first example of grievous mistreatment of detainees at the facility. Days before the judge’s phone order and the guards’ phone suspension, Sens. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) published a three-page letter to new Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin requesting information about the use of “the box”—a punishment that resembles those meted out by totalitarian governments and police states.

“Detainees placed in ‘the box’—located outside and in direct sunlight—are reportedly forced to endure high temperatures, high humidity, and ‘horsefly-size mosquitos,’” the letter states. “One Nicaraguan man reported that his ‘hands and feet were painfully shackled’ when he was placed in ‘the box’ in the recreation yard, prohibiting any movement. He reportedly remained in ‘the box’ directly exposed to the sun and heat for hours, with no water.”

This is unconscionable. But Kennedy, the immigration activist, told me that in the past month, he’s heard that things at the facility have gotten even worse.

“We don’t know why,” he said. “It goes in waves, maybe because there’s a lot of turnover with the guards. It was more calm at the beginning of the year. But over the last month, I’ve heard awful shit.”

An Amnesty International report from December tells some of the story. It’s entitled: “Torture and enforced disappearances in the Sunshine State: Human Rights Violations at ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ and Krome in Florida.”

Krome is another Florida detention center; it is located in Miami. Wasserman Schultz visited it as well and described the conditions as also being “awful.”

But Kennedy, who is in touch with families of Everglades detainees, shared a startling observation about the two sites.

“Krome has seen multiple civil rights and human rights complaints,” he told me. “But people in ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ still say, ‘I want to get sent to Krome.’”

Cubans Voted for Trump—Now in “Alligator Alcatraz”

Kennedy is in a group chat with eighty or so women—the mothers and wives of immigrants held at the detention center. Through that chat and his advocacy, he has learned that a large number of Cubans are being held at the Everglades facility.

“Predominantly, the population are Cubans whose families voted for or supported Trump, and they’re pissed,” Kennedy said.

Wasserman Schultz agreed.

“The most significant evidence that points to that is Eileen Higgins’s election,” she said, referring to the new Democratic mayor of Miami who swept into office on the strength of high Latino support. “In elections across the country, the Hispanic vote is shifting dramatically to Democrats. Even if people voted for Trump, the cruelty threaded through this administration’s policies and priorities is not what they signed up for.”

Kennedy has seen it up close.

In the group chat, the family members share videos and memes about Trump with one general message, he said: “This guy is a fucking lunatic.”

He shared screenshots of some of them with me.

One depicts Trump and Melania Trump with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, while another shows Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu in handcuffs. They also share videos of speakers declaring the “insanity” of Trump, pointing to him losing his mind, and they have recently been very upset by Trump attacking Pope Leo XIV.

But the general vibe is perhaps best captured by a YouTube video that recently made the rounds in the group. It’s a short clip of a song performed by the rapper YG at Coachella in 2016. As the crowd cheers, he sings “Fuck Donald Trump.”

The sentiment is only too easy to understand. Wasserman Schultz told me that when she says the Everglades detention center is a “monument to cruelty” and that the “cruelty is the point,” she wants to underscore that she sees the facility as a means to an end.

The reason DeSantis and Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier chose to place the facility “in the middle of the broiling hot swampy environment,” and the reason they have since made so many jokes about the perils that await escapees outside its fences, she told me, is that they want people to be afraid of getting sent there.

“They want to make it so awful people self-deport,” she said.

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WANT TO KNOW WHAT A WIN for liberalism looks like in the Trump administration? Sometimes you can spot it in the things that are not said.

Last month, Republicans floated a strategy for this year’s midterm elections that could be summarized as instructing their candidates to stop saying “mass deportations.” It was an admission that Trump’s anti-immigrant zealotry had become a liability with voters and that acts of pushing back can actually work.

Those acts are visible now both on the national stage and in communities across the country. One of the latest instances appeared last weekend: a fight against new border-wall construction that threatens to rip up the beloved Big Bend National Park.

The crowd of more than 2,000 people of all political affiliations—including many who wouldn’t normally participate in a political protest—gathered on the steps of the Texas State Capitol to deliver one message: Not in our backyard.

Texas Democratic state Sen. Cesar Blanco told me he was heartened to see the strong response to the planned construction, including the flood of letters his office had received from constituents sharing stories to underscore what Big Bend means to them.

“We’re living in interesting times,” Blanco said. “We had Republicans and Democrats coming together, people who aren’t involved in politics from different walks of life who showed up with a message of let’s not destroy this beautiful treasure we have for a wall that is ineffective. We heard from land owners who have concerns on eminent domain, people who are campers and hikers, and river rafters who are concerned, and folks who care about wildlife, which a wall would impact.”

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A crowd of a few thousand people—some motivated by a love of flora—is never going to get the headlines of a multi-million person national rally against Trump’s authoritarianism. But don’t discount its significance. Trump’s numbers on immigration have taken a dive not just because of a massive national shift in sentiment as people have seen what his mass-deportation regime looks like in practice but also because of steady pockets of resistance like this. People in local communities have been quietly opposing Trump throughout his second term. And as support for his handling of immigration continues to wane, that open opposition has grown louder and become more emboldened.

A CNN poll released last week found that in addition to Trump’s approval rating on the economy hitting a new low, 55 percent of Americans said he had gone too far in pursuing mass deportations. When it came to the DHS funding impasse and the resulting government shutdown that created interminably long lines at airports and left TSA workers without pay, 39 percent blamed Republicans while a quarter blamed Democrats; 28 percent said both groups shared equal blame. When asked whether Trump sending ICE agents to airports helped things, 40 percent said it made things worse, while 21 percent said it improved the situation.

This polling came after a University of Massachusetts Amherst poll of 1,000 respondents, also conducted in late March and released April 1, found that roughly 6 in 10 Americans disapproved of both Trump’s handling of nationwide protests against his immigration policies and the investigation of the killing of U.S. citizens in Minneapolis by federal agents.

Trend lines also show support dropping for specific controversial policies. Those in favor of deporting people to countries they are not from fell from 20 percent last July to 13 percent today, while support for separating kids from their immigrant parents has fallen a comparable amount, from 18 percent last April to 11 percent now.

But again, the national numbers don’t tell the full story. To understand the full extent of the deteriorating environment for Trump on immigration, you need to drill down to what is happening in local towns and cities. I recently reported on DHS’s preparations to spend $38 billion overpaying for warehouses intended to house up to 10,000 immigrants; companies have been backing out of those deals after facing intense scrutiny from local municipalities and local residents who didn’t want detention centers in their backyards. Some local city governments even passed zoning ordinances to stop ICE’s plans for mass detention center, and in a small town in Georgia, the city manager put a lock on the water meter pending the agency’s demonstration that its planned facility won’t put undue strain on local infrastructure.

During the long days, weeks, and months of the second Trump administration, these are what wins often look like—not massive, decisive victories, but rather delaying, slowing, and jamming the gears of the mass-deportation machine instead of letting it roll unimpeded into your town.

DILLEY, TEXAS IS THE SITE of other recent attempts to stall the deportation machine. The town’s detention center came to national attention after Liam Ramos—the boy who you’ll remember was wearing his blue bunny hat in a heartbreaking photo—was taken with his father from their home in Minnesota and shuttled 1,200 miles away to be incarcerated there. The pressure has been constant to release the families and children at Dilley. They have told loved ones and reporters about their harrowing struggles with securing access to prescribed medicine, clean water, and food. On Wednesday, the Hollywood Reporter published a story about a recent petition for the detention center to be closed; over the past month, it reached 215,000 signatures, including those of a bevy of celebrities including Jodie Foster, Ben Stiller, Pedro Pascal, Madonna, and Javier Bardem.

Rep. Joaquin Castro, who has already helped to secure the release of some families and children from the facility including Ramos and his dad, has continued to put pressure on the detention center in Dilley, not just by getting detainees released but by doing regular Instagram updates on the latest news out of the center and by continuing his periodic visits. The thorn-in-the-administration’s-side congressman appears to have caused enough frustration to elicit a response from federal agents: This week, he said that ICE has started locking down the facility when members of Congress come, apparently permitting no detainees into the common areas where they might speak with lawmakers.

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Even if Republicans are trying to avoid using the words “mass deportations,” Americans still understand that Trump’s extreme immigration policies go far beyond providing traditional border security, which polls consistently show people support. And those policies have caused—and will continue to cause—disruptions to families, disorder in local communities, and damage to local economies.

A successful border policy, Blanco, the state senator, told me, “depends on the type of border security.”

“You can’t use a first-century method to deal with the situation in 2026—you have to figure out what’s effective and what’s not,” he said. With an eye on the protests that started last week, he added: “Big Bend has a big economic impact for our region, and a cross section of folks—Republicans, Democrats, and independents—said this is overreach.”

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POP QUIZ: WHICH CITY is leading the nation in ICE arrests so far this year? It’s not the Twin Cities, which clocked in at over 5,000 arrests from mid-December to mid-March. And it’s not Chicago or Los Angeles, which were targeted by Donald Trump aggressively last year; they have had, respectively, about 4,900 and 3,300 arrests so far this year.

It’s Miami. The ICE field office in that city led the nation in arrests from December to March, with about 9,900. That comes to roughly 120 a day, more than Dallas, Atlanta, and San Antonio, which follow on the list. Since Trump took office last year, the total number of arrests made by the Miami field office is over 41,000, more than 35 percent higher than the next highest city (Dallas), according to New York Times data.

It’s a remarkable distinction considering Miami’s status as a metropolis that became MAGAfied thanks to Trump’s gains with Latinos. Yet the destabilization that ICE has caused in this bilingual, bicultural South Florida city has received scant media coverage and little attention from the rest of the country—at least compared to what accompanied ICE raids in Minneapolis and Chicago and L.A.

But that could be changing soon, in part because a political backlash is growing. In addition to the ICE raids—and perhaps to some degree because of them—Miami is also experiencing a hard political swing away from Trumpism. It even appears to be returning to its status as a Democratic bastion.

No Democrat better exemplifies the major changes underway in Miami than the city’s mayor, Eileen Higgins.

When she took office 106 days ago, Higgins became the first Democrat to serve as Miami mayor in almost thirty years. She was also the first woman ever elected to the office, and the first non-Hispanic since the 1990s. Facing off against a Republican Latino opponent, she received 59 percent of the vote in the city of almost half a million people, where seven in ten voters are Hispanic.

When I spoke with her this week, I wanted to know:

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WHEN I’M NOT COVERING IMMIGRATION, I like to watch prestige TV. I treat it as a way to unwind and give myself space from the chaos and human suffering that often comes when covering immigration in the Trump era.

Which is why it was so jarring last week when one of my favorite shows, The Pitt, centered its episode on the main topic of my reporting over the last year: the disruptive impacts of ICE.

For those who haven’t seen it, The Pitt is a popular hospital drama where each episode depicts roughly in real time an hour of a day in the emergency room. The show tries to put us in the shoes of people we are not like or whom we have not often considered. It asks us to have empathy and compassion for these patients as well as the people trying to help them within a hospital system, where frustration and emotion can often run high.

Last week’s episode, “5:00 P.M.,” stayed true to those elements, only this time the source of the frustration, drama, and emotion was ICE agents who came storming into the ER.1

Things get rolling when some commotion in the ER attracts the attention of Dr. “Robby” Robinavitch (Noah Wyle) and Dr. Cassie McKay (Fiona Dourif). They look up to see two federal agents hauling in a terrified immigrant who is clearly in immense pain.

