ICE Watch: Weaving a New World in the Twilight of Fascism's Sunset

Bienvenides, Welcome. I hope you have come here with an inquisitive mind and a gentle heart, willing to co-create spaces for fertile resistance in response to manufactured terror. ICE Watch is intended to be a monitor on the pulse of a dying social order, a way to track the decay of rule of law, and an insightful look into the belly of the beast. Together we will dissect the corpse of the American Dream.

I am confident that together we can grasp the horizon on the sunset of this fascist regime and follow that fading light into the dawn of a new day. Hold on to that hope with me with the same fervor Liam held to his father and Alex held to his dignity.

I’ll be writing to you every month with resources, reflections, reporting, and analysis on all things ICE in Texas. If this newsletter speaks to you, please make sure to sign up for updates. Email it to colleagues, family, and friends. If you are able, become a contributing member at $5 per month and leave your own thoughts, updates, and comments at the bottom of the newsletter. Email me roxana@deceleration.news with story tips or let me know what you want me to dig into next.

In Solidarity from the Land of the Spirit Waters,

Roxana J. Rojas

💡

Resource: Know Your Rights when Confronted by ICE (download, distribute!)

Voices from Angel Island

*Children of Dilley detention (ProPublica); tour of Angel Island (Wikimedia Commons), Door of Angel Island (U.S. Library of Congress). Deceleration Illustration*

The roots of today's assault on immigrant communities and people of color reach back to much earlier abuses.

"It’s been a long time since I left my home village;Who could know I’d end up imprisoned in a wooden building?I’m heartsick when I see my reflection, my handkerchief is soaked in tears;I ask you, what crime did I commit to deserve this?"

—Inscribed by Li Hai, South Village, Taishan

After visiting a Japanese internment camp on Gila River in 1943, Eleonor Roosevelt said in a speech advocating for the closure of the camps:

“We have no common race in this country, but we have an ideal to which all of us are loyal: we cannot progress if we look down upon any group of people amongst us because of race or religion. Every citizen in this country has a right to our basic freedoms, to justice and to equality of opportunity. We retain the right to lead our individual lives as we please, but we can only do so if we grant to others the freedoms that we wish for ourselves.”

The U.S. has a long and troubled history of capture and detention of "undesirables." From the forced migration of Native Americans onto reservations, African slaves onto plantations, Chinese rail workers into detention camps, Japanese onto internment camps, and the many peoples of America detained in immigration prisons, today’s iteration of hunting down, capturing, detaining and deporting is quite in line with historical practice.

We are 389 days into the second Trump administration. We have $75 billion more funding for ICE than the budget range of $6B-$10B seen over the past decade, making it the highest funded law enforcement agency in the U.S. and surpassing all federal agency funding combined. If ICE were an army it would have the 15th largest military budget in the world coming in second only to Canada’s $29.3B annual budget.

There are over 73,000 people detained in immigration prisons, more than ever in U.S. history. There were more deaths in ICE custody in 2025 than there had been in over 20 years, with this year already at six. Murders, assaults, and shootings at the hands of ICE agents outnumber the immigrant involved crime rates cited by the administration as justification for the violent expansion of enforcement.

In fact, there was a 2,450% increase in detention of people with no criminal record. The American Immigration Council reported on research that disproves the tenets of the Administration’s reasoning for upending communities finding that:

“stricter immigration enforcement does not reduce crime” and “no association existed between state-level undocumented immigrant concentrations and homicide, robbery, or assault.”

Indiscriminate use of executive orders and the stripping of legal status of 1.6 million immigrants has led to an expansion of a “detainable” population and therefore a wider target for surveillance, policing, and arrest. With the widest dragnet we have ever seen, the increased number of sites for violation of constitutional, civil, and human rights of anyone living within these borders puts the U.S. on par with the very authoritarian regimes it criticises.

Legal immigrants and those with other protections such as TPS and DACA have been wrongfully detained. In 2025 alone there were 170 cases of U.S citizens extrajudicially detained and several documented cases of use of excessive force and abuse against citizens. The U.S. exit from many of the supranational organizations and agreements that served as a status quo for the protection of human rights coupled with the engagement of third country agreements for the expansion of the deportation machine to a global network is quite telling. One does start to understand how it happened that much of the world looked away or even supported the genocidal endeavors of the Nazi regime.

Immigration detention is only possible because international human rights are incapable of fully addressing the human interests that are affected whenever the national state bases the exercise of power on its territorial sovereignty. —Galina Cornelisse

It is clear that this aggressive attack on civil society is not purely about protecting national sovereignty and territorial integrity, and that as Cornelisse argues, “immigration detention is not solely a technology that aims at reserving the territorial state system and its concomitant link between territory and rights.” Not only is it “a tool by which states violently reproduce the territoriality of the global state system,” it deliberately aims to shock, destabilize, and bring terror on a population so that life for this category of “detainable” bodies is made impossible. So much so that the administration has touted the staggering—albeit false—number of 2 million self deportations.

As many of us have already seen first hand, the domino effect of immigration enforcement has stifled the economy, crippled construction, agriculture, and hospitality industries, hijacked the already waning trust in government and eroded safety for all. This campaign has led to children coming home from school to find their parents gone, students whose friends have gone missing, doctors with a docket of missed appointments from patients too scared to keep them, employers with no call, no shows from dependable employees who have never called in to work a day in their life.

Even so, the government seeks to expand and aggressively press on with this project and increase immigration detention capacity by 76,500 to almost 150,000, just under the 153,000 inmates detained in the entire federal prison system.

Despite the fact that the detention centers already in operation are lacking medical personnel and ICE has demonstrated it is incapable of operating without case after case of abuse and nefarious conditions, they will expand.

