The ugly truth behind ICE agents’ masks | Will Bunch Newsletter

Victoria Brownworth was one of those forces of nature you tend to find here in Philadelphia. She was a pioneering LGBTQ journalist whose work in recent years appeared in the Philadelphia Gay News, the Inquirer Opinion section (here and here), and too many other outlets to count. In recent years, she did all this from a wheelchair, and barely slowed down after the heartbreaking death of her wife and a debilitating battle with cancer. Victoria died last week, leaving a world that’s much diminished without her pounding on her keyboard.

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The 19-year-old college student had literally done nothing wrong when a cop in Dalton, Ga., pulled her over earlier this month. Indeed, a subsequent investigation showed that the vehicle whose driver made an illegal left turn and triggered the police activity was a different one from the truck that Ximena Arias Cristobal was driving that day. But driving skill was never the real issue for an ambitious young woman whose family brought her from Mexico to the United States, without documentation, when she was only 4 years old.

Dashcam video shows the Dalton cop asking Arias Cristobal: “You ever been to jail?”

“No, sir,” she answered.

“Well, you’re going.”

“I cannot go to jail,” replied the freshman at a small Georgia college. “I have my finals next week. My family depends on this.”

But the 19-year-old did, in fact, spend exam week behind bars. She was caught up in the nationwide dragnet to arrest and deport undocumented immigrants with the ambitious long-term goal of removing as many as 11 million or so people from the United States during the Donald Trump presidency that launched in January. The 47th president had won after promising voters a campaign of “mass deportation.”

But mass deportation was never supposed to look like this — terrorizing a young woman who’d followed all the rules (even the traffic rules) since grade school and was chasing the American Dream of a college diploma. Trump and his minions had promised the electorate that their first priority was to go after criminal immigrants like murderers and rapists.

On Trump’s first full day in office, his immigration czar Tom Homan bragged that the 308 people arrested for deportation were “serious criminals. Some of them were murderers. Some of them were rapists. Some of them raped a child.” But statistics have shown that close to half of the migrants — 48.1% in one late March survey — targeted by the Trump regime have committed no crimes whatsoever since entering America without authorization. And many of the others have only low-level offenses — like traffic violations.

With few actual rapists on the lam, with several high-profile, big-city raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, resulting in tiny numbers of arrests, and with Trump himself demanding a much higher level of deportations toward a short-term target of 1 million a year, ICE and its allies in law enforcement are now going for lower-hanging fruit.

Last week, immigrants and their attorneys and advocates were shocked to find gaggles of federal agents — most wearing masks, in casual attire and without badges — in the corridors of U.S. immigration courts in large cities, including New York, Phoenix, Los Angeles and Seattle.

These asylum seekers and their allies are reporting that agents have been arresting the migrants who’ve not only followed the rules and shown up for their hearings, but who in many cases had their initial immigration charges dismissed in the courtroom. The surge in courthouse ICE operations appears to target refugees who’ve been in the United States less than two years and are eligible for expedited deportation.

For example, the Guardian reported that Juan Serrano, a 28-year-old refugee from Colombia, showed up at Miami immigration court for a required check-in where the judge told him that he was free to leave. But when he did, federal agents swooped in to handcuff him and place him in a van with other arrested migrants.

“It’s bad policy,” Lindsay Toczylowski, president of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center, or ImmDef, told the news org. “By putting immigration officers in the courtrooms, they’re discouraging people from following the processes, punishing people for following the rules.”

But those ICE agents aren’t just masking their faces, but also masking the ugly truth of what a mass deportation program really look like in America in 2025. The U.S. population of undocumented immigrants doesn’t have huge numbers of hardened criminals — not surprising since study after study has shown migrants commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans.

So far under Trump, Homan, and the program’s cartoonishly evil mastermind Stephen Miller, the flurry of ICE raids or in-the-street arrests of student protesters or traffic-stop seizures have certainly produced a nonstop stream of headlines. What it hasn’t done is sharply increase the level of deportations beyond the rates under Trump’s predecessors, including Democrat Joe Biden.