The immigrant is named Pranita (Ramona DuBarry), and she is a restaurant worker who was caught up in the chaos of a raid and thrown down a flight of stairs, which has likely torn her rotator cuff. It’s hard to find a more true-to-life premise in television right now: Pranita’s plight evokes the memory of so many similar stories we’ve seen and heard over the last year of immigrants trying to flee federal agents or being hurt by them. And of course the two agents who have apprehended Pranita won’t let her call her daughter to let her know where she is.

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The presentation of the two ICE agents speaks volumes. The first one, agent Russo (Juju Alexander), is tall and masked; the camera looks up at him in a way that reinforces the sense of threat and intimidation, and you can see the way this sense radiates out to various members of the hospital staff, from the main characters to the other hospital personnel and patients waiting in the ER. The second agent, Correa2 (Josell Mariano), goes without a mask and for that reason alone seemed infinitely more human than his partner. The Instagram algorithm later served me Mariano’s post about filming the episode: “I found myself imagining what it would feel like to find my own mother or father in that same situation,” he wrote. He highlighted several behind-the-scenes photos, which he offered at the end to, as he put it, “hopefully make you not hate me.”

I found the actor’s reflections on his performance fascinating, so I reached out to ask for an interview. When we spoke, Mariano told me

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THE MOST SOUGHT-AFTER INFLUENCER in Democratic politics is a Uruguayan-Mexican-American social media personality who once ran a summer camp providing free soccer to low-income kids in central Texas.

Carlos Eduardo Espina may not be a household name in establishment circles in D.C. But if you’re in the business of winning elections, or planning a 2028 presidential run, there are few people more notable or desirable.

Just this month alone, three Democratic governors widely considered to be mulling presidential bids have invited Espina to events around the country, eager to test-drive their likability among a Latino audience by filming low-friction videos with him. Previously, Espina met with three other potential White House aspirants: Rep. Ro Khanna, Gov. Wes Moore, and Pete Buttigieg.1 And in between, Espina put his cultural influence behind two of the most promising Democrats in Texas—state Rep. James Talarico and Tejano singer Bobby Pulido—helping each rack up big numbers among Hispanic voters in their respective primary wins.

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The 27-year-old’s influence is tied to the size of his audience with 22 million followers across TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. But unlike other influencers, he has built up that following not just by posting fun videos, giving man hugs, and snagging invites to high-profile events, but by positioning himself as a voice, advocate, and even gatekeeper for the Latino community. Espina noted to me how it felt to watch ex-presidents speak at the funeral of the recently passed civil rights leader Jesse Jackson.

“There are not that many leaders in the Latino community like that—who are part of politics but still distant from it,” he explained.

Espina migrated from Uruguay to the United States when he was 5 years old and grew up in College Station, Texas. (His father was a U.S. citizen, so Espina was a citizen even before coming to the country—“like Ted Cruz,” he jokes.) He went to college in the liberal arts bastion of Vassar and, from there, got a law degree at the University of Nevada. His work, primarily, was in the world of NGOs. In addition to connecting socioeconomically disadvantaged kids with soccer, he founded another nonprofit in 2019 to support migrants in ICE detention centers, called the Detained Refugee Solidarity Fund.

His entrance into the content-creation game started when he began posting videos that featured citizenship information in Spanish, which is not widely available online in a digestible way. He had been inspired by helping his mother study for her citizenship test. His audience eventually asked him for videos on other immigration topics, which led to his foray into politics.

He didn’t just find his voice. Over time he also became viewed as a trusted validator and messenger, which translated into political clout.

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WHEN DONALD TRUMP announced he was dumping Kristi Noem as his secretary of homeland security and replacing her with Sen. Markwayne Mullin, some framed the decision as a much-needed refresh for a beleaguered agency.

Noem accumulated more than her share of baggage during her fourteen months atop the nation’s main immigration-enforcement department. She’s been accused of launching a massive ad campaign with her as the star; handing out a sweetheart no-bid contract for part of that PR blitz to a company that subcontracted some of its work to the firm of a top aide’s spouse; commissioning the purchase of a luxury jet with a bedroom in the back; and carrying on a brazen affair with her adviser and “special government employee” Corey Lewandowski.

But while Mullin hasn’t done anything quite like the above, the soon-to-be head of DHS can hardly be considered baggage-free.

Consider the chaos this winter that consumed Minnesota following the ramp-up of ICE and CBP forces there. The Oklahoma Republican repeatedly defended the aggressive enforcement actions, according to an extensive review by The Bulwark of his television appearances and public utterances during that time. He kept up the cheerleading even after two U.S. citizens were killed by federal agents.

When officers shot Renee Good as she attempted to drive away from the scene of an ICE protest, Mullin echoed Noem’s assessment that Good had engaged in an act of domestic terrorism. “They are terrorizing their city right now,” he told News Nation. “What [Noem] said was absolutely, 100-percent correct.”

During a CNN interview a few days later, reporter Kaitlan Collins pressed Mullin on whether authorities should investigate Good’s killing—something that Noem and the FBI have both resisted, even going so far as to refuse cooperation with local officials. “If they’re investigating anything, they need to be investigating the paid protesters, and who’s paying them to obstruct federal officers,” he declared at one point.

In another CNN interview, Mullin was presented with video showing that ICE officers shot Good two times from the side of the vehicle, in addition to once from the front. He discounted the video. “That’s very selective imaging that you guys are using,” he told host Jake Tapper.

Weeks later, when Alex Pretti was shot and killed on the streets of Minneapolis after he moved to protect a woman who had been pushed by ICE, Mullin again attacked the victim.

“Tell me what crime that ICE is doing other than doing their job,” he told Fox News. “Unfortunately, a . . . deranged individual that came in to . . . cause max damage, with a loaded pistol, with an extra mag that was completely loaded, was shot and killed. How much more of this is going to go on before the Democrat leaders there take responsibility for their words?”

In a separate interview with Fox Business, he responded to his colleague Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who had said ICE was murdering U.S. citizens. Mullin made clear that he was mad as well—at Murphy. “Well, these American citizens are actually impeding federal officers from doing their job,” Mullin stressed.

Mullin is well liked by his congressional colleagues, and his comfort with media appearances has turned him into a messaging asset to the administration and helped sand down his once-gruff public image. Some former Mullin foes have come around. For example, Sean O’Brien, the head of the Teamsters union—whom Mullin once challenged to a fight during a public hearing—now sees the senator in a positive light, praising his nomination to lead DHS. But on the topic of immigration and border enforcement, Mullin took positions that were directly contradicted by publicly available evidence or were deeply insensitive to the families of the ICE victims. He has never recanted or walked them back, according to a review of the public record.

Mullin’s office did not respond to specific questions about his past comments.

Mullin’s past statements belie his new bipartisan tone

MULLIN’S APPROACH to his upcoming nomination hearings will signal how both he and the Trump administration view the current politics of immigration. Last week, the senator said all of the right things when asked if he would meet with Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has described DHS as being so far gone with “rot” that changing out the head may not meaningfully change the department’s culture.

“I want people to understand . . . when I go into this position, yes, I’m a Republican, yes I’m conservative, but . . . regardless of if you support me or don’t support me, regardless of what your thoughts are . . . my focus is to keep the homeland secure,” Mullin told reporters. “If Mr. Schumer wants to sit down and talk to me, I’m going to sit down and talk with him. I want to try to earn their support, and I’m going to be open and honest with them.”

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His effort to present himself as open to various viewpoints, including those of his critics, mirrors the Trump administration’s own attempt at a revamp in response to the way its relentless and often unlawful immigration enforcement policies have made their brand toxic with the American people. In a closed-door briefing Tuesday in Florida, James Blair, one of the president’s deputy chiefs of staff, told House Republicans to stop talking about “mass deportations” and instead focus their rhetoric on the removal of violent criminals, Axios reported.

Of course, this doesn’t mean the administration actually intends to moderate its policies—only that they want voters to think they are moderating. But after a year of extreme rhetoric and nihilistic hype videos from DHS, it’s hard to imagine the public will simply give credit for a communications strategy that is more gentle and reasonable about immigration. As Bobby Pulido, a Tejano singer who won the Democratic primary to face Rep. Monica De La Cruz in Texas’s 15th Congressional District, put it: “Too late cabrones....ya’ll already said the quiet part out loud.”

Pulido told The Bulwark that Mullin’s nomination is just an effort to put lipstick on a pig of an agency that won’t change under Trump.

“People see it, this is not even about deportations anymore, this is about corruption,” he said. “Noem wasn’t doing this without their authority, she just fell on the sword for them. I have no doubt he [Mullin] is going to do what they tell him to do.”

Mullin certainly has been a steadfast ally of the White House, even when the going was tough: When reporters asked him to account for the most controversial policy pursuits of Noem’s tenure—the ones that alarmed Americans and plunged voter approval over the last year—he remained a dutiful loyalist, often parroting Noem’s talking points.

Mullin was unmoved by the attempted deportation of Liam Ramos, a 5-year-old child of an undocumented immigrant in Minneapolis. After pictures emerged of a bunny hat–wearing Ramos being detained outside his school, the senator said the press was deliberately misleading their readers and viewers about the circumstances of the case.

“This story that they’re blowing up about this 5-year-old kid is so false, is so untrue that honestly, there probably should be some lawsuits filed against this,” he said of an incident that even his fellow GOP senators insisted they found disturbing. “Because I spoke to Secretary Noem yesterday and today about the case. They’re not even reporting the facts.”

Mullin’s view of the unrest in Minneapolis following ICE’s larger deployment there was that the agency’s aggression and belligerence toward protesters was justified. It was the people following, filming, and whistling at agents who had gone beyond their constitutionally protected rights and were instead impeding law enforcement in politically motivated and potentially criminal ways. He accused them of being paid by liberal donor George Soros, who he insisted was “obviously behind this.” Despite no clear evidence, he said the Soros connection was “not even disputable at this point.”

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Soros isn’t the only figure Mullin has chosen to villainize. He also accused the media of “stirring this discontent across the country, and they’re getting people killed because of their false reporting.” And he has attacked district court judges for issuing rulings that had forced ICE to slow, stop, or even reverse some of its most aggressive tactics. Asked by Fox News host Will Cain about the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador, which proceeded despite a judicial order prohibiting the administration from sending him to that country, Mullin went after the judge for overstepping what the senator considers his proper zone of authority.

“I’m not an attorney,” the former plumbing-business operator said. “But when you are a guest inside the United States, you don’t have the same due process, if you wanna say, as an American citizen or even an LPR, a legal permanent resident.” The U.S. government had at this point already admitted that the deportation of Abrego Garcia was an “administrative error,” and they later brought him back to the United States.

These statements are all in line with things Noem said that contributed to her position atop DHS becoming so tenuous. They also reflect some of the main points of contention that emerged during her participation in oversight hearings just before she was fired.

In spite of his controversial statements, Mullin is unlikely to lose support among Senate Republicans, who have the votes (assuming there are no more than three defections) to get him confirmed when his nomination is considered in the coming weeks. That’s because many of the positions he advocated have become matters of doctrine for the GOP, such as the belief—which Mullin articulated in December 2020—that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Donald Trump; or his argument—expressed years later—that the January 6th riots were the result of inaction from then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi.

But Mullin’s positions could spark contentious questioning from Democrats at those confirmation hearings. The senator might soon be on the spot to explain his support for sending National Guard troops into Los Angeles, and to explain his argument against requiring ICE to obtain judicial warrants in order to carry out some of their deportation-related activities.

“If they actually required you to have a judicial warrant on every individual you picked up that was here illegally, the entire country would become a sanctuary city,” he told Fox News.

Mullin also has an aggressive position on one of the biggest sticking points in the current debate over funding DHS: a Democratic demand that legislation be passed requiring that ICE agents no longer wear masks. The senator, like Noem before him, is vehemently opposed.

