The stories read like dystopian fiction, but they are happening here, now, on American soil—ordinary citizens snatched from their lives, handcuffed, detained, and in some cases, even deported, all because the machinery of enforcement has been set to ruthless speed with no care for who gets crushed in the gears.
Kilmar Abrego García, a 29-year-old father of three and lawful resident married to a U.S. citizen, was abducted by ICE agents outside his child’s school, thrown into detention, and then shipped to a violent Salvadoran prison before a federal judge demanded his return, an order the Trump administration has brazenly defied.
Jennifer Vasquez Sura, his wife, stood before cameras trembling with rage and grief, declaring, “My husband was stolen from us—not by criminals, but by the U.S. government.”
Hers is not an isolated horror. Across the country, from the streets of Chicago to the deserts of Texas, U.S. citizens—parents, veterans, even children—are being swept up in a dragnet that no longer bothers to distinguish between undocumented immigrants and those who belong here by birth or by right.
In Newark, New Jersey, ICE agents stormed a seafood warehouse and detained a Puerto Rican man, despite Puerto Rico being U.S. territory and its people American citizens.
His employer watched in disbelief as armed officers scoffed at his protests, demanding papers from him and other Latino workers while ignoring white employees entirely.
In Virginia, Jensy Machado, a naturalized citizen, was yanked from his car at gunpoint while agents laughed at his insistence that he was American, their sneers captured on body camera footage.
On the Navajo Nation, tribal leaders issued urgent warnings after ICE agents repeatedly stopped Native citizens, demanding they prove their birthright on land their ancestors inhabited long before borders were drawn.
The cruelty reaches its most grotesque extremes in the case of a 10-year-old U.S. citizen girl, recovering from brain tumor surgery, who was detained with her undocumented parents at a Border Patrol checkpoint as they rushed her to a hospital.
Federal agents ignored her medical records, confiscated her anti-seizure medication, and deported the entire family to Mexico, where they now hide in fear of cartel violence.
“They treated my daughter like she was nothing,” her mother told advocates, her voice breaking. These are not mistakes.
They are the inevitable result of a system stripped of safeguards, where oversight offices have been shuttered, racial profiling is tacitly encouraged, and the only metric that matters is the number of bodies removed.
A 2021 Government Accountability Office report found that ICE had wrongly detained or deported at least 70 U.S. citizens in just five years, with nearly 900 more wrongfully issued detainers—numbers experts say are certainly undercounts in a system that operates with near-zero transparency.
“This is what happens when you replace due process with deportation quotas,” said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, an immigration law professor. “They’re not hunting criminals. They’re hunting people who look like they could be criminals.”
The administration’s response has been chilling in its indifference.
When pressed on García’s unlawful deportation, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt shrugged, suggesting a federal judge “contact President Bukele” of El Salvador if she wanted him back, as if the rights of U.S. families were merely a diplomatic trifle.
The echoes of history grow louder. Trump has openly praised Eisenhower’s 1950s “Operation Wetback,” which expelled over a million people—including untold numbers of U.S. citizens of Mexican descent—and now, with his new “Laken Riley Act,” he seeks to expand deportations to include anyone even accused of minor offenses, no conviction required.
The stage is set for a catastrophe of wrongful detentions, but the architects of this system do not care. “When you don’t have enforcement priorities, everyone is a target,” said Rosanna Eugenio of the New York Immigration Coalition. “And when everyone is a target, citizens will always, always be caught in the crossfire.” The question is no longer whether this will happen again, but who will be next—and whether anyone in power will lift a finger to stop it.
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