A few short weeks before returning to the White House, Donald Trump announced that he would keep his campaign promise to fix the U.S. immigration system by implementing the “largest deportation operation in American history.” What he didn’t mention? The draconian and inhumane methods his administration would use to scare, ensnare, and force immigrants to leave the country — and often their families — against their will.
Since Trump’s second inauguration, U.S. Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) agents, often masked and in unmarked vehicles, have been violating people’s constitutional rights and terrorizing “individuals with brown skin” through raids and seizures that are essentially “brazen, midday kidnappings,” according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Tens of thousands of men, women and even children with no criminal records have been accosted in their homes and workplaces, on the street, in the fields, and in stores, parking lots, courthouses, and elsewhere. As of July 13, nearly 57,000 people were reportedly in ICE detention, and while up-to-date figures for deportations are more difficult to track, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) told TIME in early June that it had deported more than 207,000 immigrants since January.
To counter Trump’s immigration dragnet, a coalition of immigrant rights, faith, rule of law, and pro-democracy organizations has come together to create Disappeared in America, an ongoing project to focus on the human toll of these aggressive policies, to call attention to the Trump administration’s disregard for due process, and to demand accountability from immigration enforcement agencies.
The site is filled with accounts of abuse and illegal behavior by ICE agents throughout the country, including the arrest of a Salvadoran mother of four who was driving to work with her daughter when ICE agents in Maryland shattered her car window and took her without showing a warrant and despite her having an active asylum case, and the pre-dawn raid In New Bedford, Massachusetts, when ICE agents in military gear used a battering ram to break into a private home without a warrant or any explanation as teenagers inside watched them hunt down two Guatemalan men.
“The Hispanic community is living in a state of terror,” Claudia Noemi Gatica Santos de Moreno, the consul general of Guatemala at the consulate in Providence, RI, said at a recent community event in New Bedford. “The law says one thing, but things play out differently in practice.”
“The reality is people are being essentially disappeared and are picked up roadside and their whereabouts may be unknown for days at a time,” Melissa Brennan, co-legal director of Maine’s Immigrant Legal Advocacy Project, told Maine Public. ICE is also executing a deliberate strategy of moving detainees out of state and even out of the country to prevent them from accessing community or legal support, she and others have pointed out.
“It became clear that there was a lot of interest in addressing the immigration issue as a rule of law issue, given the trampling of due process rights and other fundamental freedoms that the Trump administration [is] engaging in their immigration crackdown,” Rio Tazewell of Uplift Strategy Group told the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD).
Tazewell is involved in coordinating the grassroots working group at the Not Above the Law Coalition, which is behind the Disappeared in America campaign. Not Above the Law was founded during Trump’s first term in response to the anti-democratic policies he pursued at the time.
Disappeared in America also came together around an existing project of the Immigration Hub, which had already been collecting these stories for some time.
Developed by Immigration Hub, the Disappeared in America website serves as the centerpiece of the initiative, documenting the growing cases of tragic injustice and families torn apart due to the Trump administration’s heartless approach to detainments and deportations. As the stories on the site make clear, ICE is not focused on individuals with criminal records (“the worst of the worst,” as Trump had repeatedly claimed) but rather on people who have lived and worked in the U.S. for years — and in many cases, decades.
“When you look at this, it’s telling a story of current America and what people are feeling — the cruelty… and also… the outrage,” Beatriz Lopez, co-executive director of the Immigration Hub, told CMD.
Lopez says the point of the site is to highlight the emotional impact of Trump’s immigration policies, and to compile as many cases as possible in one place so that people can share the information with one another.
Shortly after launching the website in May, the campaign organized Disappeared in America Visual Action, a national photo petition day on June 26. The goal was to use social media to disseminate photos of those who had been disappeared over the previous 100 days, with the hope of raising broader awareness of the sheer scale of ICE activity and the impact it’s having on families and communities across the country.
A current focus of Disappeared in America is the role of local sheriffs in enabling and cooperating with ICE in their communities. Partnering with Safety Bound, the project highlights the wide discretion sheriffs have in determining how they work with ICE, which can include allowing ICE agents to use their facilities for interrogations, renting out jail beds for detentions, and even acting as immigration agents themselves under 287(g) agreements. The Talk to Your Sheriff initiative provides resources for activists to meet with local sheriffs to urge them not to collaborate with ICE.
