Munir Abdul-Hakim, Muslims for Social Justice / People’s Power Lab
Rania Masri asked me to write a reflection on “the surge in kidnappings by ICE.” She’s right to call it that. Ten thousand people detained in five days isn’t law enforcement. It’s ten thousand families torn apart in less time than it takes most of us to finish a work week.
These aren’t the people the government points to in press conferences. Most are parents, workers, and taxpayers who did everything asked of them and got detained anyway.
The bait-and-switch
This country recruited these workers, not with open arms, but with open industries. Nearly 1 in 7 construction workers here is undocumented. 1 in 8 in our fields. 1 in 14 in our hospitals. They’re the backbone of entire sectors, kept exactly where employers wanted them: cheap and disposable.
And they paid for the privilege. Undocumented immigrants paid nearly $97 billion in taxes in a single recent year, into Social Security and Medicare they’ll never draw from. In most states, they pay a higher effective tax rate than the top 1%. The people being hunted at check-ins are often paying more into this country than the billionaires cheering their removal.
Compare that to Ellis Island (1892-1954): tired, poor, huddled masses, given a shot at citizenship. That door is closed now. Today’s version is: come, work for less than you’re worth, stay invisible, and when we’re done with you, we’ll treat you like a criminal and lock you up.
What “detained” actually means
We say “detained” like it’s neutral. It isn’t. Advocates outside one Florida ICE facility described people crammed together, sleeping on concrete floors, with limited food, water, or hygiene, conditions one organizer called an attack on human dignity. People fainting from heat in processing centers never built to hold them.
Human Rights Watch found 52 deaths in ICE custody in this administration’s first 500 days, the highest mortality rate in over two decades, nearly four times the last administration’s rate. At least 10 detainees have taken their own lives since last year, in a system that used to report one suicide a year, if that. Detainees at one New Jersey facility went on hunger strike over spoiled, worm-ridden food, medical neglect, and pressure to sign away their legal rights. The UN’s human rights chief has called for these deaths to be investigated and flagged the use of solitary confinement.
That’s what “detained” means: a system where a mandatory appointment can end with you sick, unheard, or dead.
Why the quiet matters
This surge isn’t happening through the splashy raids we got used to. It’s quieter. Field offices told 2,000 arrests a day is the new floor; officers pulled off everything else, seven days a week, arrests happening at check-ins, traffic stops, sidewalks, job sites. Compliance itself has become the trap. That’s meanness, dressed up in procedure.
And it’s everywhere now: LA and San Diego, Houston and Dallas, New York and Newark, Chicago, Nashville, Charlotte, two hours up the road from a lot of us. Not a regional storm. A national posture.
Why this matters to the movement
Black liberation struggle has always understood this: the state doesn’t need to announce itself to be violent; it just needs a captive population and a system efficient enough to keep the cruelty out of the headlines. We’ve seen this architecture before, aimed at us. Recognizing it here, aimed at immigrant families, isn’t a stretch. It’s the same machine, different name.
These are people who wanted nothing more than to raise their kids here, pay their taxes, and one day call themselves citizens. Instead, this country took their labor and offered them a cage.
So we refuse to let the system stay invisible. We show up at check-ins so people aren’t alone. We build rapid-response networks before the knock on the door. We say the names, cite the numbers, and make sure worm-infested meals and concrete floors don’t get buried under next week’s news cycle.
If they won’t make noise about what they’re doing to these families, we will.