“The reason why they want the ID and they want the mask taken off is because they want to dox these individuals, and they want to threaten them,” Mullin told Fox News host Brian Kilmeade. “There’s no other reason why.”

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BEFORE SHE WAS INFORMED YESTERDAY via a presidential Truth Social post that her tenure as secretary of homeland security is about to end, Kristi Noem was battered by Democrats and Republicans alike at congressional hearings this past week. A couple of Republicans made news by eviscerating her tenure in office, but I thought a different back-and-forth was at least as revealing.

Last week, Noem admitted that her department had arrested and deported DACA recipients—the “Dreamers” who are shielded from deportation and have had work authorization since 2012—at unacceptable levels. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) grilled her about the startling confession:

Durbin: Do you understand that people that are covered and protected by DACA have to go through a background check which includes a criminal check? Yes or no?

Noem: Yes.

Durbin: You do. Last week your agency informed us that last year ICE arrested 261 DACA holders and deported 86 of them. We learned about a DACA recipient who’d lived in this country for decades, was arrested by ICE at her green card appointment. In tears she hugged her daughter goodbye, she was deported to Mexico within twenty-four hours. Madam Secretary, why have you deported dozens of DACA holders who had to comply with a criminal background check to be eligible for DACA?

Noem: Sir, we follow all laws as applicable to the Department of Homeland Security in how we handle detainment and deportations.

Durbin: Why did you deport them?

Noem: I will not—I don’t know the details of that specific case you just read but I will look into it, sir.

Noem added that DHS has followed the law, to which Durbin responded that she had “clearly violated the law.” But I was struck by Noem’s words: “the details.”

Do we expect the DHS secretary to know “the details” of every case in the country? Of course not. But we should expect her to care about them.

THE WOMAN DURBIN WAS REFERRING to is Maria de Jesus Estrada Juarez, 42, who lived in the United States for 27 years and has a daughter who is a U.S. citizen. I wanted to know what it’s like when the government—one’s own government—says you can live and work here legally, before betraying you at a green card appointment and plucking you unceremoniously from your family, job, and life. So I spoke to Maria, who is currently living with her mother in Mexico, to find out what she’s been through and what it says about Trump, Noem, and the relentless deportation machine that continues to break the law.

Maria, from Sacramento, is a hospitality area manager for Motel 6 properties. She had been looking forward to her green card appointment on February 18. Though she is able to live and work here legally under DACA, her daughter Damaris, 21, is now old enough to sponsor her for a green card. For Maria, a green card would “open doors” to visit different countries, she told me. Growing up in a Catholic family, she dreamed of visiting the Vatican in Rome. She was so excited for her appointment that she did her hair and makeup.

But that excitement turned to dread as Maria was detained and deported back to Mexico the next morning.

“I feel like it was entrapment,” she said. “The moment they told me I was going to be deported, first I felt like they killed me right then and there. But seeing my daughter devastated was one of the hardest moments I had in my life. I was thinking, ‘What am I going to do?’”

Life has grown hard. Maria helps her mother with the stand outside the front door where they sell vegetables, candy, tortas, water, and soda. She misses her life and her daughter, but also the other markers of American life. She enjoys Mexican food but misses Chinese, Indian, and Thai food.

Damaris has vowed to see Maria return to the United States, and she was in the audience during Noem’s oversight hearing this week. She also met with Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), who used his time at the hearings to call for Noem’s removal, whether by resignation, firing, or impeachment. Damaris says he told her that he would do everything he can to help her mother.

I asked Maria what it means that her daughter is advocating so strongly for her. While Maria remained stoic throughout the conversation, I could hear her pride through the phone as she spoke about Damaris.

“To me, it means my whole entire world that I raised a good daughter, a daughter that is not going to let go,” she told me. “Standing up for me and fighting, being a voice for those that cannot speak, it means a lot. That I did a good job as a mother and raised a good citizen.” She was moved when Damaris decided to accompany her to Mexico, dropping her off at abuela’s house to make sure Maria was safe despite her ordeal.

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THE STORY IS GUTTING, but it doesn’t end there. Democrats and advocacy groups have pegged the economic benefit of Dreamers at somewhere between $280 billion and $390 billion.

But what of the human impact that goes beyond those sterile numbers? Maria was working with a shelter program to house fifty unhoused families at one of the Motel 6 properties she managed, she told me. The Trump administration likes to paint immigrants as hostile, violent drains on American society. Maria was just the opposite, and thanks to her deportation, housing for those fifty families may now be in doubt.1 The U.S. government is deporting hard-working people who help the country grow, Maria said. “Why not give them the opportunity to be part of that country? We decided to go to a different country, we were taken as minors, but we built a life there. It’s very devastating.”

Maria’s message to the Trump administration is that in their zeal to remove criminals who are bad for the country, they have targeted good people like herself who are “assets to the country.” She also underscored that, in addition to helping those homeless families and other community work, she doesn’t live on government assistance, welfare, or food stamps.

“I try to help as much as I can. I do a ‘Feed the Homeless Day’ every year on my own, with my own money,” she said. “I never do it with the intention that I want people to see I have a better living than them. It’s from my heart, from my kindness—a lot of these families, they are U.S. citizens.”

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DURING A PRIVATE CALL last Wednesday, Department of Homeland Security official Heather Honey vowed to election officials around the country that ICE would not be at the polls in November, calling the idea “disinformation.”

“There will be no ICE presence at polling locations,” she said, according to Politico.

But others who dialed in to the conversation didn’t leave convinced. Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, who was on the line, waved away Honey’s promises as empty on account of her past efforts pushing the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump.

“I can’t depend on an election denier like that for the truth under any circumstances,” he told Politico. Honey—who serves in a newly created role at DHS, deputy assistant secretary for election integrity—was an activist in Pennsylvania whose research Trump attempted to use to overturn the 2020 election.

Fontes’s skepticism is justified. Trump has already called to “nationalize” elections—and Republicans in the House passed the SAVE America Act, which stipulates national voter ID requirements—to stem voting by “illegal aliens,” as the president alleged is happening in his State of the Union speech. Others on the call expressed sentiments similar to Fontes’s.

“I did not walk away from this meeting reassured that the federal government wouldn’t try to interfere in state sovereignty over the election,” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows told NBC News.

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Concerns over what Trump may do to influence the 2026 elections are serious enough that Democratic-run states are already taking steps to mitigate the threat. Even before the Wednesday call, advocacy groups, lawyers, and organizers were preparing for ICE to try to come to the polls. In particular, they are bracing for the Trump administration to engage in acts of voter intimidation and voter suppression, especially in areas with voters of color. The result could be a huge swath of voters either being prevented from exercising their democratic right or being made to feel too nervous to even try to exercise it. All of it done in an attempt to keep Republicans in power.

A clear example of proactive, preventive work at the state level can be seen in Arizona, where earlier this month Republican lawmakers tried to pass a law basically “inviting ICE to the polls,” as my colleague Andrew Egger put it. It ultimately was pulled, with residents standing in line for hours to testify against the measure.

LUCHA Arizona, a political organizing group that has been at the forefront of Arizona’s turn from red to purple (the state went for Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024, and it now has two Democratic senators and a Democratic governor), was among those that saw the legislation as an important early bout in the national fight against ICE showing up at the polls.

Alejandra Gomez, the executive director of LUCHA AZ, said hearing ICE could be at the polls was a “chilling factor” for her two thousand-strong membership. But even though the legislation was pulled, there are many challenges ahead. For one, the bill can be resurrected at any moment. There is also the possibility that rebellious county recorders or other officials could ignore the law and allow ICE at the polls. In anticipation of such a scenario, she said, her group is preparing for legal challenges and an organizing fight.

Gomez said that LUCHA and the coalition it’s a part of, Activate 48, are prepared to “hold the line for democracy,” as Arizona groups have already done once with the recent legislative fight against ICE at the polls. They will also be active in the governor’s race and in working to flip the state legislature. Their goal is to knock on close to one million doors.

“This is a direct attack on immigrant and Latino communities, but right now it is having an effect on all communities,” Gomez told me. “What people witnessed with Renee Good and Alex Pretti is that ICE is a rogue force that uses violence to oppress and to scare people, and in Arizona, people are worried about violence when ICE is deployed.”

THAT FEAR IS REAL AND TANGIBLE. ICE may not show up at the polls in November, but just the prospect of Latinos, immigrants, and brown people getting detained by masked federal agents simply for deciding to exercise their right to vote could prove chilling.

Charles Kuck, a Georgia-based lawyer who often sues the Trump administration—he’s gone after them in response to their $100,000 fee gambit for H-1Bs and defended international students whom the administration tried to strip of legal status—said that while he believed the courts would rule against ICE being allowed to have a presence at the polls, the fear that the agency might try and show up poses a major problem.

“I don’t understand what legal basis they would have to have ICE at the polls,” he told me. “I think lawsuits would be filed that morning, and ICE would be forced to leave the polls. But the mere threat that it might happen would intimidate people from going to the polls, which is why voting early and absentee is so important.”

Mi Familia Vota, a national group that works to mobilize Latino voters in the eight states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, and Texas, is working on voter education efforts to let prospective voters know their rights and ICE’s limitations.

They recently partnered with Mundial Media, an ad firm that works to reach Latinos digitally, to create more community comfort with elections. The groups showed advertisements of Latinos who have worked to make local elections safe, such as poll watchers. Those ads, an official said, helped increase strong voter intent 3 to 4 percentage points among English and Spanish respondents and lowered intimidation fears by 6 percentage points.

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Mi Familia Vota’s national director of campaigns and programs, Angelica Razo, said that in addition to the digital work, the group plans a $10 million national campaign of voter engagement and education. It would involve old-fashioned, on-the-ground, direct work with voters to answer their questions and assuage their fears so they feel empowered to cast their ballots.

This kind of work involves group members showing up at polling locations—libraries, schools, courthouses, places “where we have already seen ICE target people,” Razo said—to offer support.

Mondale Robinson, the founder of the Black Male Voter Project, a national group that has done voter mobilization work in Georgia, said new fears around ICE are a natural progression of previous kinds of election interference.

“ICE is new, but it isn’t new,” he told me. “What’s the difference between ICE and massive investment in sheriff departments among southern rural populations where black people and brown people are overrepresented? ICE is everybody with a badge.”

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Voter education also includes rapid-response messaging if there are threats and intimidation when voting begins. But reducing fear is also about presenting voters with options, like early voting, which can increase turnout without voters going directly to polling places.

“On the proactive side, we’re making sure people early vote and vote by mail,” Razo told me. “As an organization that works across various states on vote-by-mail campaign strategy, our work is around ‘How do we bolster that?’”

Robinson put it more plainly: “Our people are already counting on the fact that ICE and armed people are coming to the polls; we’re already prepared for that because Trump can only hold power without respect for constitutional norms.” He says that his main message to black voters is simple: “Assholes are working to try to create fear at the polls, but they can’t stop you. Do your shit and get out.”

This type of work could make a profound difference in overcoming potential efforts to suppress the vote. But it’s also grunt work—the kind of necessary but not flashy labor that doesn’t always garner national attention or the support of big-moneyed donors. They have, so far, been reluctant to give.

Razo’s group, like others that exist at the crossroads of Latino voting and immigration, still need financial support to help fund their work. When I wrote about the topic last year, I found that immigration groups were yelling from the rooftops that democracy-defense initiatives intersected with the urgent immigration work. It was also clear that progressive donors were gun-shy about publicly challenging Trump on immigration (his strong suit at the time) out of fear of drawing the administration’s wrath.

Razo and others are still waiting for those donors to get off the sidelines—since ICE itself is clearly ready to engage.

“Investing in our communities is investing in democracy for the long run,” she said. “Latino issues are everyone’s issues.”

