ICE agents aim for easy pickings: like stealing children from school bus stops in San Antonio, Texas. Children who, not incidentally, are legal residents of the United States with their protected status granted by U.S. courts.
ICE is also chaining pregnant woman to hospital beds. And recently, legal US resident Darisbell Quintero, one of hundreds of other pregnant women caught up in Trump's mass deportation campaign, miscarried inside the Prairieland Detention Center in North Texas, according to The Dallas Morning News.
Had the baby lived, he or she would have been a US citizen and yet still likely joined a skyrocketing number of children now held in the United States, echoes of the 1940s Japanese internment camps in the U.S. They would have also suffered from abominable conditions like Liam Ramos, another legal immigrant with protective orders. Ramos's capture in Minnesota and subsequent flight to Texas, woke the nation to this practice of child internment—possibly in the CoreCivic facility in Dilley, an hour South of San Antonio, where unsanitary foods and water, medical neglect, and abuse are well documented.
“Come in the Right Way” remains a popular slur on the Internet but it no longer fits what is actually happening on the street. With nearly 8 in 10 of the more than 60,000 being detained have no criminal history to speak of, a growing number of these are actually lawful US residents who “came in the right way”—many making their cases before judges that their lives were at risk in their home countries—before being given legal residence here.
Related: 'Protests of ‘Abolish ICE’ Reach Texas Dems as Trump’s Agents Count the Holes in the Dead'
Now those promises of courts, judges, and former presidents are either being broken at the top or rogue agents are doing the work of the courts for them and violating those agreements. Either way it is a shame on our nation.
Rightly or wrongly, the United States has long celebrated itself as a shelter in the storm of an often brutal world. It has long been promoted as a land of justice and a force for good, especially after the Civil War when the French gifted us the Statue of Liberty to mark our long-delayed break with slavery and the slow, winding, and now suddenly reversing road to racial equality.
While there's wide room to debate these national narratives, they are useful in providing a compass pointing toward how we expect our nation to behave.
And when we consider the words inviting the “tired huddled masses yearning to breathe free” we are forced to consider the overwhelming evidence that this current regime is—through ICE and the growing deportation industrial-complex most clearly, but not exclusively—betraying the better angels of our human natures and the promises of our nation.
When the most vulnerable are threatened by persecutions in other lands, our instinct and sometimes practice, is to open our doors and provide temporary shelter—and in tens of thousands of cases a year, refugee status for extended allowing for extended residence and sometimes a pathway to citizenship.
The number allowed has ranged over the years depending on global conditions and the changing administrations setting the rules. Since the 1980s it has shifted from 120,000 under President Reagan, to 50,000 during Trump's first term, up to 125,000 under Biden, when nationals of war-decimated Afghanistan, the collapsing Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and a hemorrhaging Venezuela made up nearly half of all cases.
Last year, Trump closed the door to virtually all refugees—all except White South Africans, mostly Afrikaners. More than a dog whistle, this move placed white supremacy at the front of US immigration and refugee policy.
Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson have long alleged a “white genocide” in South Africa, a country where apartheid segregated and priortized the needs of white people well into the 1990s (as well as other conspiracy claims about race in the U.S.). But “the idea of a ‘white genocide’ in South Africa is completely false,” according to reviews of policy and crime data from that country, where four out of every five farm deaths decried as racially inspired are of Black people.
Back in the U.S., in an attempt to fulfill his campaign pledge to unleash the largest mass deportation in the history of the United States, Trump has set about betraying our nation's promises—including to those Afghans, many of thousands granted legal protected status, we should remember, for assisting US forces during our 20-year war against the Taliban in that country. (A 20-year period that allowed for the flooding of the world's drug market with Afghanistan heroin.)
Many of these Afghans (perhaps including a family I met recently in San Antonio) are now being offered a vicious non-choice: Either a return trip to Afghanistan likely imprisonment and possible death at the hands of the ruling Taliban, or a one-way ticket to … the Democratic Republic of Congo, now suffering severe humanitarian breakdown and massive internal armed conflict and as many as 4 million moving toward starvation within months.
“America’s word is worthless now” George Pierce opened their recent piece at Esquire. “because the president’s word is worthless.”
This great betrayal of our allies matches the betrayal within this war on immigrants, where citizen and non-citizen are caught up: Whether we're rolling back voting rights for Black folks, whose enslaved ancestors over 250 years produced the majority of the entire wealth of the United States, and returning to one-party rule across the U.S. South to again deny Black people political represenation, or we’re breaking the law in a myriad of directions for those who turned to the US for life-saving aid, we are in a period of stark and sustained moral offense.
