Trump’s deportation force is giving ordinary people new ways to threaten, torment, and punish their neighbors.

“ICE is facial recognition, ICE is surveillance, and ICE is coming after you regardless of your status.”

SO SAID REP. ALEXANDRIA OCASIO-CORTEZ at a “Students vs. Billionaires” town hall event in late September.

And while her rhetoric is heated, the New York congresswoman has a point.1

Since the beginning of Trump 2.0, we’ve seen ICE perpetrate wanton violence, especially against Latino fathers and husbands. The agency relies on a gigantic, AI-powered surveillance network to pursue its targets and intimidate protesters. And ICE has assaulted and detained U.S. citizens, showing that in the minds of their agents, the actual legal status of the people they accost does not seem to be a primary concern.

Take Ricardo Gonzalez in Long Beach, California. A U.S. citizen and former city employee, Gonzalez was riding an e-bike near his home when ICE agents set upon him. A video of the episode shows an unmarked car driving the wrong way down a one-way street, then swerving at Gonzalez, obscuring him from view.

A masked agent then draws a gun, yelling, “Get on the ground.” Gonzalez appears to respond, “Fuck you. You hit me with your fucking car. I’m a fucking U.S. citizen.”

A neighbor and witness said an agent jumped out of the car and tackled Gonzalez, and video footage shows Gonzalez yelling in pain that his arm is broken as an ICE agent kneels on his back. The Long Beach Post reports Gonzalez was tased twice, and that one agent taunted the growing crowd of protesters at the scene, saying they didn’t “look legal.” Gonzalez’s daughter confirmed the tasing and said the family is raising money for his hospital bills and recovery.

Long Beach Mayor Rex Richardson has filed a complaint on behalf of the city asking for a formal investigation into the ICE operation, and answers to questions such as whether an ICE vehicle hit Gonzalez, whether he was tased, and why medical aid was not rendered immediately.

“Many people—they relegate use of force to ‘this person must have done something wrong,’” Richardson told me. “[Gonzalez] was a U.S. citizen. But even if he wasn’t, do these agents have the right to brutalize who they want with no accountability and no oversight? Because if they do, no one is safe.”

ICE has also run up a body count this year. Some of the men killed or brutalized—fathers, brothers, and sons—have been undocumented, it’s true. But none deserved the brutal treatment they received for it. And neither did their children or spouses (many of whom are U.S. citizens) do anything to warrant having their fathers or husbands violently taken away. Sometimes the children were with these men when they were attacked.

That’s what happened to 24-year-old Sebastian, who was dropping off his two children at their babysitter at 7:30 a.m. on Tuesday when ICE drove him off the road, wrecking his car. The hard-to-watch video shows Sebastian desperately holding onto his toddlers as ICE agents methodically pry his fingers off them. As the two children cry, a crowd gathers, filming the encounter. In this case, the agents eventually let the terrified father go, telling him to report to ICE, the Boston Globe reported. He was apparently not even the man they had come to find.

Sometimes the agency’s actions are much more targeted. ICE’s investigative arm raided the home of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) last week, carrying out a plan clearly intended to get the congresswoman denaturalized and deported. The whole episode was defined by the deeply anti-Somali racism rampant on the right, and it sends a message to naturalized citizens across the country: The White House could send law enforcement after you, too.

Politics has a way of turning human beings into categories.

“Migrants.” “Illegals.” “Detainees.” “Deportees.”

Journalism can do the opposite. It can give people their names back. Tell you where they came from. Introduce you to their families. Show you what happened to them—and ask whether it should have.

That’s the journalism we believe in.

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ICE is not just Trump’s mass deportation tool. It has also become a vector for the sort of basic mean-spiritedness that he’s spent the past decade giving permission for his followers to emulate. Sometimes the agency’s name is used to inflict casual cruelty upon kids, as a woman at a high school volleyball game did in Houston last week when she yelled, “We’re going to call ICE on your parents” and “Go back to Mexico!” Other times it lets petty people settle scores in horrifying ways, like when a man filed a theft charge against a 25-year-old former employee who had bought a $12 meal not realizing her phone’s McDonald’s app was still linked to her former company’s credit card. As reported in Baltimore Brew, when she went to court to settle the matter, she was grabbed by ICE; she apparently remains in ICE detention. (It’s unclear whether the former boss, who reportedly showed a pattern of disturbing behavior toward the former employee, alerted ICE.)

