“I got lucky,” José told me. “Because they got the wrong person.”
José, 28, who did not give his last name for fear of retribution from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said he was leaving his house in rural Southwest Colorado recently “when two federal SUVs pulled out, blocking my path in both directions.”
José is not a criminal, though 10 years ago he crossed the border into the United States from Mexico without legal documentation. Since then, he’s worked as a painter and a chef, has always paid federal and state taxes, and has never been in trouble with the law.
That morning, though, he was a target: “It was the migra, and they pulled me out of the driver’s seat, forced me into one of their cars and asked me for identification.”
Because the ICE agents were looking for someone else that day, and because rural Colorado has limited jail space to hold detained migrants, they let José go. But they told him he had to show up for an interview at an ICE substation.
José didn’t go to his interview. “I don’t want them to find me,” he told me. “I’m always looking over my shoulder. My life is here, but I’ve moved and have to start over again.”
José’s experience is not unique. Scores of people with darker skin – including Native Americans – have fallen prey to the new administration’s trawl-net approach to immigration enforcement.
During his campaign, President Donald Trump repeatedly said, “I will launch the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America.” His stated goal is to deport 1 million immigrants before 2026.
During the first 50 days of Trump’s second term, ICE arrested nearly 33,000 people – but only half them were convicted criminals. ICE also detained foreign students for voicing their political opinions, arrested at least one legal U.S. resident and wrongfully held foreign visitors for weeks, including a woman from Canada who was legally in the United States.
Created as part of the Department of Homeland Security, ICE was charged with policing immigration in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Before 2003, immigration enforcement was primarily handled by other federal agencies operating within a far less militarized framework. Two decades later, ICE has ballooned into a federal behemoth.
ICE says its work is essential for national security, but its more than 20,000 employees operate with extraordinary freedom. Local and county police usually know and understand the community they work in, and in case of misconduct, they can be held accountable for their actions. But not ICE.
Under Trump, ICE has become increasingly aggressive in its tactics while appearing to focus on non-criminals and activists. In recent months, it has concentrated on apprehending people far above the U.S.-Mexico border; used military planes as a tool of deportation; outsourced detention to third parties, including private prisons and sovereign nations like El Salvador; and enlisted wartime law to bypass due process.
For the first time, ICE is also employing data from the Internal Revenue Service to identify some undocumented residents – a move that could also have devastating consequences for legal residents and citizens who get swept up with the undocumented.
Nayda Benitez, a director for the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, oversees a state hotline where people can report ICE activity in their community. “We’ve seen a huge increase in reports,” she said. In one Colorado town, she said, ICE showed up at a trailer park, “and they put a woman into handcuffs who was a U.S. citizen.”
As an advocate for immigrants in Southwest Colorado, I see the contributions of migrants everywhere. Children of immigrants attend local schools, and their parents work in every sector of the economy, including restaurants, transportation, construction, farming and ranching, hotels, resorts and hospitals. I also see the fear that immigrants are forced to endure, and the countless ways in which ICE agents disregard our nation’s most cherished rights, including freedom of speech, due process, protection from government excess, and cruel and unusual punishment.
“If you look at authoritarian leaders throughout history, our nation is repeating some key patterns like academic censorship and the marginalization, criminalization and dehumanization of specific social groups,” Benitez said.
It’s time to take a stand against federal overreach, and ICE is the right place to start.
Benjamin Waddell, Ph.D., is professor and chairman of Sociology and Human Services at Fort Lewis College and a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring conversation about the West. He lives in Durango.
