A Nation of Immigrants Under Attack

Over 70 percent of the immigrants kidnapped by ICE have no criminal record. Some are even U.S. citizens.

ICE raid on a house in LA, June 2025 -- public domain image

By Farrah Hassen

Across the country, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are tearing families apart, terrorizing communities, and upending businesses.

Mario Romero was among those arrested by ICE recently. His daughter, Yurien Contreras, witnessed ICE agents taking him “chained by the hands, feet, and waist” after they raided his workplace in Los Angeles. Over 40 other immigrant workers were also arrested.

“It was a very traumatic experience,” she told The Guardian. But “it was only the beginning of inhumane treatment our families would endure.”

The architect of this anti-immigrant agenda, top Trump aide Stephen Miller, has demanded that ICE make 3,000 arrests like these per day — an arbitrary quota with no legal basis.

To meet this quota, masked, plainclothes ICE agents embrace violent and unconstitutional tactics to abduct people from courthouses, citizenship appointments, churches, graduations, restaurants, Home Depots, farms, and other workplaces. They arrest people without warrants or probable cause, violate their right to due process, and deny them their basic human dignity.

There’s mounting evidence of ICE using racial profiling. “We have U.S. citizens who are being asked for their documents and not believed when they attest to the fact that they are U.S. citizens,” said Angelica Salas, who directs the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights. “They just happen to be Latino.”

In one disturbing case in Chicago, ICE agents grabbed, handcuffed, and forced Julio Noriega into a van as he stepped out of a Jiffy Lube in late January. ICE detained him for 10 hours before releasing him when they realized he was a U.S. citizen.

In another instance, ICE forced two children, who are both U.S. citizens — one undergoing Stage 4 cancer treatment — onto their mother’s deportation flight to Honduras in April. The cancer patient is four years old — and ICE deported him without his medication.

The inhumane treatment continues in ICE’s sprawling network of private prisons and county jails.

The U.S. spends over $3 billion annually on the world’s largest immigration detention system, which is primarily operated by for-profit prison contractors like GEO Group and CoreCivic. These facilities are notorious for poor medical treatment, dangerous overcrowding, due process violations, and preventable deaths.

The largest ICE detention center in California, Adelanto, is operated by GEO Group and currently houses dozens from the LA raids, including Yurien’s father, Mario.

The prison has a sordid history. Recent detainees have been forced to sleep on the floor without blankets and pillows and have been denied a change of clothing, underwear, or towels for over 10 days, reported the Los Angeles Times.

If these attacks on immigrants were really about “following the law,” then immigrants fleeing war and persecution would be able to exercise their right to seek asylum — a human right long enshrined under international and U.S. law. Their due process rights would be respected.

In fact, the vast majority of immigrants in this country — including those kidnapped by ICE — have no criminal history. According to agency data compiled by research organization TRAC, out of the 56,397 people held in ICE detention as of June 15, 71.7 percent had no criminal record.

Both Republicans and Democrats have enabled ICE’s rampant human rights abuses since the agency’s creation in 2003. ICE functions as a quasi-police force with limited public oversight and uses private data sources like utility bills to conduct unauthorized surveillance of potentially anyone in the U.S.

The current system has a vested interest in locking up and deporting people instead of pursuing real immigration solutions, like pathways to citizenship. This system, which includes ICE and its detention facilities, must be defunded and dismantled.

People abducted by ICE are not numbers. They’re someone’s entire world. They’re cherished members of communities. And they’re on the frontlines of defending all of our civil liberties. We must stand together and demand that ICE leave our communities. We are a nation of immigrants after all.

OtherWords columnist Farrah Hassen, J.D., is a writer, policy analyst, and educator. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org