Torture and death are hallmarks of the entire detention system today. Last year there were 31 in-custody detention-related deaths, the most in 20 years. And this year seems about to top that, with 18 deaths in the first four months of 2026. Detention guards, who regularly refer to detained people as “bodies” have been caught placing bets on who will kill themselves next. There have been more than 1,000 credible human rights abuses documented in ICE detention.
Here are a few other betrayals:
Chanthila 'Shawn' Souvannarath was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and entered the United States before his first birthday. He became a U.S. citizen, according to the National Immigration Project, after his father naturalized. In spite of a judge's order barring his deportation, he was deported to Laos.
"This should shock the nation," said Nora Ahmed, legal director of the ACLU of Louisiana.
A 10-year-old U.S. citizen with brain cancer was deported from Texas to Mexico with her parents and other U.S. citizen siblings after being stopped while on the way to a medical appointment. Who's caring for her now? An 18-year-old brother still in the US works two jobs to afford her medicine.
The legally blind Nurul Amin Shah Alam was allowed refugee status along with his wife and two sons. After Shah Alam got lost after going out to buy a curtain rod for a makeshift cane, he accidentlly wandered into a neighbor's yard. After police brutalized him, taking him four times, he was turned over to U.S. Border Patrol. When Border Patrol realized they couldn't legally deport Shah Alam they dumped him outside a closed donut shop in a Buffalo, New York, winter. He was found dead five days later.
Here are some cases involving U.S. citizens from a December report from the U.S. Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations titled, "Unchecked Authority":
- Andrea Velez, who was detained for over 48 hours despite repeatedly telling officers she was a citizen and having her identification in her bag;
- George Retes, an army veteran thrown out of his car while trying to get to work and detained for over three days, resulting in him missing his daughter’s third birthday;
- Javier Ramirez, a severely diabetic father of four taken from his workplace and detained for over 96 hours despite having his identification and passport in his pocket;
- Julian Cardenas who now suffers from PTSD after he was detained for documenting ICE agents’ conduct and subsequently held for three days;
- Ceasar Saltos, who was detained for over eighteen hours despite having a photo ID and birth certificate that verified his citizenship and identity.
The many livestreams documenting the violence of U.S. Border Patrol and ICE agents, the executions of US citizens protesting ICE abuses, all turned the stomach of the majority of Americans. Negative polling pushed Trump to seek to move ICE out of the daily news cycle.
Meanwhile, many in the MAGA base have turned on Trump over a rapidly entangling war on Iran that keeps leaning toward the involvement of ground troops, as well as Trump’s allegiance to jobs-stealing AI data centers. While many remain allied with Trump’s scapegoating of immigrants, the day is not far off that broader understanding of ICE in practice—the facial recognition glasses, the databases of undesirable citizens, the attacks on U.S. citizens, and centralization of data and power during this largest presidential grift in U.S. history—will soon awaken millions more. Maybe even those who served in Afghanistan who still value integrity and loyalty.
Last month in Dallas, an Afghan man and veteran of the US war against the Taliban living in the U.S. under protected status died in ICE custody. Nazeer Paktyawal, was prouounced dead within a day of being detained. His brother, hearing Paktyawal was not well, called an ambulance to the ICE processing center. But it appears no one inside ever checked on him.
This is Capital & Main reporting:
“Paktyawal fought alongside U.S. Special Forces, including the 3rd Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group, as a member of Afghanistan’s special forces and was evacuated with his family when U.S. troops withdrew from the country and the Taliban took over in 2021.
"[The younger] Paktiawal said his brother inspired his own decision to work as a translator for U.S. troops. After their father died, Paktyawal [elder] joined the special forces to support their family in 2005, and Paktiawal [the younger] took the translator job in 2010 once he finished high school. … He said beyond supporting their family, both brothers believed in the U.S. mission to bring peace and stability to their country and were willing to sacrifice their lives for it.”
They were willing to sacrifice their lives in the hopes of freedom from the Taliban, with trust in the United States. And could not have imagined this outcome: victims of the United States of American's own War on Immigrants.
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UPDATE: The Uzcategui-Laborador family (the two children and stepmother snatched from the Alamo Heights bus stop referenced on opening of this column) are still detained at Dilley, but local community has raised $30,000 for legal fees. The family recently paused contributions until they know exactly what those final fees will be. There is no update yet on the wellbeing of Darisbell Quintero. A public hearing has been called