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SEVEN MONTHS AGO, the Florida detention center nicknamed, with equal parts triumphalism and cruelty, “Alligator Alcatraz” was all the rage. The Department of Homeland Security was hailing the abominable new prison as the first of many and proudly announcing a “Speedway Slammer” in Indiana and a “Cornhusker Clink” in Nebraska. But now the alliteratively named detention centers are facing a massive backlash, because it turns out that the public cares much more about rampant child abuse than a catchy name.

The online celebration of 5-year-old Liam Ramos’s release from a detention center in Dilley, Texas was tempered by the awareness that many other kids remain trapped in terrible conditions, often with their entire families. Public pressure has helped to free some of them—Mariela Sobrero Chillitupa and her three children, for example, were released last weekend—but the harsh reality is that many more children are still inside, coping with inadequate food, unsanitary conditions, and the rapid spread of disease.

A two-month old baby, Juan Nicolás, had recently been detained with his mother. While in detention, Juan developed a persistent cough that grew worse on Valentine’s Day.

After the fragile newborn started throwing up and choking on Monday, his mother told Univision journalist Lidia Terrazas, he was rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. There, he briefly became unresponsive. Doctors diagnosed Juan with bronchitis, according to Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), who has been advocating for the baby and his family.

Juan was discharged from the hospital a few hours after arriving Monday night, and Tuesday morning his mother was told by an immigration judge that she would be deported; she was not told when or where. Juan was sent back to Dilley, but the situation was so chaotic that it was unclear to Castro and other advocates where the baby actually was. They received their answer Tuesday night, when the Nicolás family’s attorney confirmed that Juan, his sixteen-month-old sister, and his parents had been deported to Mexico with only their commissary money, which totaled $190.1

Castro called the decision to deport a sick baby and his family “monstrous” and said it was possible the family was subjected to backlash for speaking to the media about their situation and advocating for their baby.

“It’s also possible they [federal immigration agents] know the baby is in bad health, and they don’t want to be responsible for what may happen to him in their care, so they deport them,” Castro told me.

The San Antonio congressman has been at the center of the fight to get kids released from Dilley. He met with Liam and his father, whom he personally escorted back to Minnesota following their release, and also pushed for DHS to free 7-year-old Maria Isabella and her mother, asylum seekers from Venezuela. Castro said when it comes to their journey to America, the pair “did it the right way” and “followed all of the rules.” Maria Isabella, whose asthma had been worsening at the detention center, was released with her mom just ahead of her eighth birthday on Monday; they spent the special day together at home with her dad and grandmother.

FOR EVERY HIGH-PROFILE CASE that gets attention from the media (including this newsletter), there are untold other abuses that aren’t yet known—and may never be. Castro told me his office also advocated for a 12-year-old girl who made a sexual-assault claim; she was recently released back into Texas with her mother.

Too many people—including children—are being caught up in the immigration dragnet for the government to quash all their stories, and time and time again, cases that have been brought out of the darkness and into the spotlight have led to

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LIAM RAMOS WAS THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG. Dilley Immigration Processing Center, the facility from which 5-year-old Liam and his father were discharged on February 1, is a place where many other children are still being detained. Their stories are almost too much to bear.

There was the 18-month-old baby, Amalia, who was suffering from respiratory failure and was rushed to the hospital, where she spent much of the next ten days on oxygen. Upon release, federal officers took her right back into detention at Dilley, words that boggle the mind to write, and there she was denied daily medication prescribed after her hospital visit, according to a new lawsuit filed last week. Amalia and her family were finally released last Friday in response to an emergency habeas petition, but for many families in similar situations, there is no clarity about when they or their children might leave, or under what conditions.

Carmen Ayala, an aide to Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), has been in contact with many of the detainees at Dilley, as well as with their families. She told me about Valery, a 13-year-old who attempted self harm at Dilley with a knife from the cafeteria.

Valery’s family arrived at Dilley on December 13, one day after they were detained near their home in South Florida. The family fled Colombia for the United States because the father was sexually abusing the two daughters, aged 8 and 13, Ayala was told by the girl’s family. But after the asylum claim for Valery’s family was denied in January, they faced deportation.

“It was a sense of hopelessness,” Ayala said of Valery’s suicide attempt. “They’ve been in there for months, she’s depressed and wants to get out. She saw no way of getting out, she thinks she’ll be there forever, and that was her way out.”

Crockett’s office received a privacy waiver from the family and has opened a congressional inquiry to advocate on the family’s behalf. When I asked why Valery’s treatment for self-harm seems to be exclusively a prescription for sleeping pills, ICE did not respond.

THEN THERE IS THE CASE of Mariela Sobrero Chillitupa, 31, who was in the hospital for a few days in December for tests to determine if she had breast cancer. The tests weren’t conclusive, so her doctors called for a biopsy in the new year to know for sure. Mariela wanted to delay biopsy until after a court date she had scheduled for January 14. She didn’t think it would be anything major. She spent the night in a hotel with her three children, aged 2, 8, and 11, and had breakfast with her sister-in-law the next day. They said their goodbyes and Mariela told her sister-in-law to wait nearby, it would likely only be two hours. Later, however, she received a call: “We’ve been detained, don’t wait for us.”

Her sister-in-law, Mari, who asked to be identified by only her first name, said that Mariela has complained to her about her deteriorating health and treatment inside Dilley.

“Mari, they don’t give me my medication, only when they want,” Mari says Mariela told her, adding that her breast “gets hard like a rock,” and she is only given her medication when the nurse arrives. If the nurse doesn’t come, she doesn’t get her medication. Ayala was also told by Mariela that her breast is turning beet red. She told Mari that a week ago she asked a guard to give her fussy 2-year-old to his father, who is also in detention, because her breast was causing her so much pain; she was told “No, you have to keep him, he can’t be with his father.”

DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin did not respond to specific questions about Mariela’s treatment, why her medication has been withheld, whether she will be allowed to seek outside medical attention, or if she will be released given her medical condition. She said only, “That doesn’t sound right but we’ll run this down,” before asking for identifying numbers for the children, which I provided.

ICE did not respond to questions about operations inside Dilley. For example, why can’t Mariela pass her 2-year-old to his father when she is in pain? And what is being done to follow up on the biopsy ordered during those inconclusive tests in December?

Mari told me she can’t understand why people like Mariela are being treated this way.

“As a Latina . . . and as a mother, it worries me more the situation for the mothers because they’re in there with their kids suffering, but they have to hold in the pain to protect their kids,” she said in Spanish, adding that her 2-year-old nephew doesn’t understand where he is and is getting aggressive in a way that he never was before.

“I think the conditions and the suffering is inhumane and they shouldn’t be going through that. They should have respect because of the kids. Adults, we can suffer, but the kids don’t deserve to be treated this way,” she said.

She called for Dilley to be shuttered. “It’s inhumane and they should let Mariela come home with her children.”

AS I WROTE THIS NEWSLETTER on Thursday, Ayala told me of a promising new development for Mariela. The court gave her more time, until March 10, to fight to remain in the United States, but unfortunately, they ignored the medical records she brought with her. The judge said that there is nothing he can do regarding her medical issues and that the detention center is responsible for her treatment.

Sadly, these stories aren’t outliers—they are more common than we’d like to admit. ProPublica reported this week that 3,500 detainees have been at Dilley since it reopened, and more than half of them have been minors. And while a legal settlement in effect since 1997 holds that children can be held in immigration detention for a maximum of twenty days, ProPublica determined that more than 300 kids have been at Dilley for longer than a month.

Letters from inside the facility, obtained by ProPublica, are unfailingly heartbreaking. Just like Liam Ramos, the kids who wrote them miss their friends and Happy Meals from McDonald’s. Susej Fernandez, 9, who was in Houston when she and her mom were detained, has had her opinion on the United States forever changed. “I have been 50 days in Dilley Immigration Processing Center,” she wrote. “Seen how people like me, immigrants are been treated changes my perspective about the U.S. My mom and I came to The U.S looking for a good and safe place to live.”

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A window inside Dilley from a former employee

A FORMER DILLEY EMPLOYEE who served in the U.S. armed forces spoke to me—on condition of anonymity—about what they witnessed inside the facility. They said they took the job because it paid the most in the area, and they had been led to believe there were only women in the facility. They soon realized the unsettling truth: Not just women but entire families were detained inside, including children and even newborn babies. This former employee struggled daily with what they saw, being politically opposed to ICE and what the Trump administration is doing, but rationalized their involvement as a way to help those in detention—to counterbalance the fact that almost everyone else who works there “is for Trump, is for ICE.”

Of the food, which has been described as overly seasoned and “nasty,” the former Dilley employee explained that one day detainees receive chicken, another day beef, and every few days, they get hot dogs.

“They’re tired of it, that’s why they’re saying it’s nasty,” they told me.

They said when people go for medical attention—because they’re vomiting, for instance—more often than not they’re just given Tylenol or Advil.

“All the kids are sick. I’ve never gotten sick before, but when I worked there I was always sick,” they said.

It’s hard for the children to sleep because the lights are always on in the rooms.

“They’re treated like they’re criminals, but most of them have done it the right way—they were picked up at their court appointments,” the source added. “People complain that they’re doing it the ‘wrong way,’ but when they do it the right way, you detain and deport them, so it’s a lose-lose situation.”

And forget about the twenty-day detention limit for minors and little ones. The former employee said they know a mother who has been there 130 days. That woman’s 11-year-old daughter has been with her the whole time, and her depression has gotten bad enough that she won’t eat.

“They’re all sad,” the source said. “They’re locked in there sad and depressed.”

I asked the former employee to say a few words about how they’ve been doing since they left the job. They said seeing how things are on the inside has forever changed them.

“This isn’t what I fought for [while in the military]. . . . I have PTSD as it is. Now adding this, I can barely sleep, thinking about those families,” they said.

They said “100 percent” Dilley should be shut down and the children should be sent home.

“Kids shouldn’t be going through this,” the former employee said. “If I knew this was happening, if I knew it was really like this, I wouldn’t have served.”

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FORCED TO GO THROUGH an unimaginably terrifying ordeal, 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos and his father, Adrian Conejo Arias, were finally released from a Texas detention center 1,200 miles from home last Saturday. After Liam was reunited with his now-famous bright blue bunny hat and Spider-Man bookbag, he had a request. He asked for papitas—french fries. That’s how he ended up with a Happy Meal from a McDonald’s down the road from the Dilley facility where he had spent over a week in federal detention. ICE’s use of the little boy as bait to lure out his father and other family members to be detained sparked nationwide outrage and contributed to the intense scrutiny of the actions of federal forces in Minneapolis.

Liam’s return to his family is a rare example of a positive outcome for a person targeted by DHS. I wanted to get the full story, so I contacted Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), who was instrumental in getting Liam released.

Through luck or fate, Castro had already requested to visit the Dilley facility along with Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), giving the required seven days’ notice, before Liam was taken by DHS. But when he saw the now-iconic photo of the scared little boy being loaded into a vehicle by masked agents, he felt he needed to act.

“When I saw him and the cap and the backpack, I just thought, ‘I can do something about this, I’m already scheduled to go there,’” he told me. His visit date was Wednesday, January 28.

Castro and his staff prepared for a week. They were going to visit with Liam and Adrian, but they wanted to be prepared to talk to other detainees. They ended up speaking to hundreds of parents and young people.

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Dilley is a small rural town in Texas, and Castro estimates that 90 percent of the ICE staff, including administrative workers and career people, are Mexican American. Upon entering the facility, he and Crockett and their staffers were taken to a makeshift courtroom and given a brief overview of how the facility works. Castro said staff told him that they’ve been at the facility for years and have enacted the policies of each administration, whether it was Obama, Trump during his first term, Biden, or now Trump again. “That’s how they justify being part of this whole system,” he said.

