The ICE Chronicles: A Journey to the Twilight Zone

But first, a piece of good news: The 252 immigrants from Venezuela sent to El Savador’s notorious Cecot prison, known for its inhumane conditions, including torture, isolation and daily beatings by guards, were released last month back to their home country. Far from being “some of the most violent savages on the face of the earth,” as Trump had claimed, the vast majority had only immigration violations, and 118 of them were snatched out of the U.S. in the middle of their immigration cases, which were supposed to protect them from deportation, according to ProPublica, which spent four months tracking them.

In a deal with the US negotiated by Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, the 252 men were released in exchange for 10 American prisoners held by Venezuela, as well as dozens of Venezuelan political prisoners. After a joyous arrival, some talked with journalists about the nightmarish conditions and state-sanctioned torture, including sexual assault, they had endured in the Salvadoran prison. Six men interviewed by ProPublica said that “at some point while they were there for four months in that prison, they thought about killing themselves, that they wished that they were dead instead of continuing to be tortured.” Maduro had been lobbying for their release for months, describing them on television as “kidnapped.“

Kristi Noem as ICE Barbie

A while back I was reading about Kristi Noem, the head of Homeland Security and ICE, who is perhaps best known for killing her family’s puppy and mugging for photoshoots as a heavily armed ICE agent or fashion model in front of a Salvadoran torture prison. It never snows where we live in Berkeley, California, but that night Noem emerged in my dream during a snowstorm, sailing down the hill of our street in a sleigh dragged by Huskies. She was wearing black jackboots and a long suede coat with a fur-lined hood. Behind her on the sled was a tall cylinder of barbed wire, and hanging from it were six dead frozen Huskies. 

I was standing, in shock, on our front porch, and Noem stopped the sleigh to look at me. I stared back, waiting, feeling a chill much like residents of Narnia might upon seeing the White Witch. Then, with a slap of the reins, she set off down the hill. The light shifted slightly, and high above me, in the clouds, I saw a giant golden retriever, running in the opposite direction.

There is a lot a therapist could probably say about that dream – my therapist certainly did – but let’s move on to the reality of ICE, which is still more chilling. Commentators from Harvard Law Review to Rolling Stone have captured the horror of ICE’s secret police force and detention centers and the targeting of immigrants, especially Latinos, by Trump administration officials, especially Stephen Miller, who recently screamed in a meeting that he wanted ICE to ramp up arrests of immigrants to 3,000 a day.

“The recent ICE activity in Los Angeles has left many in our immigrant communities feeling a renewed sense of fear, grief and hypervigilance, Long Beach, California, therapist Lizette Sanchez recently told The 19th “These raids often reactivate intergenerational trauma for families who have experienced displacement or detention in the past.” 

Worse, Trump’s cruelty is spreading. Here’s what South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace recently said on Fox News: “One of my favorite things to watch on YouTube these days are the court hearings where illegals are in court and ICE shows up to drag them out of court and deport them. I can think of nothing more American.” Political commentator Jeff Tiedrich’s response said it all: “Ugh, just… ugh.” 

Asked about the penchant for violence and sadism surfacing in Washington, DC, and across the country, psychiatrist and former Yale professor Bandy Lee, author of the The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, told MindSite News: “Many mark this Fourth of July as the day our democracy died. Trump Contagion is what got us here. We reelected an unfit leader not by persuasion, not by shrewd calculation, and not even because of self-interest primarily – but by a spread of symptoms that we failed to contain when we still could. It was possible while we were still well enough to recognize it and not yet in the grips of emotional compulsion.” 

This ugliness underlies the recent intimidation of elected officials exercising their Constitutional rights to visit and inspect ICE detention centers, to protest, or even to ask a question, as U.S. Senator Alex Padilla of California tried to do before he was dragged off, wrestled to the floor and handcuffed at a press gathering by Homeland Security’s Kristi Noem.

It also surfaces in the violence of ICE police. This May in Florida, 18-year-old US citizen Kenny Laynez, who is Latino, was profiled, mocked and tasered in an arrest by agents of the Florida Highway Patrol and the US Border Patrol working with ICE. Unbeknownst to the agents, the episode was videotaped and recorded. In the recording, Laynez protests that he was born and raised in West Palm Beach, while agents scoff and comment that they could have ”taken him out,” with one saying, “I can smell a $30,000 bonus.” 