What we are experiencing today collectively binds us to a responsibility. We have a responsibility to each other, to our communities, and to our humanity. The networks of support and aid seen in the wake of the assault on Minneapolis and the increasingly quotidian violations of the basic principles of “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness” throughout the country have demonstrated what we are collectively capable of achieving, building, imagining.

We can dream of a new social order, one that does not depend on a national identity minted by a government.

This newsletter is intended to be a vehicle for information, but also a conversation for collective consciousness building. By bringing you voices from our communities, survivors of immigration detention and enforcement, experts, activists, and readers like you, the very act of engagement brings us closer.

As weavers of this new order, may we join to pull together the threads of the fabric of society and make something new. May we together build understanding for collective resistance against the loss of our humanity.

Letter to an ICE Agent

'Letter to an ICE Agent,' by Dr. H.H. Coyotl read by Roxana Rojas.

The heaviness of our current reality requires creativity and imagination to propel us towards the future we want for ourselves and future generations. In the same vein that painters, musicians, poets, and other creatives imagined a different world through their art during times of political strife, we too can participate in the coloring of our future and the creative analysis of our present. As the Zapatistas wrote communiques from the Lacandon jungle under the name of Subcomandante Marcos to expose the realities of neoliberal violence on indigenous communities, and as Albert Camus wrote letters to a fictional German friend during the Nazi occupation to argue for the French cause, this letter to a fictional ICE agent penned under the name of Dr. H.H. Coyotl is a call to the resistance of our time.

I. Days and Nights of Love and War

Comunicado callejero: desde la Calle Commerce para el pueblo

You said to me: “You hate this country. You are ‘the enemy within,’ ‘vermin,’ ‘a domestic terrorist.’ The greatness of my country is beyond price. Anything is good that contributes to this greatness. We are the patriots, and WE are making America great again.” And I said: “I cannot believe in this brand of greatness that comes at such a price, at the cost of our ideals, of reason itself, our very humanity. A hollow greatness that is won with blinkered eyes and shuttered hearts, that only knows violence and the boot and the fearful stunned silence they command. There are means that cannot be excused. And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.”

We were young once, together, dreamy children who rooted for the same silver screen heroes, cheered the little guy with the laser sword against the forces of Empire, played at these characters, battling imaginary foes that wore the faces of movie villains. Now, what character are you playing when you don that khaki? What heart beats behind that freshly bought panel vest? Whose face do you wear behind that mask, and what are you so desperately seeking to protect as you slip it over that face?

In middle school we read the Diary of Anne Frank, banned now perhaps, and I remember sharing your outrage at the cowardly vendidos who sold her out, appalled that a neighbor or friend could do such a thing – even to save their own skin. We vowed, with the courage of children, we’d never fold like that. Well, now, friend, out there there is a little Latina Anne Frank, huddled, fearful of your boots, of your guns, of your heavy gloved hand on her door, for 12 months out of school, for 12 months without comfort, 12 months of uncertain mornings, of strained days and fitful sleep in the long American night.

You said I hate this country, and perhaps, upon reflection, you are correct, but only if you mean this country of yours, where naked aggression trumps the Constitution, where might and right are confused, where rights, no longer civil or human, are suspended at the whim of an elderly autocrat, and the law applies only to others, a country where violence is more natural than thinking and cruelty is the point, where blatant lies cover the hateful actions of the powerful, straining reason and belief both.

This country of yours is peopled not by fellow citizens on a common journey, united in a common project, the common flourishing of all. It is peopled by the creatures you’ve deformed by your actions, bundles of reactions, craving the simplest digestible version of the story, driven and manipulated by fear alone. No, yours is not a country, but a terrifying and terrorized fortress of cold and ignorant stone. Perhaps I prefer MY country, the complicated diverse Republic, of spontaneity, courage, creativity, braver than the bullying impulse blindly lurching its way to significance, bigger than the oblivion of thoughtlessness, big enough in heart and mind to inspire, and accept, and nurture many worlds.

I would like to live in such a Republic. There are many of us who still believe and struggle and work for such a place. Who refuse to give in to apathy and loneliness, the paralysis and despair that is the intended aim of all authoritarian regimes – to make us feel alone so that we are reconciled to your rule. There are many of us who strive, together, to be more than little balls of fear, anxiety, and hatred, who are assembling networks of care, to look after one another, and to meet the demands of the day.

We intend to outlive your destructive structures, habits, ignorance, violence, the fear that you are sowing; and we mean more than just outlasting or surviving these. We mean to assemble, and really live in, this larger world we still believe in; to shame the smallness of your world with our joy; to outflank your violence with preparation, and care and humor; to eclipse your insecurity-driven need for a Fuhrer by being true to ourselves, our ideals, the ideals of this country, speaking in our own voices, caring for ourselves and each other as a practice of freedom. We aim to wrest poetry from this fallen world, to love. After all, “Fear and destruction are the major emotional sources of fascism… But eros belongs to democracy.”

And there are millions of us.

Perhaps I will see you again, after this storm passes and your side is defeated, because, make no mistake, your side will be defeated. Its thin veneer of legitimacy is already cracking under the weight of its own contradictions, the mounting burden of sustaining the lie at the heart of all oligarchy and authoritarianisms, and the increasingly laughable contortions of your apologists; you keep giving us so many opportunities to be heroes, while even your infamy must be masked and sustained by lies; your house, built with only one tool, violence, teeters already, and your would-be victims and would-be submissive subjects are learning that inevitable, vital lesson; they are learning not to be afraid.

(With apologies to A. Camus, E. Galeano, R. Bolano, T Adorno, et al)

— Dr. H.H. Coyotl