Crockett asked a staffer who said he had been there under the Biden administration whether he had seen a difference in the way the facility had been run under different administrations. That’s when Carmen Ayala, a bilingual staffer who accompanied Crockett for the visit, saw one of the man’s colleagues frantically signaling “to shut up and not answer the question” by covering his mouth with his hand, she later told me.

The group was taken to the medical facility, which they were told was closed that day because of a public protest a couple days prior where parents had yelled “Libertad!” demanding the children be released. The group then walked through the commissary before heading to see Liam. When the detained mothers and fathers heard Ayala ask a question of staff in Spanish, they crowded close to her and Crockett, telling stories of their treatment, and of food and water that were “nasty,” Ayala told me.

As I wrote last week, Castro noticed that Liam didn’t seem okay; the boy was reportedly sleeping a lot and possibly depressed. When Ayala walked over after speaking with several women about their treatment, Crockett leaned in. “Carmen, I don’t even have to speak Spanish to know something is wrong with that baby. Come with me to translate so I can ask questions,” she said.

They learned from Adrian that Liam’s medical care since arriving at Dilley amounted to one meeting with nurses that lasted just two or three minutes, where the only questions they asked him were about how much he was eating and sleeping. Adrian shared with the visitors that Liam was sad, missed his mother, and wanted to go back to school.

The next day, Castro requested another visit to Dilley for a week later, but he received a response that a measles outbreak at the facility meant everything would be shut down until February 14. News of the outbreak added an urgency to Castro’s work to free the child: The highly contagious disease was like a ticking time bomb for Liam, Adrian, and everyone else at the facility.

Then on Saturday, some news broke on the legal front. U.S. District Judge Fred Biery ordered Liam and his father released, angrily chastising “the government’s ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence.”

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The judge maintained this fiery register throughout the opinion. The case of the young boy was born of “the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children,” Biery wrote, adding:

Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.

Biery concluded his opinion in a highly unusual way. Below his signature, he included the widely circulated photo of Liam in the bunny hat being held by a federal agent, and below that, two citations from scripture: Matthew 19:14 (“Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these”) and John 11:35 (“Jesus wept”).

Bringing Liam Home

CASTRO WAS IN AUSTIN on Saturday, January 31, for an afternoon rally with Texas state Rep. James Talarico and others when he heard from Liam’s legal team. They were asking if Castro’s office could facilitate picking Liam and his father up at Dilley. Castro offered to do it himself, and soon he was driving the two and a half hours it takes to get from Austin to Dilley.

Castro was met by Dilley Mayor Alexandria Inocencio and six police officers—the town’s entire PD. “They were kind to [Liam], they gave him a cross and a trinket,” Castro said. It was then that Liam and his father were asked what they wanted to eat. Liam got his Happy Meal before heading to San Antonio.

Castro, who represents the city, called longtime friends he knew had a spare guesthouse, and within a few hours, Liam and his father were settled for the night. Castro picked them up again at 4:30 a.m. the next day to take them to the airport for their flight back to Minneapolis. They were escorted by San Antonio police. The pilot for their flight home gave Liam a tour of the cockpit and a pair of junior pilot wings. It was an early morning flight, so the other travelers were slow to realize who Liam and his father were. That changed after ABC News journalist John Quiñones started taking video of their return home.

With the big problems in the rearview, only smaller problems remained. Castro didn’t take a jacket or coat to Minnesota, wearing only his suit and congressional pin, and you can see him grinning and bearing it in a photo taken on the tarmac after the group landed and met up with a coated and scarfed Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), who represents the area where Liam and Adrian live.

Castro had a ticket for an immediate return flight back home; he hoped to be able to make it to his son’s 11:30 a.m. birthday party. He dropped off Liam and Adrian at a fire department, where Liam’s mother thanked him on FaceTime. Castro then said his farewells to the father and son whose story had captured the hearts of a nation. After giving Liam a hug, he raced back to the airport. In the end, he made his son’s birthday party just in time.

Meanwhile, back in Dilley, there are plenty more Liams. “All these parents, with TVs in the rooms, they all heard stories of Liam and how he got out, so they want the same thing for their kids,” Ayala told me. She says that family members have been texting her photos of their young relatives and asking her, “Please put them up online so people can see.”

They want their kids released, too.

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WHEN DON LEMON WAS ARRESTED after reporting on the aggressive protest of a church whose pastor allegedly works for ICE, the Trump administration claimed that Lemon and another journalist present at the event had violated federal laws meant, in part, to shield churches from having their services disrupted.

The administration’s message was clear: Disrupting church services and taking away the right of others to worship freely and in peace is unconscionable. How dare protesters infringe on those congregants’ First Amendment rights! Who would do such a thing?

Well, one of the first things this White House did after Donald Trump’s second inauguration was to rescind the 2021 guideline that required CBP and ICE agents to do everything in their power to avoid conducting operations in or near “protected areas” like churches, hospitals, and schools.

It wasn’t long before agents were showing up at just those sorts of places in the apparent hope of surprising their targets. And over the past year of increasingly cruel immigration enforcement actions, a hallmark of the administration’s deportation campaign has been operating close to formerly “protected” areas to create an atmosphere of anxiety—one that has kept worshipers, documented and not, from attending church services for fear of being grabbed and disappeared to a detention center in another state without access to counsel or family. (This, it’s worth mentioning, is precisely the outcome the rescinded 2021 guidance was intended to prevent.)

According to a multi-bylined story in the National Catholic Reporter published late last year, DHS hadn’t yet raided a church building, “but immigration agents have arrested immigrants on or near church property in at least a dozen instances so far” following the administration’s move to end the protected areas policy.

ICE leadership recognizes that this is a delicate matter and has insisted that it is operating out of respect for places of worship.

“You could take the NYPD, they’re not going to go ahead and target a church or synagogue, we’re not going to do the same thing,” the agency’s acting director, Todd Lyons, told CBS News. “If we’re in a pursuit of a criminal alien or a felon and they run into a hospital or a church, we’re going to continue that pursuit. Nothing’s off the table when it comes to that. But we’re not actively targeting schools, we’re not actively targeting hospitals. That’s just—no law enforcement agency would do that, we don’t do that.”

But the public utterances don’t match the actual record. According to faith leaders, organizers, and reporting on the ground in recently targeted cities such as Chicago and Minneapolis, the administration has conducted a variety of actions on church properties in the cities they have singled out for DHS’s paramilitary occupations.

Let me take you back to Los Angeles last summer. On June 6, agents started tackling landscapers and chasing street vendors alleged to have been making dangerously delicious hot dogs and Mexican food, eliciting intense protests; the next day, Trump signed a memorandum deploying the National Guard to the city to protect federal agents, and on June 8, the troops started heading to L.A. Things continued to escalate. By June 11, federal agents were surrounding a man in the parking lot of Downey Memorial Christian Church, even pointing a long gun at a pastor. Then, on June 20, two Catholic churches in San Bernardino County became backdrops to scenes of fear and despair: Agents took a longtime parishioner near Our Lady of Lourdes Church, while other agents chased men into the parking lot of St. Adelaide Church and detained them there.

Days later, Iranian asylum-seekers were arrested in L.A., adding to the number of churchgoers taken into immigration detention despite having lawful status. A Christianity Today piece titled “ICE Goes After Church Leaders and Christians Fleeing Persecution” described how a pastor was called by two members of his church, a husband-and-wife couple, because CBP agents were going to take the husband. The wife collapsed and began to convulse on the ground; she appeared to be experiencing a panic attack. Agents barred the pastor from approaching her to give her comfort.

The pastor told the agents the couple had come to America to flee religious persecution in Iran. Terrible things could happen to them if they were deported back.

“They came here for freedom, not like this,” the pastor said. “I know you are doing your job, but shame on you. Shame on this government.”

Actions like these—operating aggressively outside churches and often targeting churchgoers—has left a deep mark on faith communities across the nation.

“You ever been in a living room with a family who’s very, very deeply committed to Christ and can’t go to church for a month, and that’s their community? And faith is what sustains them,” Rev. Dr. Gabriel Salguero, president of the National Latino Evangelical Coalition, told CBS News. “They’re telling you in the living room with tears in their eyes, ‘Pastor, I want to go, but I’m too afraid.’ What do you do?”

Similar actions by agents were reported in Chicago and in Charlotte.

In October, in the Rogers Park area, ICE agents stopped a man in front of St. Jerome Catholic Church as a Spanish-language Mass was going on inside.

“I think they’ve been casing the church,” a bystander told the local news, noting that the church’s Mass schedule was publicly posted. She added that parishioners were terrified to walk outside after the service concluded that day.

In Charlotte, a May operation at Central United Methodist Church on the east side of the city brought armed agents to the church’s grounds at preschool pickup time, alarming the community. Right before Christmas, Charlotte was again rocked when a community member was taken at a Casa de Dios church event. Video recorded by the pastor showed congregants who had fled inside the church when the agents approached; children huddled together anxiously, and one woman openly wept.

While she doesn’t lead a predominantly Latino church, Rev. Sadie Lansdale, minister for the Unitarian Universalist Church in Greensboro, said her congregants have been “emotionally and financially affected,” by the administration’s crack downs. She noted that government support for health care coverage had been cut dramatically while funds were “going into terrorizing our neighbors.”

In Minneapolis, where another pastor had a gun pointed at him by federal agents, church grounds have been targeted since ICE and CBP invaded the city. Evangelical pastor Doug Pagitt of Vote Common Good helped me get a sense for how deeply local churches have been affected by immigration enforcement actions in the city.

“A week ago, eight to ten churches asked for clergy to come and provide support to create a protective band so people could come to church, because dark-skinned people are afraid to come to church,” he told me, noting that churches that used to have 300 to 800 people on Sundays now routinely see small groups of just 50 to 75 people.

Pagitt shared with me his own view of the situation involving Lemon and the church protesters the administration had condemned.

“The idea that they want to protect people’s freedom to worship and yet sit outside and specifically target their churches in the sixty days since they’ve been here goes against their argument,” he said.

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IT IS ONE OF THE INDELIBLE IMAGES OF MINNEAPOLIS: Liam Ramos, age 5, in his oversized bright blue bunny hat, being loaded onto a bus bound for a Texas detention facility 1,200 miles away. Many parents I know shared the image, picturing their own child, aghast that our government would do this to a little kid. I was shocked, too, when I first saw the image, tears welling up in my eyes. With his little Spider-Man backpack and the fuzzy pom-pom balls dangling from his hat, Liam looks so cute and so forlorn. His middle name is even Conejo, which means rabbit. It can all be too much.

On the day he was photographed, January 20, Liam had been used by faceless, nameless DHS agents to capture his father at his preschool pickup; he was also being used as bait to see if the agents could ambush other members of the family. Rep. Rob Menendez (D-N.J.), gave a blistering speech on the House floor last week, castigating Republicans for their silence on Liam’s kidnapping, reading a devastating quote from Liam’s teacher Ella Sullivan: “He comes into class every day, and he just brightens the room. His friends haven’t asked about him yet, but I know that they’ll catch on.” What the kids will catch on to, Menendez said, is that Liam—and not violent criminals—is the real face of the people being taken from our communities.

“My daughter is 5 and I live in Jersey City,” Menendez told me. He said Liam reminded him of his daughter’s classmates, or his neighbors walking around town holding their children’s hands. Liam’s innocence moves him, he said, and it horrifies him to think about what Liam’s “life is going to be like after this awful experience and the fact that our government—our government—is responsible for that.”