In Camarillo, dozens of farm workers were arrested in a chaotic ICE raid, with tragic results: A man who had spent a decade picking tomatoes in California and sending money to his wife and children in Mexico fled ICE and fell from a roof to his death; he was taken off life support after his wife traveled from Mexico to see him. On July 8 in Ontario, Calif., ICE police chased a young landscaper from Honduras into a surgical unit, where nurses in scrubs tried to protect him. When they demanded to see a warrant and told the ICE agents to let the man go and leave, an agent shoved a nurse against the wall, choking her and causing her to scream. 

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said ICE “provoked the city” by chasing people through Home Depots and car washes and showing up at schools, emergency rooms and homeless shelters. “We know that Los Angeles is the test case,” Bass told the Los Angeles Times. “And we will stand strong, and we do so because the people snatched off city streets and chased through parking lots are our neighbors, our family members, and they are Angelenos. Let me be clear. I won’t be intimidated.” 

And then there’s this. In late June, Homeland Security posted a message on X celebrating “Alligator Alcatraz,” an immigrant detention camp horror made of cages in the Everglades, replete with an image of alligators wearing ICE hats outside:

Far-right Trump supporter and advisor Laura Loomer celebrated this with a post on X: “Alligator Alcatraz. Feeding illegals to the gators. We need more of this energy.” As evidence that there truly is no bottom, she tweeted again: “Alligator lives matter. The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now” – a number that just happens to be the approximate number of Latinos in the US. Not to be outdone, the Florida Republican Party began selling Alligator Alcatraz T-shirts.

Besides its brutality, the ICE detention system is characterized by lawlessness. According to Newsweek, 12 migrants have died in detention since October 2024 and more deaths are expected. In “Alligator Alcatraz,” detainees are being held without charges and barred from seeing their lawyers; the conditions are miserable, with unsanitary conditions and floodwater, a lack of adequate food and medical treatment, and mosquitoes plaguing both guards and prisoners. MindSite News has cited reporting on horrific conditions at an ICE women’s detention center in Miami, Florida and NBC has covered similar reports from California, Texas, Louisiana, Washington and New Jersey, where detainees have reported hunger, food shortages and sickness. 

And things may get even worse. Congress is giving $45 billion to ICE to expand its detention system, on top of a nearly $30 billion boost to its budget between now and 2029.

This level of funding, ACLU attorney Eunice Cho told Newsweek, enables ICE to build a detention system “that is larger than the entire federal Bureau of Prisons population put together, under the care of someone like (Border Czar) Tom Homan who has expressed total disregard for the fact that people are dying in custody.”

Ongoing coast-to-coast protests

In December of last year, we published an eerily prescient essay about ICE called “Confronting Immoral Actions, We Can Aim to Stand Up, Not Look On,” by psychologist Kaethe Weingarten, a former associate clinical professor of psychology in the department of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.

“In this post-election, pre-inauguration period I have one overriding feeling: panic,” says Weingartner, now director of the Witness to Witness Program at the Migrant Clinicians Network. “My dilemma: Imagine that I am walking down the street heading to the mailbox and I see an ICE officer approaching a young woman emerging from a house she has just spent the morning cleaning. In this scenario, I am a bystander, about to be a witness. What I do or don’t do matters.”

The actions of the Trump administration and ICE are a kind of psychological warfare intended to demoralize and disempower. But while some may succumb, millions have not. Trump’s immigration policies are increasingly unpopular: In polls taken after Trump sent the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles to quell anti-ICE demonstrations over the protests of California’s government, the majority of Americans disapprove of ICE (47% oppose ICE compared to 43% favorable to the agency). And at least ten million people have taken to the streets in protest. 

Communities are also forming groups to protect immigrant workers, and thousands are shooting and posting videos on social media that document the brutal – and often illegal – arrests of vendors, gardeners, cooks, day laborers, construction workers, fruit pickers, and others, some showing ICE agents throwing people to the ground, beating them or smashing the windows of cars with children inside. Besides trying to stop unlawful ICE arrests, people are using their phones to obtain migrants’ names and phone numbers to send to their families as they are hauled off.

ICE agents’ morale is also at rock-bottom, according to The Atlantic. In one recent video on social media, I saw several ICE agents berated by a small Latina woman who forbade them to enter her private business; inside, a Latino man froze in place. The ICE agents shifted uneasily from foot to foot. I couldn’t see the agent’s expressions – they were wearing masks – but their slumped shoulders and soft voices suggested uncertainty and confusion, possibly even shame. They stood close together, looking in different directions. Then, without entering the facility or arresting anyone, they left.

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We’ll continue to cover these issues, as we’ve done in stories about the mental health support needed for immigrant youth, about bilingual therapists working to help clients deal with their stress and despair and healing circles for migrants in Chicago. We invite you to share your stories by reaching out to us at info@mindsitenews.org.