I’ve been haunted by what happened last Thursday afternoon in Manhattan's Riverside Park, near where I live. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, faces hidden, approached a youth‑league baseball coach and his players, demanding IDs and questioning them mid‑practice under suspicion of “being undocumented.”
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The coach later recounted to WABC the haunting questions the agents asked: "Where they're from, who are their parents, and I just thought, whoa, whoa, this is ... this is not good.” All the kids, he said, were American citizens.
And how much did this horror show affect those kids? Only two players — two — showed up for the next practice.
This scene is being replicated in ports of entry and border towns across America. In Los Angeles, a July 3 video captured ICE agents urinating on school grounds, an appalling spectacle of brutal power flaunted in front of children and teachers.
In Nashville, families recount living in constant fear even as U.S. citizens, recalling ICE checkpoints manned by thugs “looking for color of skin.” Axios revealed July 9 that ICE has arrested U.S. citizens, often due to racial profiling.
In Los Angeles, job seeker Job Garcia, a U.S. citizen, has sued the Department of Homeland Security after ICE agents hauled him off in handcuffs for no legal reason. In Arizona, the attorney general pressed ICE for answers after a New Mexico man was wrongly arrested in her state, his identity mistaken. Mistaken identity? That’s beyond the pale in a situation so incredibly delicate.
And in New Orleans, a shocking scene took place when agents detained an Iranian woman who has lived in the U.S. for 47 years. They swarmed her like an escaped convict while she was gardening in her own yard. Yes, while she was tending her garden. She was released over a week later, most certainly leaving lasting trauma for her and her distraught family.
Want to talk about a family being distraught? How about when Immigration agents violently tackled and repeatedly punched Narciso Barranco, an undocumented landscaper and the father of three U.S. Marines, during a June arrest caught on video in Southern California. His sons are demanding accountability, calling the assault on their father “inhumane.'”
And these are only the tip of the iceberg. Only the ones were hearing about, because without question, I am sure that there have been many wrongful detentions of individuals who are too afraid to come forward and talk about what’s happened to them.
Meanwhile, detainees, not the dangerous criminals Donald Trump said he would only target, languish in hellish conditions we thought were relics of harsh authoritarian regimes of the past. Arizona U.S. Rep. Yassamin Ansari reported scenes of horror after visiting a detention center in her district.
Democratic lawmakers, including U.S. Rep Maxwell Frost, found vile conditions at "Alligator Alcatraz" in Florida. "I saw 32 people per cage, about six cages in the one tent. I saw a lot of people, young men who looked like me, and people who were my age,” Frost, who is 28, told USA Today. He called the conditions “gross and disgusting.”
Confirming this point, The Guardian reported that tents in “Alligator Alcatraz” were overrun by vermin and that the facility had sweltering heat, no medical care, and spiritual starvation.
Further, at least 12 migrant deaths have occurred in ICE custody since last October. That is, if you believe the Trump administration about this. To me, there are likely more, and undoubtedly there will be many more. One of those lives lost was that of Jaime Alanis, who was killed as a result of last week’s raid on a California cannabis farm.
And what of our civic leaders? New York City Comptroller Brad Lander was violently blocked from trying to prevent the arrest of an alleged noncitizen ICE was trying to detain. And California, U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla tried to ask a question of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and was tackled and cuffed.
On Sunday, Padilla told CNN’s Dana Bash that ICE was getting, “more aggressive, more cruel, more extreme.”
The Atlantic revealed that morale among ICE agents is at a low ebb. They say they are underpaid and overworked, with moral qualms mounting amid families being torn apart. And there will be a 50 percent increase in ICE staffing under Trump's "big beautiful bill, fueled by an aggressive agenda that includes appalling new facilities like “Alligator Alcatraz,” as Newsweek reported
And let’s not forget Trump aide Stephen Miller, the architect of this regime’s ICE or what it is turning into, the U.S. version of the Gestapo. Miller has been dubbed a modern‑day Adolf Eichmann by some commentators, a reference to the architect of the Holocaust. He has helped orchestrate a policy of detentions and deportations disguised as law enforcement. Miller is a repugnant human being.
Yes, some agents have families and children, so they hold their nose and do their job to pay the bills. But how do they look their children in the eye after something like raiding a birthday party in Texas last March?
Agents detained 47 people at that party (including nine kids) with flashbang grenades. None of the partygoers had criminal records or proven gang affiliation. How do these agents reconcile feeding their own children dinner while they torture familial bonds with violence, shackles, trauma, and death?
America is becoming a police state. Men and women in ICE uniforms behave like occupying forces, instilling fear, suspicion, even panic. Trump declared he would deport gang members and nothing more, but his words are always a smoke screen for the lies that lie beneath his lies .
Instead, ICE targets anyone, regardless of nationality or criminality. As The Guardian reported, even an Irish tourist was jailed for overstaying his U.S. visit by three days. And he was held for 100 days, denied decent conditions, and banned from the U.S. for 10 years. “Nobody is safe,” the Irish tourist said. Truer words have never been spoken.
And this week, we are learning about another ominous move away from democracy. Last week, a memo by acting ICE Director Todd Lyons banned bond hearings for immigrants who arrived illegally in the U.S. This ensures that millions of undocumented immigrants, many with clean records, will remain locked up indefinitely. It's sickening.
This is not the United States I remember learning about growing up, working for during my time on Capitol Hill, and obsessing about as a political junkie. All of us have been taught respect for due process, rule of law, protection of the vulnerable. Not stonewalling oversight. Not arbitrary arrests.
And not jailing grandmothers like Margarita Ávila in Texas, who was detained over a trimmer‑related dispute with a postal worker. She has since been released, but her story scares anyone who has lived in the U.S. for decades and now cannot take their place in American society for granted.
Some might say, “But ICE is just enforcing the law.” No. It enforces it without transparency, without accountability, without oversight. Agents wear masks, literally and figuratively, making it easier to refuse responsibility.
Have we become a banana republic? We’re getting close. We were founded on liberty, not fear. Yet here we stand, watching as our government builds camps reminiscent of darker times, with alligators and vermin as added props. All that’s missing are Nazi armbands on ICE agents.
And speaking of Nazis, Trump’s top racist aide, Miller is the force behind the raids, detentions, and visa purges of activists. Gay Wisconsin Congressman Mark Pocan had it right wh,en he responded to an offensive Miller social post by replying, "Racist ****. Go back to 1930’s Germany."
What worries me is that perhaps many of you who are reading this are seeing some of these stories for the first time. Trump has pulled back so many levers of democracy that stories about migrants and immigrants and those wrongly detained take a back seat to tariffs and TACO, Supreme Court rulings (or uselessness), and now Epsteingate.
Once again, it’s the poor, the marginalized, and people of color who are most at risk and who suffer the consequences outside the glare of the spotlight.
Democratic leaders must try harder to demand transparency, beginning with opening all facilities, unmasking those agents, restoring bond hearings, and reempowering the courts. They must defend the rights of those on the fringes, due process, free speech, and dignity.
And Democrats need to turn up the heat on ICE agents and call on those who are willing to blow the whistle, to remove their masks, and to resist these barbaric and unspeakable raids.
This isn’t “just immigration enforcement.” It’s a descent into authoritarianism and a serious erasure of constitutional guarantees. And the bottom line is that all of this is utterly despicable.
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