The Washington Post’s art and architecture critic, Philip Kennicott, writing about the photo of Liam, asked if it had “the power to shock Americans into demanding an end to this cruelty?” The picture reminds us, Kennicott argues, that “childhood isn’t just about age”:

It is a condition of existence created, sustained and protected by adults. The hat tells us not only that there is someone close to him who loves and cares for him, but also that all of us, as adults, owe to children the right to live free from the suffering and meanness that so often define the world of adulthood. We must certainly never co-opt them into our guile or cruelty. . . . A universal moral image works because at some level we share a universal moral conscience. There are certain things that, when seen, compel us to action in a way that transcends all other concerns. . . . A child in distress demands action now. The world stops for a moment, and decent people do what is absolutely, immediately necessary.

Kennicott goes on to argue that it is the weaponizing of compassion and decency that is so deeply unsettling about the image. “ICE didn’t place a box of candy or a $100 bill on the front stoop of the house, hoping to tempt people out,” he said. “They used a child to appeal to the most innate and essentially human impulse to show care, concern and protect—to capture those who care for him. They weaponized decency, the last incorruptible defense we have against absolute misery and evil.”

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Misery in Texas

TO MAKE THE STORY EVEN MORE DISTURBING: Liam isn’t the only child or even the only 5-year-old jailed where he is now. Lawyer Eric Lee, who saw detainees with ashen faces when he went inside the Dilley, Texas detention center last week, told me his clients are dealing with bugs and dirt in their food, putrid water mixed with baby formula, and denial of medical care. Two clients he visited last week, a boy and a girl who are twins, turned 5 in the detention center. He explained that the 1997 Flores Settlement Agreement, which calls for kids to be treated humanely and for their release to be prioritized, says they can only be in detention for twenty days. The twin 5-year-olds, and their family members who are 9, 16, and 18, have been there for an appalling eight months, Lee said.

As Lee waited, guards unceremoniously kicked him out, and that’s when he heard the protests from what sounded like hundreds of kids and parents, who risked likely retribution to yell “Libertad para los niños” and “Let us go!”

“Those are children’s voices. So to every American who is watching, and watching those demonstrations, watching what this administration is doing—the effective attempt to establish a dictatorship in this country—if the kids who are in detention are risking their lives then what are you doing to stand up and fight for democracy today?” Lee asked on MS Now.

In our interview he noted that a mother inside the detention center bravely spoke to the Associated Press last week, saying “The message we want to send is for them to treat us with dignity and according to the law. We’re immigrants, with children, not criminals.” She could be punished and separated from her own children. The stakes are unbearably high.

“Liam has ignited something, but Liam is one of so many,” Lidia Terrazas, the Univision local reporter who covers the Dilley detention center, told me, noting that one-third of the detainees in the facility are children.

Texas state representative Linda Garcia took part in actions on Wednesday to bring attention to what is happening to children at Dilley. She was joined by representatives from unions like the AFL-CIO, faith leaders, and advocacy groups like Mi Familia Vota. Later, she met with Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) for a community rally on the west side of San Antonio, a city that is two-thirds Latino.

“I am a mother, I have a 9-year-old son, this completely paralyzed me, it stopped me dead in my tracks,” she told me of Liam’s kidnapping, stressing the need for solidarity now.

Castro, who had long been planning to visit Dilley, gave seven days’ notice that he was going to visit in the days before Liam was taken. When he gave subsequent forty-eight-hour notice so he could meet with Liam while there, Castro was initially given the runaround because ICE said the detainee has to sign the form.

“He’s a fucking 5-year-old kid and we’re going back and forth with them. . . . This is the bullshit this system is all about,” Castro told me.

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Before the rally, Castro did manage to go to the facility and meet with Liam and his father. Because Liam is depressed and sleeping a lot, the congressman did not get to speak to the boy, but he spoke to his father, who is trying to remain strong. Liam’s mother told MPR News that he is sick “because the food they receive is not of good quality” and “he has stomach pain, he’s vomiting, he has a fever and he no longer wants to eat.”

Castro let Liam’s dad know his classmates at school miss him and they left his space and his desk ready for him to return. He learned that Liam has asked about his classmates and wants to get back to his school and his community.

Liam also asked where his bookbag and his bunny hat are.

Castro made the point that the 1,100 mothers and fathers in Dilley are not criminals—because real criminals get expressly deported and their kids get put in facilities run by Health and Human Services. His message at the detention center was that the country is against what’s happening, wants Liam released, and no child who is 5 years old should be in detention.

Or no children should be at all: While there, Castro learned there is a two-month-old baby being held at Dilley. There was also a little girl who kept hugging his leg and asking him to help them.

I asked Castro how the visit affected him.

“It’s heartbreaking,” he said, sounding spent. “It makes you question humanity when you hear that a two-month-old has been there several days—and again there isn’t a single criminal in that building. A lot of people came to claim asylum and did it the right way, using the CBP One app. There was someone who lived in Florida thirteen years. Another [was] the wife of a U.S. citizen.”

Castro said that he and his staff will follow up on the cases of the dozens of detainees he met with and give notice of a return trip to Dilley to check on Liam. Next time, though, he says he plans to bring more congressional Democratic colleagues with him.

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Minneapolis, Minnesota
EVEN BEFORE THE KILLING OF Alex Jeffrey Pretti, 37, by Border Patrol officers on Saturday, Minneapolis’s social fabric was being torn apart. Over the course of several days in the city, I met activists, protesters, ‘ICE watch’ volunteers, and community leaders deeply angry and disillusioned about what was happening to their way of life. There was Carolina Ortiz, an immigrant advocate whom I tagged along with as she and others moved swiftly to respond to ICE sightings and organize help for those in danger. There were the thousands of people who hit the streets in -20 degree weather—yes negative—to protest the actions of ICE in their hometown. There were the local lawmakers forced to grapple with what happens when your own federal government is now targeting you, and the everyday citizens standing up for their neighbors and community in ways they never thought would be asked of them. Today’s newsletter is dedicated to telling their stories in an effort to underscore the myriad ways in which the Trump administration has harmed a great American city.

Noah Levy, 53, drummer

The day before Renee Nicole Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent, Noah Levy was also watching ICE agents as an observer. He told me that he and his wife were following the agents around town, and in turn ICE went to his house and used his wife’s first name. The message was clear: they’re watching him.

Because of ICE’s aggressive tactics and unrelenting harassment of the citizens of Minneapolis, Levy took part in “ICE out of Minnesota: Day of Truth and Freedom,” a protest on Friday that involved a blackout on all work, school, and shopping. He connected with 35 other drummers to put on a raucous publicity stunt on the Stone Arch Bridge in downtown Minneapolis. His goal was to draw eyes to the work important advocacy groups like COPAL are doing to help the community.

“All of us musicians in town are looking at each other like, what can we do? We can throw together shows but people are stuck in their homes, they need rides. We’ve heard horror stories of people who need medical care because ICE is coming to hospitals so they’re not getting help. Well, we can do something visually arresting, but we also want to scream out into the void on the coldest day in 10 years.”

So why the hell did he put his bodily safety (the high was around -9 degrees on Friday) on the line after ICE killed a white observer just like him?

“I’m still involved because I care about my neighbors,” he told me. “I was just talking to my friend who is moving back here because of the sense of community. This is why they’re cracking down on our cities, because of what we stand for. St Paul, Minneapolis—if we didn’t have that, we wouldn’t exist. We’re all looking each other in the eyes. It’s personal, it’s deeply personal.”

Segundo Balboa, 44, co-owner of Galapagos Bar & Grill

Segundo Balboa is a U.S. citizen who came from Ecuador twenty-five years ago. Being half-Ecuadorian myself, I know that Ecuadorians can be overly formal with strangers or authority figures. But when we discussed Renee Nicole Good, he used her first name. It wasn’t out of disrespect; in fact, I found the tender way he called her “Renee” to come from a deep sense of affection for her and of sadness over her tragic killing.

Balboa began by explaining to me that he saw federal agents enter the Twin Cities in significant numbers in early December, which is when the trouble for the Latino community began.

“The Christmas season was not a celebratory Christmas season,” he said. “There were no days of holiday for Latinos.” He said he has lost 90 percent of his business, the chill from ICE agents keeping his customer base far away. But still he keeps his restaurant open, if for no one else than his two children and younger baby.

Good’s killing has changed the way he views his safety as a U.S. citizen.

“You think twice about leaving work,” he confessed. “They’re taking away freedom of speech to protest nonviolently. Now if we protest and oppose the policies of Trump, we’re terrorists.”

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Irma Márquez Trapero, 35, head of LatinoLEAD

Irma Márquez Trapero was awake at 4 a.m. having received a tip that a meatpacking plant where her mom works could be an ICE target. After a few frantic outgoing calls, she found out her mother was already planning to stay home. Such is the urgency of people doing the work to protect immigrants, including their own families.

Trapero runs LatinoLEAD, a cross-sector hub of 3,000 people that uses chat apps like Signal and WhatsApp to connect people across government, the non-profit sector, and advocacy groups. But having grown up in rural Minnesota, Márquez Trapero felt she had a unique view of the full scope of ICE’s invasion into Minnesota. She used a Latino roundtable led by the office of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz this week to warn of a coming danger in the state and the need to create support plans and share available resources outside of just the Twin Cities.

“The majority of Latinos live in greater Minnesota and in rural areas,” she told me, “and I’m sounding the alarm because greater Minnesota is going to be targeted, an area where the community is most vulnerable and has less resources available.”

Daniel Hernandez, 41, owner of Colonial Market and Restaurant

Daniel Hernandez has been in Minnesota a quarter century and is a DACA recipient. By his observation, ICE’s actions in the Twin Cities over the past two months look more like a military occupation than a law-enforcement action.

“The way they’re moving, every single aspect is literally a military campaign inside the country,” he told me.

He saw the danger early and began preparing before things got bad late last year. As the owner of a supermarket chain, he thought of his employees and their families. He has been spearheading efforts to help ensure vulnerable migrants fill out and file Delegation of Parental Authority (DOPA) forms; if an immigrant is taken by ICE, the DOPA authorizes specific family members or friends to take care of and make decisions for their child in their absence. In just the past year, he has helped the parents of 2,575 kids find some solace and peace of mind with the DOPA paperwork.

Hernandez is a force of nature. When I arrived at his supermarket, he was there with just one other employee. Hernandez was on the phone with a New York Times reporter. He told them what he told me: that he offers free grocery delivery—which isn’t free for him, of course. But he also told me something earlier that he didn’t tell the Times then: He also gives food away for free if people come to him in need.

“People who do not have money, we have ways to give them free food, but I don’t advertise it, I still need to sell. But I usually bring them $150 worth of food,” he told me.

The remarkable generosity is even more staggering when you realize how much Trump’s presidency and the current ICE occupation is costing Hernandez.

“I used to sell $1 million per month,” he says of the period before Trump took office. “Right now we’re selling $175,000 per month. I’m going to stay open as long as I can. The owner of the building decided to waive my rent for three months. Without the income I should be getting, I haven’t paid myself.”

Hernandez couldn’t protect everyone from the effects of ICE occupation, as he’s had to let employees go. His supermarket once had seventy employees; now it has just eighteen.

Still, he moves forward. He’s currently trying to raise $1 million to create the “biggest fundraiser in Minnesota history for Latinos.” He already has a $100,000 pledge to jumpstart his effort. Hernandez said he wants it to be run by churches and non-profits, but for the money to be able to be spent at smaller Latino-owned grocery stores instead of big box stores like Walmart or Target.

As I prepare to leave, I meet Dean, a white 69-year-old retired physician, who stood out as one of the only non-Latino people there. He was returning from delivering groceries to Latino families and was about to pick up more for another delivery. He had met Hernandez at church, and when he and his wife heard his call for people to deliver groceries, he asked himself, “Why not?”

