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On August 29, US District Judge Jia M. Cobb wrote, "The Supreme Court has therefore 'long held that no person shall be removed from the United States' without due process of law." Will the administration listen?
"I'm here because of due process."
In June, a Houston immigration attorney was addressing protesters across the street from a prison owned and operated by CoreCivic for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). A group called FIEL—the Spanish acronym for Immigrant Families and Students in the Fight—sponsored the rally.
"People can be given a court date to appear, and then the prosecutor can literally dismiss their case, send a text message or a Teams message—yes, I know that you guys use Teams, DHS—to the ICE agents, who are in the hallway, and then they know exactly who's coming out."
Several CoreCivic employees watched from outside the perimeter fence. When I asked what they thought of the protest, one said, "I'm not at liberty to speak." His identification tag, flipped around so that his name was hidden, hung from his neck on a purple lanyard with white lettering that said "CoreCivic Diversity Equity Inclusion." CoreCivic used to be the Corrections Corporation of America, which boasted in promotional materials that its Houston detention center was "the world's first privately designed and built prison."
The attorney, Bianca Santorini, said: "The men [with their faces covered] who are approaching people who are leaving court did not have any badges, they did not have any uniforms, they had zero insignia, they did not identify themselves. And when I refused to let them detain one of the individuals that they approached, and I specifically asked them what agency they were with, they didn't answer... They said, 'We're here assisting' .... And that's [who is] coming up behind adults, children, women, and just grabbing them and taking them."
I'd met Santorini outside the South Gessner immigration court earlier that week. FIEL had posted a call for "media and supporters" because ICE was arresting immigrants who were showing up for their hearings. Soon after I got there, I joined a small group following the crying and screaming of a woman in the parking garage adjoined to the building by a glassed-in walkway. She and other family members watched four unidentified men put their handcuffed relative into an unmarked car.
Their relative, a Cuban man, had appeared in court as part of the application process for political asylum, and now Santorini calmly but loudly spoke to him through the noise and confusion as agents put him in the car. After he was gone, she spoke to his relatives. Then she showed me a court document, folding it to hide the applicant's name, which documented that the immigration judge (IJ) had ended the whole process at the government's request and denied the Cuban a chance to argue his case.
In the garage she said in Spanish, "The law is not operating here. There is no law."
I went back to the main lobby, through security, and up to the 10th floor to watch proceedings in an immigration courtroom. As I stepped off the elevator, I saw that two plainclothes men had just handcuffed another man. One of the presumed government agents pulled up his "neck gaiter" to hide his face, keeping one hand on his prisoner. The prisoner said, "Ayúdame." Help me.
It happened quickly. The masked agent had the handcuffed man at the back of the elevator. His partner stepped toward me and barked, "Get back!" and "You're not coming with us!" I asked the masked agent if the man could tell me who he was or whether there was someone I could call for him. The agent said no. The elevator doors closed. It was the end of the day and the hallways were empty. A clerk watched from behind the check-in window of the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), which is part of the Department of Justice (DOJ).
*
In May, attorneys around the country started noticing that plainclothes agents were grabbing noncitizens in hallways—sometimes in bathrooms—outside immigration courtrooms and taking them away. The new tactic was straightforward. DHS lawyers ask immigration judges to dismiss cases. Judges tell the "respondents" they may leave. ICE (and sometimes other federal agents) are waiting in the hallways to grab them.
These courthouse arrests have focused on people who arrived less than two years ago. After their cases are dismissed, they're put into a process called "expedited removal," a "cursory removal process with almost no substantive or procedural protections that requires detention in most circumstances." The process has always been intended for people at the border who had arrived less than two weeks earlier. The Trump administration widened the net exponentially. That widening is based on two policy changes, both of which, according to an August lawsuit by African Communities Together, are illegal, and which the administration implemented to help it reach a reported daily arrest "goal" of 3,000 by "turning mandatory hearings into traps." (On August 29, in a related case, Make the Road New York v. Noem, Judge Cobb temporarily blocked the expansion of expedited removal; the administration has appealed.)
