The tip line is ringing, and the joke is so bitter it curdles the coffee.
In a late December plea that sounded less like a law enforcement bulletin and more like the frustrated sigh of a man who has heard one too many bad punchlines, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement asked the public to stop.
Please, stop calling to report an undocumented girl named Anne Frank hiding in the attics of Republican lawmakers.
This is not a drill, but it is a performance.
The immigration tip line number, 1-866-DHS-2-ICE, has become a stage for a national nervous breakdown, a satirical seance where citizens invoke the ghost of a Jewish child murdered by fascists to haunt the American agency tasked with hunting the hidden.
On Christmas Eve, the absurdity escalated: reports of a pregnant foreign couple seeking refuge, and pointed inquiries about the visa status of a certain portly gentleman in a red suit making chimney entries.
The goal is obstruction through allegory, a deliberate clogging of the bureaucratic pipes with a historical solvent meant to dissolve the official narrative.
But in America today, the official narrative is armored in Kevlar and precedent. ICE, turbocharged by the 2025 “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” is now the most powerful federal law enforcement entity in history.
Its officers move in the gray space between cop and soldier, in masks and mufti, their unmarked cars a rolling argument against transparency. The violent tactics used by these modern American Gestapo agents are routinely captured on cell phone video and shared with the world, which is watching in disbelief.
The agency views the prank calls as a nuisance, a distraction from the serious work of national security. Many Americans view the agency and its thugs as a threat to our democratic republic.
The callers view their actions as a moral emergency broadcast, a warning that the mechanisms of enforcement are drifting into a shadow from which some believe history may not return.
The raw nerve these calls scratch was exposed just weeks earlier.
In Maryland, Dulce Consuelo Díaz Morales, a woman claiming U.S. citizenship, spent 25 days in ICE detention.
Her attorneys say they presented a birth certificate; ICE still insists that she is an illegal alien from Mexico.
Then, in Minneapolis, on Jan. 7, there was the crack of a single gunshot.
Renee Nicole Good, a U.S. citizen, an award-winning poet, a mother of three, was killed in her SUV by an ICE officer.
The officer was identified in court records as Jonathan Ross, an Iraq War veteran who months earlier had been dragged by a vehicle and badly injured during that incident.
Now, the machinery of accountability has ground to a halt.
Minnesota’s Attorney General, Keith Ellison, says the FBI is blocking a state investigation into Good’s death, with federal claims of immunity for Officer Ross.
Ellison calls it “Third Reich stuff,” an “unprecedented attack on American institutions.”
The Trump administration has denounced this language while defending its agent, citing the earlier dragging incident to explain a split-second decision made in fear.
So here we are, in this screaming feedback loop. The state cites operational trauma to justify a fatal outcome. A citizen invokes the Holocaust to condemn the operation itself. And in the middle, a tip line bleats uselessly, carrying jokes that are not funny and accusations that are deadly serious.
The callers dialing about Anne Frank are not historians. They are citizens watching the news, drawing a line from a Maryland detention to a Minneapolis street to the sealed attic of their own conscience.
They are using the only tool left that feels both safe and subversive: a voice on a phone, pretending to report a ghost, hoping against hope that someone in power will feel a chill and finally understand what, and who, they are actually hunting.