“It’s just sad,” Dean told me, noting that when he arrives at Latino homes, they cautiously peek through the blinds, wary of who might be at the door.

Before I’m done, I turn to Hernandez, who has DACA status and could have his life made very difficult by these overzealous and under-qualified ICE agents rampaging his community, and I ask him if he’s worried he might be next.

He invokes the twentieth-century Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata.

“‘I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees,’” he says, quoting Zapata. “If they want to get me they can get me here, outside, or at home like they have to so many others.”

To hear more, check out Adrian’s discussion of this story with Bulwark Managing Editor Sam Stein:

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Minneapolis, Minnesota
SHE WILL NEVER FORGET the sight of Renee Nicole Good’s blood on the snow.

Carolina Ortiz is the associate executive director of Communities Organizing Latine Power and Action (COPAL),1 a community-based organization that advocates for Latino families in Minneapolis; it leads the Immigrant Defense Network, a group of 106 organizations like COPAL across the Midwest. She first grasped that something was wrong on January 7 when a colleague known for her cool demeanor in high-stakes situations called Ortiz in a panic. Something horrific had happened.

Ortiz’s team grabbed their gear—neon vests that say “Immigrant Defense Network,” bullhorns, whistles, masks, and first-aid kits—and headed to the site where ICE agent Jonathan Ross had just killed Good.That snowy Minneapolis street has since become familiar to the millions of people who saw the disturbing videos on social media. But Ortiz and her colleagues couldn’t press pause or look away. They were there on the ground.

She witnessed one community member get yelled at and thrown on the ground by an ICE agent for recording, despite being a safe distance from the scene. For about forty-five minutes, the area was blocked off, and then it was cleaned up—long before it was cordoned off as a crime scene, an order of events that struck Ortiz as unusual.

Meanwhile, Ortiz’s staff and others in the growing crowd were starting to be shot at with chemical irritants. Some cried out in fear when the agents started their volley against the crowd; as the masked men shouted at them, Ortiz and her staff didn’t know if the projectiles being fired were chemical devices, rubber bullets, or real bullets. It was chaos.

But what will forever stick with Ortiz was all of the blood. She describes an “extensive” streak of blood across the ground; it painted the snow. The extent of it helps to explain why the cleanup took so long.

Ortiz felt unmoored, scared, and traumatized by what she and her staff saw. In the days since, her constant challenge has been putting those feelings aside to continue doing her work—not only for the sake of her staff, but for the people they’re trying to protect.

“Its scary as hell when you’re in the middle of that, but also scary when you have a staff there that you’re responsible for,” Ortiz told me. “It’s terrifying at a whole other level.” The day of Good’s death, she was trying to keep her team calm and disciplined, even as ICE agents appeared intent on doing everything possible to escalate the situation. She debated whether her people should leave for their safety.

A week later, ICE descended upon Lake Street, a predominantly Latino business corridor. They showed up right outside Ortiz’s office, forcing her group to mobilize. COPAL members saw someone running down the block warning businesses to lock their doors, which many did. Outside, ICE vehicles seemed to appear on every corner. Ortiz jumped into her car to follow ICE and record what was going on, as a cacophony of whistles and honking horns filled the air.

It’s become a common sound in Minneapolis over the last few weeks.

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After reading about and reporting on this escalating conflict since the events of January 7, I decided it was time to go to Minneapolis myself to report on the ground.

I spent the day after Martin Luther King Jr. Day with Ortiz. It turned out to be part of a relatively quiet forty-eight-hour period, which unnerved Ortiz and her team rather than calming them. They were still at the ready in case enforcement operations ramped up again.

Ortiz started driving at 5:30 a.m. to drop off groceries to three different people: a community member who had run out of food, plus a family member and a friend of hers who needed food but she also wanted to check in on. We met at 8:00 a.m. for breakfast.

8:18 a.m.: Eerily Quiet

We stop at El Mercado Central, a shopping mall that houses thirty-five Latino-led businesses. The place is usually bustling by this hour, with little parking available, but today we find it deserted. The owner informs us that they’re basically closed and only selling menudo. We head over to Midtown Global Market, another large retail complex that usually has everything inside, even a DMV. Also closed. I tell Ortiz that downtown Minneapolis has been eerily quiet since I arrived. It reminded me of the scenes of deserted streets in Atlanta from the pilot for The Walking Dead. “That’s exactly what it is,” she agrees.

8:28 a.m.: “Don’t Let Anyone Stop You From What You Know Is Right”

Ortiz came to the United States from Zacatecas, Mexico when she was 2 and eventually became a DACA recipient—one of those we call “Dreamers.” As we sit at Pineda Tacos for a chorizo breakfast burrito (one so good it gave me an out-of-body experience), I bring up the scene at Good’s shooting. I ask her about where her spiritual resilience (a term I’ve borrowed from my therapist) comes from—how she’s able to keep going in the face of something so dark. Is it a mantra, maybe, or some wise advice she remembers her abuela once uttered, or a physical item from which she draws encouragement?

The real source, she tells me, is a conversation she recently had with her father.

“As things started to get bad, I was nervous—not for me, but for my parents,” she says. “I talked to my dad and he had a really good conversation with me. He said, ‘I know what you’re doing. I know you’re brave, just do it, don’t let anyone stop you from what you know is right.’ That conversation allowed me to say, ‘Yep, let’s go all in.’”

She tells me more about her father, who is diabetic.

“My worst fear is he’s detained and his sugar levels spike,” she tells me, her eyes glassy, and rose-tinted on the edges. “I don’t know if he would be able to survive that, that is something that is hard to even imagine.”

This was the only time in our entire day together that Ortiz got emotional.

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9:00 a.m.: The Immigrant Defense Network

As we head back to the COPAL offices, Ortiz joins a call with other members of the Immigrant Defense Network. They report that they received a staggering 450 phone calls just yesterday, during the federal holiday. About 35 percent of those calls were requests for food to be delivered to homes whose occupants were afraid to leave. Another 30 percent were requests for rent assistance because the callers are unable to work. The rest of the calls were split between legal-aid requests and reports of deportations. The conversation then turns to whether the coalition still has the capacity to give food; they decide to distribute $5,000 to experienced food pantries.

What amazes me, shocks me, depresses me each time I witness it is that these priorities are about basic necessities, something groups like this have done since the pandemic. The focus here isn’t raising awareness or organizing or raising money or influencing legislation. It’s just keeping people alive. Consider again what the federal government is doing to our neighbors, to U.S. citizens, and mixed-status families. Because federal agents are terrorizing the community, community members are going hungry, can’t safely go to work, and can’t pay their bills out of fear that they could be violently thrown against cement, arrested, flown to Texas to be detained, and deported.

In light of these realities, I try to channel some of Ortiz’s spiritual resilience. I allow myself to be amused that the participants in the meeting call St. Paul “San Pablo”—and I think I will, too, from now on.

9:42 a.m.: “We Love Reporters But. . .”

Oops. Despite Ortiz telling people I was on the call, someone says, “We love reporters, but let’s not have them inside the network.” I don’t mind at all. I know it shows pride and protection they feel towards their work. They are cautious because they want to protect something they feel is doing so much good.

Before I leave the call, someone notes the apparent decline in federal enforcement over the last forty-eight hours probably means “something is brewing” because agents haven’t left the city yet.

10:35 a.m.: “Do You Worry These Make You a Target?”

Ortiz introduces me to COPAL employees after the call and tackles her inbox, responding to donors and answering meeting and media requests. She tells me about “constitutional observers,” the term COPAL has given to what’s called “ICE watch” in other cities. She shows me the neon vest and beanies they all get, as well as handbooks, bullhorns, and walkie talkies. I see the neon fits and ask if she worries they mark COPAL people as targets “Of course,” she says. Her staff has been doxxed, and she installed a dash cam on her car and a camera on the front door of her home after threats.

It turns out the assistance COPAL provides isn’t limited to food, rent, and legal assistance. People who are staying at home are being connected with physicians to help get their medical needs met (and veterinarians to help get their pets’ medical needs met).

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12:00 p.m.: “A Buffet of Information”

Ortiz has a private, off-the-record call with five dozen lawyers. I won’t recount the discussions except to say one of the participants described the purpose of the call as a chance to share a “buffet of information.” This is the kind of behind-the-scenes legal work that is helping people, defending their rights, and reinforcing their humanity.

12:34 p.m.: “This Has Happened Before”

Ortiz receives a text. Someone with DACA was detained hours earlier and needs legal support. I witness the urgency here, but also note that sometimes helping people during an ICE invasion feels like playing whack-a-mole. The goal in this case is to get this person an attorney who can draft a habeas petition to free them before they are relocated. ICE often keeps the detainee on the move without updating their locator, giving the government time and cover to get them to Texas unimpeded. “This has happened before with DACA recipients, TPS holders, visa holders, and green card holders,” Ortiz tells me, adding that among the hundreds of cases she’s seen, the agents have never had a warrant.

12:43 p.m.: The Need for Lawyers

Ortiz takes a follow-up call on getting more lawyers to volunteer. She needs to start categorizing them by who is pro bono, who is willing to do habeas paperwork, and who can do the work at a “super-low” rate.

1:34 p.m.: Doing It All

Ortiz grabs the keys of an SUV someone dropped off. She takes me with her as she fills up the gas tank for a community member who has legal status but is terrified of even going to the gas station.

1:49 p.m.: Where Are the Workers?

We head to COPAL’s Primero de Mayo Workers’ Center, which teaches computer literacy, offers citizenship and driver’s license classes, puts on health clinics, does intakes for wage theft, and offers career support. Housed in an old union building, the center has served more than 10,000 people over the last year, helping them with over 14,000 cases, and recovering more than $80,000 in wages. Ortiz tells me it’s normally packed, but when we walk in, there’s only one worker being helped despite a handful of employees there.

While Ortiz stays behind, half the staff heads in a van to Mankato, a city almost two hours outside Minneapolis/St. Paul, for the latest installment of COPAL’s new “The Brave of Us” tour, which is visiting thirty cities across Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, South Dakota, and North Dakota in the coming weeks. They will be training 350 constitutional observers in each city, including government leaders and activists who will seed the ground for the coalition as it spreads ahead of a Regional Immigrant Defense Summit planned for April.

2:15 p.m.: Reports

At lunch, Ortiz looks down at her phone. ICE has been spotted at the Maplewood Mall, fifteen minutes to the north. Her team is already looking into it. Sometimes these reports are accurate; sometimes they’re false alarms generated by understandably jittery community members. Either way, COPAL has to run it down.

2:50 p.m.: An Exclusive Over Lunch

While we eat, Ortiz looks again at her phone, but this time I register her excitement. Before I can ask what’s up, she shares that COPAL is raising $800,000 to give directly to the community for rent and utilities assistance, groceries, mental health efforts, and more. She is comfortable telling me this because the group has already raised close to half a million dollars from individual donors from Minnesota to New York, and Vermont to California.

After spending a day with Ortiz, I can understand at least a little bit how life-changing this money will be. Regardless of how long ICE besieges the Twin Cities, people need food and rent and utilities money. The fact that people are willing to give so generously is hugely encouraging—for Ortiz, I’m sure, but also for me.

4:00 p.m.: “Imagine What Our Lives Would Be If We Chose to Do Nothing?”

Ortiz takes some time at the end of the day personally calling donors and thanking them. Some give her stories in return and she dutifully listens. I think to myself, this is tiring work. Then I hear her say that she “really needed” the message from one donor currently living in Brooklyn.

