ICE is breaking the deportation narrative that the Trump administration created
In President Donald Trump’s second term, mass deportation and immigration enforcement have been one of his administration’s foremost public concerns. In his 2024 presidential campaign, a central promise was to carry out the largest deportation of illegal immigrants in U.S. history. He claimed that unauthorized immigrants are either criminals or coming from jails and mental institutions over five hundred times and that unauthorized immigration is an “invasion” of America. Trump framed deportation as a necessity by emphasizing the supposed danger of undocumented immigrants and, therefore, the urgent need for the protection of Americans. Trump has been successful in achieving his mass deportation goals, as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has recorded record-high detainments, with over 73,000 this January. Yet, there is a growing sentiment amongst the American public that ICE operations have become too extreme. Recent ICE raids undermine the administration’s “criminal” narrative: detainees don’t match the administration’s description and agents lack accountability during the detention process.
On January 20, a five-year-old boy, Liam Conejo Ramos, was detained in Minnesota alongside his father and then sent to a Texas detention center. That day, Liam and his father had arrived home after preschool, when Liam was taken from the family’s running car by agents as the car pulled into the driveway. Afterwards, the agents led him to the door and ordered him to knock to check whether anyone else was home. The agents were using him as bait to see if any other detainable people were home. Yet, ICE argues that they have never used a child as bait, insisting instead that Liam was abandoned by his father, Adrian Alexander Conejo Arias. In addition, the spokesperson from the Department of Homeland Security added that the two were “illegal aliens” from Ecuador. However, this information turned out to be false when the family’s attorney later shared at a press conference that Liam and his father had gone through all of the correct legal processes to seek asylum, meaning that they were not undocumented immigrants. Liam is not the only child who has been detained by ICE agents; the superintendent of the school district of Columbia Heights, a suburban neighborhood in Minnesota, shares that Liam is one of the four children from the district who have been detained. Liam’s case sheds light on the multitude of problems ICE agents pose to everyday people. ICE exploiting a child without repercussions undermines accountability and causes irreparable harm to a family who are legally in America. Moreover, Liam’s case highlights how the targets of ICE arrests are not only the undocumented immigrants with a criminal record that Trump touted on the campaign trail, but rather innocent children and families caught in the fire.
Another ICE attack that has signaled a need for immediate change was the death of Alex Pretti. His death is the second of an American citizen by the hands of ICE agents in Minneapolis. On January 24, Pretti was protesting against ICE agents and recording them on his phone. A video recording reveals that Pretti was helping a woman who was shoved, leading to seven agents coming to pin Pretti to the ground. During this time, he was pepper sprayed repeatedly until one agent started to fire at close range around four times. Two other agents on the side also fired more than six times at Pretti, who had already collapsed. This tragic and devastating death has caused uproar amongst Americans and has become a tipping point for the public. The Trump administration labelled Pretti as a terrorist threat due to him carrying a firearm on his waistband, despite the fact that only his phone was in his hand at the time the agent fired. However, Pretti’s profile was far from those Trump promised ICE would target; he was a white American citizen working as an intensive care unit nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Affairs hospital. Moreover, he was a legal gun owner with no criminal record. Pretti’s death represents another break in Trump’s credibility on who ICE targets are. In addition, it highlights how ICE’s inconsistent and impulsive attacks are a national threat to anyone.Liam Conejo Ramos and Alex Pretti are not isolated cases of legal immigrants or citizens being detained or attacked. In the first nine months of Trump’s second term, more than 170 U.S. citizens were detained by ICE agents. These individuals have faced varying extents of violence, ranging from being held at gunpoint, knocked over, or held for more than two days. With the sharp uptick in ICE raids, the administration has strayed from the narrative President Trump touted during his campaign. Instead of deporting the worst of the worst criminals, immigrants with no criminal record are now the largest group in ICE detention centers. Immigration enforcement is not only misaligned with what the Trump administration tells the public, but instead closer to a morally problematic abuse of power and violation of rights. These actions call for concern on the widening gap between ICE and America’s democratic ideals.