In this climate that the president has cultivated—defined by growing acrimony, suspicion, and downright cruelty, sometimes causing irreversible consequences—it’s no wonder that Latino truancy is up in places like Washington, D.C. After his father was deported, one child reportedly described feeling “genuinely afraid to step outside.”

Columbia University’s Mae Ngai, a leading historian of immigration, told me the Trump administration treats U.S. citizens who are Latino as illegitimate or second-class citizens based on their racial or ethnic background—a concept she calls “alien citizenship.” Ngai says black and brown Americans have long faced this type of suspicion, and that you can draw a straight line from Mexican repatriation during the Great Depression—which saw 450,000 people of Mexican descent, half of whom were U.S. citizens and many of whom were children, removed from the country—to the anti-immigrant fervor of the Trump administration.2

“Mexicans and Asians were never considered to be the ‘right kind’ of immigrant,” she said. “Mexicans were written off as birds of passage: They just come and go, they don’t settle here, but many Mexicans did settle here. . . . There’s this idea that Mexicans and by extension other Latinos are not bona fide immigrants, they don’t become Americans.”

She said what ICE is doing is citizenship nullification. “With Asians and Latinos, even their citizenship is shaky—it’s suspect.”

To make the United States even less hospitable for Latinos, the administration has also slashed the number of people it is naturalizing. The numbers are lower now than they were during COVID, when some operations of the federal government virtually ground to a halt. The administration’s reduction of the number of people being granted citizenship has coincided with its willful destruction of the visa process for highly skilled workers and its breaking of the asylum process for those seeking refuge.

SPEAKING OF THE ASYLUM PROCESS: CNN reported this week that the State Department has been using two different, contradictory sets of assessments of the safety of some Latin American countries. In public travel advisories, the department has been warning Americans about the dangers of visiting Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador. But in assessments sent to asylum officers, the department suggests the level of danger there is lower than in some U.S. cities like Houston and Baltimore. The upshot is that future asylum claims from Latin America are more likely to be denied.

This change follows a 2025 law creating an annual asylum fee—one that was applied retroactively, which left many asylum seekers unsure not just how much they owed but also how to prove they had paid the fee.

The Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP) recently won a lawsuit in district court against the method the Executive Office for Immigration Review used to charge the fees, partly because the agency failed to address the difficulties applicants faced in producing their payment receipts. (The practical effect of the ruling is not yet clear, though, and the court did not invalidate the fee itself.)

“Wait until you see what we do next year,” border czar Tom Homan boasted earlier this month.

One indication of what’s to come, according to the American Prospect, is that ICE is “fast-tracking a $100 million domestic surveillance program,” which includes plans to deploy 142 intelligence contractors across the United States to create network analyses and possibly targeting packages using classified and open-source material. According to an ACLU senior policy analyst quoted by the Prospect, “It looks dangerously like the construction of an internal spying agency.”

A FORMER OBAMA OFFICIAL once told me that you either inspire people to vote or you scare them into voting. What is happening is scary, to be sure. But the way people have responded to that fear—sometimes, that itself is inspiring.

I’ve had a lot of cause this year to write about the late Lorenzo Salgado Araujo. Which is why it caught my attention when the veteran immigration activist Erika Andiola posted that people are leaving their “I Voted” stickers on a memorial local residents have set up to honor him in Houston.

“Guys, seventy of these stickers. We counted,” Araujo’s son Ronaldo beamed in a video as he showed stickers dotting the area under the words “Justice for Lorenzo.” “Thank you guys for voting and thinking about my dad.”

1

AOC’s subsequent words on ICE and complicit Republicans are really worth reading in full:

ICE is not structured in any way to even resemble law enforcement. There is no accountability, you cannot assert your constitutional rights in these facilities. These black-box detention centers are for-profit institutions . . . it’s not a county jail, it’s not a state prison. They are traded on the private market. They exist to house bodies. That’s why they are going after every man, woman, and child that is engaging in productive activity in the street. Because the CEO of GEO Group and the CEO of CoreCivic, they’ve got profits at the end of the quarter to post. Just look at the Republican members of Congress that like to invest in those stocks right before they authorize funding for ICE. They’re all on the take!

2

Ngai also highlighted Japanese internment during World War II as a brutal case of alien citizenship. Of the roughly 120,000 people affected, two-thirds were U.S. citizens.