That’s because the overall deportation number largely consists of two very different scenarios. The first involves new migrants seized crossing the U.S. southern border who can often be quickly deported, which fueled most of the numbers during Biden’s presidency when there was a surge in asylum seekers. But a crackdown launched by Biden in mid-2024, followed by Trump’s draconian policies, has slowed border apprehensions to a trickle.

Team Trump is hoping to produce bigger numbers with a surge in a different manner of deportation: the inland arrests of some of those 11 million or so migrants who’ve been in America for a while. Most of them are working in essential jobs, like construction or farm work, that aren’t being filled by native-born Americans, while paying their taxes and planting roots in their communities. Others, like the arrested Arias Cristobal, are going to school with the dream of someday thriving as upwardly mobile Americans.

A majority of the public, including a lot of folks who voted for Trump last November, didn’t want to see these immigrants deported — shuttering a favorite restaurant, leaving critical jobs unfilled, or emptying church pews. But the Homans and Millers of a cruelty-is-the-point regime knows the only way to actually do a mass deportation is to pull over motorists for Driving While Brown, or flock to courthouses like vultures. These cowardly ICE agents want to shoot their fish in a barrel.

So far, the faces of Trump’s push for mass deportation look like Jose Adalberto Herrera, a 17-year-old passenger in a minivan pulled over by a Maine state trooper, or college students like Rümeysa Öztürk, snatched off the street by ICE agents after she was ID’ed on a pro-Israel website as a co-author of a student newspaper op-ed supporting Palestine. Does any of this make you feel safer... or feel better about being an American?

The bigger problem is that these arrests are lowering the bar for a future of actual mass deportation to come. Team Trump has called for adding some 20,000 additional deportation agents, involving the National Guard, which would amp up arrests. What’s more, the sweeping budget plan passed last week by the House finds a whopping $150 billion in new money that would build the network of gulags needed to detain all the refugees that Trump is so desperate to detain.

It’s good news, for now, that after a wave of publicity about her arrest, the teenage Arias Cristobal as well as her dad, who was arrested by immigration cops a week earlier, have been released on bail. And the Dalton police officer who wrongly arrested her in the first place has left the force. The bright light of publicity has brought temporary justice in some of these cases.

But the regime is still pushing to eventually send Arias Cristobal and her father back to Mexico, and the odds are that the government will eventually succeed. The bigger picture is that for every undocumented immigrant who commits a murder that gets the top-of-the-hour treatment from Fox News, there are hundreds of law-abiding college students and highway construction workers that ICE will instead target. The immoral stain of an American government’s war on these good people, led by goon squads who hide behind ski masks, may never be fully erased.

Question: Why isn’t there outrage over Trump’s West Point speech and his Memorial Day rant? Has anyone asked any of the Republican leadership about this? — ‪@hideout2014.bsky.social‬ via Bluesky

Answer: It’s a good question, since Trump’s mostly bat-guano crazy speech to U.S. Military Academy grads at West Point over the Memorial Day weekend was definitely “sanewashed” by some of the leading mainstream media. This was especially true over at the New York Times, which headlined its piece: “Trump Gives Commencement at West Point, Stressing a New Era.” It didn’t emphasize that our brave new world apparently includes having a 78-year-old president who rambles on and on about the dangers of trophy wives between endless anecdotes about his friend the pro golfer Gary Player, or comparing himself to “the great late Alphonse Capone.” This public unraveling is occurring amid the media frenzy about the health — mental and physical — and an alleged cover-up involving not the current president but the last one, Joe Biden. This is a moment that screams out for focus on the real problem.