Mounting Cruelty of ICE Operations
Disappeared in America’s collection of individual cases and stories lays bare several crucial takeaways from Trump’s immigration dragnet.
The first is the contradiction of an assurance repeatedly made by Trump during his campaign that deportations would be limited to violent criminals. Figures provided by ICE itself indicate that this is not what’s happening. Of the nearly 57,000 individuals now in detention, only about 28% are classified as “convicted criminals” (a designation Trump shares with them), meaning that 72% have no criminal convictions. And like Trump, many of these “convicted criminals” were never charged with violent crimes.
Another common thread is the Trump administration’s disregard for due process protections. By invoking the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) of 1798 — a wartime measure that has only been used three times in 227 years and is now being misused — the president is fast-tracking the pace of deportations by detaining and deporting individuals from any country he designates as an “enemy.”
The ACLU and Democracy Forward have filed a lawsuit challenging Trump’s authority to use the AEA, which is currently pending before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. While the Supreme Court lifted an injunction in April on procedural grounds, it also made clear that detainees have a right to challenge the constitutionality of their removal under the act.
The case of Andry Hernandez Romero highlighted by Disappeared in America focuses on one of the more than 200 Venezuelan migrants who were deported in March under the AEA. Romero is an asylum seeker who fled threats of violence due to his political beliefs and sexual orientation, but the White House alleges that he and the other migrants belong to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. They were deported without trials or orders of deportation, and without legal representation or any notice to their families. These migrants were detained in an El Salvadoran maximum-security prison known as “the cemetery of the living dead” for several months before being released to Venezuela — the country they had originally fled — in July as part of a prisoner swap.
Trump’s claims that only the “worst of the worst” would be targeted for deportation increasingly ring hollow. Another one of the many tragic cases highlighted by Disappeared in America is that of Heidy Sánchez, a Cuban migrant married to a U.S. citizen and the mother of a one-year-old child. She has no criminal record but was deported in April because of a missed immigration hearing in 2019.
Disappeared in America also spotlights Elsy Noemi Berrios, a Salvadoran immigrant and mother with an active asylum case. In March, she was violently arrested by ICE agents who took her into custody without showing a warrant. DHS claimed after her arrest that she is “an associate of the vicious MS–13 gang,” though the government has yet to provide any evidence to substantiate the allegation.
The Trump administration is also targeting college students involved in pro-Palestinian activism, raising serious free speech concerns. In March, ICE arrested Columbia University graduate student and green card-holder Mahmoud Khalil and held him in a Louisiana detention facility for more than three months without ever charging him with a crime. Rumeysa Ozturk, a Fulbright scholar pursing a doctoral degree at Tufts University, was also detained by ICE for six weeks, seemingly for co-authoring an op-ed that criticized her school’s response to pro-Palestinian activism. Like most of the other students arrested this year, she was never charged with a crime.
The dozens of other cases showcased via Disappeared in America’s campaign illustrate a disturbing pattern of detentions and deportations that are taking place on a mass scale without immigration hearings, judicial warrants, or other proper legal proceedings meant to protect every individual’s due process rights, regardless of citizenship status.
Escalating Pushback from the Public
Surveying public opinion on immigration and mass deportations is complex, as responses tend to be quite varied depending on the specific questions asked. But increasing numbers of Americans appear to be turning against Trump’s approach to immigration, with 59% of respondents to a July CNN poll answering no when asked if ICE should search and deport undocumented immigrants who have not committed any crimes on American soil. The same month, a Gallup poll reported a 62–35% disapproval rating of Trump on immigration and found that 78% of Americans support citizenship for undocumented immigrants, including majorities of all parties.
A survey conducted by PEW in June reveals that 65% of Americans believe there should be a way for undocumented immigrants to stay in the country legally. PEW also found that Americans have mixed to negative views on several key Trump administration immigration actions, with disapproval of ICE workplace raids and additional detention facilities at 54% and 55% respectively. A majority (59%) opposes DHS’s moves to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for immigrants from distressed countries like Haiti, Venezuela, and Afghanistan; suspend most applications for asylum (60%); and deport certain undocumented immigrants to a prison in El Salvador (61%).
More recent polling by CNN and SSRS shows that 55% of respondents describe the Trump administration’s actions in deporting undocumented immigrants as having gone too far, marking a 10 point increase in disapproval ratings since February. Gallup found that a record 79% of Americans now consider immigration a “good thing” rather than a “bad thing” for the country.
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