“ICE is out of control,” goes the headline at Slate. “Donald Trump’s ICE is tearing families apart,” goes the headline at the New Yorker. “ICE wants to deport the caregiver of a 6-year-old paraplegic boy,” goes the headline at Daily Kos. “ICE targets sanctuary cities, arrests 33 in Northwest,” goes the headline at NPR.
Reading these stories, we learn that ICE just arrested a 55-year-old chemistry professor in Lawrence, Kansas, who’s lived in this country for 31 years and has three children, all of whom are American citizens; according to the Washington Post, he was arrested on his front lawn in front of his children, and his wife was threatened with arrest if she tried to hug her husband goodbye. We learn that after ICE moved to deport a married man in Arizona who now has five children, one of whom has leukemia, the father was forced to take refuge in a church with his ailing son. We learn that ICE denied an appeal from an Ohio man who is a specially trained caregiver for a 6-year-old paraplegic boy who depends on his care. We learn that ICE ordered an HIV-positive gay man in Miami deported to Venezuela, a country in a state of economic collapse; since the man won’t be able to get the medications he needs to keep him alive, his deportation amounts to a death sentence.
Every day ICE rounds up more and more law-abiding but undocumented residents of the United States, many of whom were brought here as children. “ICE made a hundred and forty thousand arrests last year, an increase of thirty per cent compared to the year before, and the number of so-called non-criminal arrests has doubled,” reports the New Yorker about Trump’s first year in office.