It turns out the donor is 81, from Minnesota, but had to move away because of the difficulty navigating a wheelchair in the bitter cold. Growing up in the 1960s during the Vietnam War, they took to the streets almost every day to advocate for change.

It’s sad that it feels like we are going back in time, but I am happy to see that Minnesotans are going out and speaking up. We need to speak up and be in solidarity to see change, that is the only way we can turn the tide.

I have my own organization now focused on issues around disabilities, and trust me, at my age, there are days when it might feel like the work is never done. Just when you think you solved one problem, you then realize that we are in a consistent cycle, the problem always comes back around. Unfortunately, prejudice, racism, and the anti-immigrant rhetoric are like a disease without a cure.

But imagine what our lives would be if we chose to do nothing? We have to fight against injustice. When it feels like it’s too much, take the day off, reboot. Deadlines are important, but don’t stress too much, it’s never as urgent as you think it is. Don’t take things personally, otherwise you’ll burn out. Be passionate, work hard—but not to the point of losing yourself in the process. Passion needs balance.

Know that you are making a huge difference. Who else is doing what COPAL is doing? Take pride in that. Be determined but be patient, as well. Even if things get worse, it won’t last forever. People don’t want that, injustice is not okay. I just don’t understand how people can carry so much hate, but if we don’t do anything about it, it won’t change.

5:30 p.m.: Tracking Tips

The hotline tip at the Maplewood Mall didn’t pan out but the team is looking into another tip: ICE was sighted in “San Pablo.” Constitutional observers are on the scene. As my time with Ortiz ends and evening falls over the Twin Cities, she and her colleagues return to their work, unsure of when it will end for the day.

Coda: Remember that quiet forty-eight hours I mentioned? The next day, as I was writing this newsletter, Ortiz sent me a concerned text. Men she believed were federal agents were snooping around outside her home—caught on the camera she has on her front door—and looking in her mailbox. They had serape-like coverings on and easily could have had ICE gear under them. She filed a police report and contacted her lawyer. She and her family are shaken up.

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WHY THE HELL are federal forces brutalizing Minneapolis? Are the Twin Cities a bastion of undocumented immigrants? The Migration Policy Institute estimates around 100,000 people in all of Minnesota are in the country illegally. Sound like a lot? The organization’s estimates for Florida, Texas, and California are 1.2 million, almost 2 million, and just under 3 million, respectively.

Clearly, any immigration-enforcement pretext for a massive ICE surge is bullshit. The state’s childcare fraud scandal—a real problem first investigated years ago, which has been raised to public attention again thanks to the work of right-wing social media influencers—has allowed for a convenient White House narrative to differentiate the Minneapolis operation from other recent ICE actions: Minnesota must be saved from itself. Possibly through the invocation of the Insurrection Act.

It all amounts to one more scene in an ongoing production of political theater, as the federal agents themselves demonstrate by having their cameras constantly in hand, filming clips for DHS’s aggressive social media campaign supporting their actions. The problem is that they are real masked agents in tactical gear nonetheless, and they’re carrying real guns.

Unchecked violence, including against U.S. citizens, was a likely possibility built into the foundation of this scenario. But why did Renee Nicole Good have to die? And why did the Trump administration move so swiftly after her murder to disparage her, label her a domestic terrorist, and investigate her? They even targeted her widow—who, it should be remembered, was a witness to her wife’s killing and likely heard her being called a “fucking bitch” by the ICE agent who pulled the trigger.

Unfortunately, deaths at the hands of ICE are not a new phenomenon: In all my years covering immigration, I’ve learned that one of the most undercovered aspects of the story is how many immigrants die in detention. However, in this area, things have recently gotten much worse. Last year was the deadliest year to be in ICE custody in more than twenty years, with thirty-two deaths. A Wall Street Journal investigation additionally found that immigration agents shot into cars thirteen times since July, hitting eight people and killing two of them.

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GOOD’S KILLING, which was captured in clips from multiple angles including that of the shooter, is the latest in a long line of shocking episodes witnessed over video by millions. Before her, there was video of Silverio Villegas-González being killed by an ICE agent in Chicago; those clips circulated in September. The circumstances of his death were similar to Good’s: He had just dropped off his 3-year-old son at daycare when an unmarked car pulled in front of his own. Less than a minute later, he was dead. DHS got out early with a made-for-TV story of a violent immigrant resisting arrest and dragging a heroic agent with his car before being shot. When the video came out, it showed the agent to be fully mobile after the shooting and describing his own injuries as “nothing major.”

The reason Good’s killing stands out is not because it was caught on video; it’s not because she was fearless in the face of an armed, hostile agent; and it’s not because she was calm and smiling and apparently in full control of her emotions—much more so than her killer—right until her death. What makes Good’s killing unique is that she was a blonde, white woman and a U.S. citizen.

It’s Good’s whiteness and her American citizenship that has made her so dangerous to the Trump administration. It’s what made Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem call her a domestic terrorist, almost immediately, with no facts to back up that baseless allegation. It’s what led JD Vance not just to blame Good but to announce federal agents doing immigration work have “absolute immunity.” (It was an appalling performance, even by JD Vance’s standards.) And it’s what led Trump to post, “the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense.”

Once again, the federal government is telling us that what we saw with our own damn eyes is wrong. But this isn’t the usual lie—that all immigrants are criminals, or that melanin leads to blue city violence. This is a new one. And it’s sadly revealing how quickly the administration realized they needed a different lie for a white lady than for all the other innocent people DHS has killed.

Good was dangerous because she stood in solidarity with immigrants, with her neighbors, and the people of this country. As her widow said, “We had whistles, they had guns.” Latinos and immigrants have and will continue to die under this administration, and the media probably won’t bat an eye. Their deaths won’t penetrate the busy daily lives of Americans. It’s terrible but important to note that it took someone like Good dying the way she did for the media and the public to take notice.

Good didn’t ask to be a hero or a martyr, but this administration killed her and then sought to cover it up. The federal government has pushed the FBI to investigate Good rather than Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot her, while blocking state and local participation in the investigation of what happened—all while disparaging Good along the lines Vance and Noem set out in their public statements. They have created a MAGA-inspired fantasy where they are saving the country by assaulting immigrants (and natural-born citizens) at their jobs, outside their places of worship, and at the schools where they drop off their kids. When Good and others like her, no matter their race, stand up and directly challenge that fantasy, it comes crashing down, and fast.

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I’VE BEEN SHAKEN by not just the horror of Good’s killing but the cruel and soulless rush to paint her as evil and unworthy of our sympathy or understanding. So I spoke to people I respect in the larger community of immigration advocates to try to get some perspective on why this happened.

Tony Hernandez, the founder of the Immigrant Archive Project, an oral history of immigrants from all over the world, cited Bill Clinton in our discussion on Good: “There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.”

“She was a noble woman who interjected herself into this fight when she didn’t have a dog in the fight, but she had empathy for those being abused,” he told me. “As we look back on this moment, future historians will say she was on the right side of history pushing back on this nonsense, but we need a lot more of that for this to end. We need a lot of people to have the empathy that she displayed because those who have it are afraid to speak up.”

Good’s death hit the activist community particularly hard. Many groups—such as Siembra NC, a group that protects North Carolina immigrants—held vigils for Good and helped facilitate ICE watch activities, arming the participants with whistles and voices just as loud as Good’s was.

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“This was a white woman doing ICE watch; it hit a completely different nerve,” Jackie Ramirez, 23, a member of Siembra NC, told me. But instead of seeing volunteers get scared away, Ramirez saw them recommit to the work of protecting their community. “It’s not like, ‘Oh my God, I don’t want to do this anymore.’ Our allies are asking, ‘How are we going to respond?’ They’re not saying, ‘We’re fearful’—they’re saying, ‘How do we keep continuing to honor the work she was doing?’ They really struck a nerve in the movement with this one.”

Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-N.Y.), who introduced legislation this week to require ICE and Border Patrol agents to wear scannable QR codes that link to the officer’s identifying information, said the MAGA worldview was effectively summarized in something Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) recently said: “If you impede the actions of our law enforcement as they seek to repel foreign invaders, you’ll get what’s coming to you.”

“If you get in our way, we’re going to execute you,” was Torres’s gloss on that remark.

“It’s in the nature of a corrupt authoritarian regime to treat the victims as victimizers and victimizers as victims,” Torres said. “Donald Trump’s mantra is he is the state. The execution of Renee is the clearest manifestation of Donald Trump’s fascism, the most cold-blooded.”

Torres said he introduced this legislation in the wake of her killing because asking an officer for a physical ID requires an encounter that could turn violent; Torres says there is an “urgent” need to unmask ICE and CBP “not only physically, but digitally.”

Corbin Trent, a former aide to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), went on Fox News recently and left the host speechless after pointing out the hypocrisy of threatening Iran for shutting down protests when Trump’s “oppressive regime” is doing the same thing here. Trent told me that the administration needs ICE to feel protected “because if ICE agents start getting charged with murder, that’s really going to put a damper on Stephen Miller’s plans.”

Trent said solidarity from Americans is what can stop this administration from shooting people with impunity.

“I don’t understand why there hasn’t been more solidarity on whether or not the government can assassinate you, that’s a lot of power to give away willy-nilly with no checks and balances,” he said. “That’s the ballgame. If people come together, they’re fucked.”

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MARK ZUCKERBERG TOOK it personally.

Just hours after Donald Trump signed the executive order that would come to be known as the “Muslim ban” on January 27, 2017, Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook at the time, posted a response on his social network. He began by saying that his own great grandparents had come from Germany, Austria, and Poland, and his wife’s parents had fled China and Vietnam to eventually be welcomed to America as refugees. These and other deeply personal connections to the issue framed the concerns he then raised about the implications of Trump’s order.

“The United States is a nation of immigrants, and we should be proud of that,” he wrote.

We need to keep this country safe, but we should do that by focusing on people who actually pose a threat. Expanding the focus of law enforcement beyond people who are real threats would make all Americans less safe by diverting resources, while millions of undocumented folks who don’t pose a threat will live in fear of deportation.

The stances weren’t new for Zuckerberg, who in 2013 had launched the immigration-focused advocacy organization FWD.us. In a Washington Post op-ed announcing the initiative, he called the American immigration system “unfit for today’s world,” a judgment he arrived at following his experiences teaching local middle-schoolers about entrepreneurship in an after-school program; he discovered that some of his most talented students were undocumented. From the beginning, to his credit, Zuckerberg called for a comprehensive immigration fix—one that would go far beyond the H-1B visas that would most benefit his business, which reportedly employs the second-most workers living in America under that visa type after Amazon. Among the larger reforms he called for in his 2013 editorial were increased border security, a path to citizenship, and more rigorous STEM education.

In his Facebook post after the Muslim ban, he said he was heartened that Trump was going to “work something out” for Dreamers—recipients of DACA, just like some of the kids he’d taught about business. Zuckerberg described his undocumented students as “our future, too.”

He even welcomed Dreamers into his Palo Alto home for a Facebook Live event in 2017. Sitting on couches in front of a sun-lit wall of small white window frames with three Dreamers, Zuckerberg admonished the Trump administration, saying “To offer the American dream to people and then take it away and punish them for trusting the government is one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in a long time in our country.”

“If we don’t have the moral strength to say that we’re going to stand up for people who have been in this country since childhood, who didn’t choose to come here on their own, who are contributing to their communities and to the economy, then, for a lot of us, it makes us question, ‘What can we assume that our fellow people in this country are going to stand for?’” Zuckerberg added.

Oh, how things have changed.

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Now, DACA recipients are being detained on Christmas eve, and some are even deported. Days ago, an ICE agent shot a U.S. citizen at point blank range, killing her and leaving her 6-year-old son an orphan. But the fifth-richest man in the world remains silent.

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