As I expected, I got a record number of responses about the media blitz over that new book about Joe Biden’s health during his presidency and his subsequent prostate cancer diagnosis. Many of you think the story is a total distraction — perhaps deliberately so — from Donald Trump’s disastrous regime. “The Biden administration may not have been perfect — looking at you Merrick Garland — but they were experienced public servants who did their jobs for the betterment of the country and its people,” wrote Rose M. Arnone. “We absolutely, unequivocally cannot say the same about the 47th president and his band of misfits.” But some agreed that there must be a conversation about Democrats’ mishandling of Biden’s age. Daniel Hoffman said the Biden story “has value in revealing the Democrats as a gerontocracy that persistently tries to hide its frailties from the public.”

📮 This week’s question: The 2024-25 school year is winding down after a year when one story dominated the classroom: The skyrocketing use of artificial intelligence, or AI, by students but also often by their teachers. Are there benefits from AI taking root in our universities and high schools, or should programs like ChatGPT be banned as a threat to real learning? Please email me your answer and put the exact phrase “AI in schools” in the subject line.

Who’s against more civility, especially when American society seems to be coming apart at the seams? That’s the underlying notion behind a plan backed by administrators at a gaggle of top universities to hopefully solve a lot of their current problems, including fights over campus free speech and the right to dissent that now are at the center of the Trump administration’s push to decimate higher education with federal funding cuts. The idea is that young people cannot only learn about civil discourse but show off their talent for it, which could help them gain admission to one of these elite schools.

“I don’t want brittle students,” Jim Nondorf, the vice president for enrollment and student advancement and the dean of college admissions and financial aid for the University of Chicago, told Education Week. It was kind of a defensive way for Nondorf to announce that UC — a school that often puts itself at the center of the free speech debate — is one of eight major colleges planning to take “civility transcripts” as a useful tool for admission decisions. “I want students who can come here and add to the conversation on campus, but do it in the right way.”

The transcripts are a feature of a high school program called Dialogues from a nonprofit that’s developed a curriculum to work with high school age students to essentially teach them to agree to disagree. The program matches teens for conversations about hot-button topics such as gun control or immigration with someone who holds a different point of view; the kids build up a portfolio by taping the discussions and evaluating themselves and each other. (Dialogues is competing with some existing programs around civil discourse in several states.) Other selective schools pledging to look at these “civility portfolios” as a possible admissions boost include Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Johns Hopkins University, and Vanderbilt University.

I do agree that the ability to openly discuss and debate loaded topics would be a plus for America’s embattled universities, and potentially for the nation writ large. But I also find this idea — allowing college administrators to decide who gets into top universities based on how the school sees their “civility” — troubling. That’s because too often “civility” has served as a code word for compliance, for people who won’t rock the boat and challenge the status quo — even when sometimes the status quo desperately needs to be challenged. It’s important to note that throughout American history, some of those judged most harshly for highlighting those necessary challenges have been Black and brown folks.

“People of color don’t get to orchestrate the terms of civility,” UCLA professor Gaye Theresa Johnson told NPR in 2019. “Instead, we’re always responding to what civility is supposed to be.” The powers that be didn’t think young people were being civil when they sat in at segregated lunch counters in 1960, or when they protested the Vietnam War or apartheid in South Africa, or the issue currently at hand: the ongoing slaughter in Gaza. The kinds of critical thinkers we so desperately need our universities to produce are people willing to fight unjust laws or situations, and sometimes that requires offending the conventional wisdom of elites. My own opinion of this University of Chicago idea is something I definitely wouldn’t include in a civility transcript.

It’s hard to believe, but yesterday was the 10th anniversary of Sen. Bernie Sanders barging his way into the national conversation by formally launching his first presidential bid with a barnburner of a rally in his home state of Vermont. His campaign, which built on the themes of the 2011 Occupy movement to promote real working class issues like higher wages and stronger unions, was electrifying... and all too brief. I wrote that “the American worker and what we’ve earned — a fair wage, healthcare and other benefits, and basic dignity — isn’t ‘them,’ but ‘us.’ And look out, because we’re on the move... again." Read the rest: “‘Enough is enough!’: Income inequality, Bernie Sanders ... and unions.”

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