The first change was a memo from DHS that allows ICE agents to make arrests in courthouses even when doing so violates local laws against such arrests. The second change was a DOJ memo that "allows" judges to dismiss ongoing proceedings, including unresolved asylum applications, without giving any reason, so that ICE can make those hallway arrests. The DOJ has made it clear to IJ's that they must grant these motions to dismiss or risk losing their jobs. This threat is important because it facilitates the collaboration between the government attorney and the immigration judge.
"If you have no justice, and you only have enforcement, you no longer have a democracy, you have an authoritarian state."
What we usually think of as a judge is part of the judicial branch of government (as per Article III of the US Constitution). But immigration judges are what Robert S. Kahn, in Other People's Blood: US Immigration Prisons in the Reagan Decade (1996), calls "bureaucrats in judges' robes." In immigration court, the government attorney is employed by DHS, and the immigration judge is employed by DOJ. That means they have the same boss: the president.
Certainly many IJ's fight to remain independent. But, as one judge in New York told me, referring to those appearing in court without lawyers, "What was disturbing was that if we gave pro se respondents time to respond to the motion to dismiss made unexpectedly by DHS counsel in court, ICE would pick them up anyway."
For the sake of more "efficient" deportations, such judges are being replaced by former DHS attorneys, by military lawyers, and, in Florida, by National Guard officers. (The latter scenario might be illegal.) DOJ has announced that it will now assign lawyers "without prior immigration experience" to serve as temporary immigration judges. To help shield the new judges from any potential empathy, the new DOJ rule also reverses Biden-era changes by replacing the word "noncitizen" with "alien," and changing "unaccompanied child" back to "unaccompanied alien child."
George Pappas, one of those recently fired, told PBS, "We have a huge increase in supporting enforcement and we have... an attack on the court system [and] on judges." The "huge increase" is $170 billion for immigration enforcement, which includes $45 billion for detention operations, or "at least three or four times the amount they currently spend on immigration detention," Eunice Cho of the American Civil Liberties Union told Mother Jones.
There are approximately 60,000 immigration detainees acknowledged to be held by the US as of late August—"a number that excludes thousands more held in off-the-books facilities," according to Austin Kocher of Syracuse University. The administration's stated goal is a detention capacity of 100,000. Detention is part of the deportation process, and the administration has suggested to Time magazine that it would start by banishing 1 million human beings each year, eventually to target 15 million people in "the largest Mass Deportation Operation in History."
Pappas said, "If you have no justice, and you only have enforcement, you no longer have a democracy, you have an authoritarian state."
*
Immigration law is complicated even without the language barrier. One judge in Houston had these exchanges with a respondent through an interpreter:
"Do you want to designate a country of removal?"
"I don't understand."
"What kind of relief are you going to be seeking?"
"I don't understand."
When a Nicaraguan woman holding her infant was ordered deported, she told the judge, "I want to take my daughter with me." The judge said that "the court" had no control over the "removal" process, but that she had 30 days to file an appeal with the Board of Immigration Appeals. She said, "I don't understand."
Not surprisingly, immigrants are much more likely to win their cases when they have lawyers—which they are not entitled to, as in the criminal justice system—and when they're not detained. That's why the immigration agency wants more people detained and has always opposed due process and interfered with legal help.
In Houston, attorney Santorini noticed that government agents waited until volunteer lawyers were gone before making arrests. On a day when she and other local lawyers organized themselves to show up in all the courtrooms, there were no arrests. That afternoon, in another garage press conference, a reporter from Spanish-language TV asked a Venezuelan man flanked by the volunteer lawyers whether he knew that ICE was arresting people who showed up for court. The man said in Spanish, "Yes, obviously. My legs were shaking, I had to go the bathroom, my head hurt—all the symptoms of terrible stress, but I have to do things legally."
In Sacramento, the government actually barred attorneys from immigration court at least once, Kamalpreet Chohan of the California Immigration Project told me. At a press conference in late May outside the federal building in Sacramento, attorney Chohan said: "ICE wants the public to believe that immigrants are missing their court dates, or that they have done something wrong. But that couldn't be further from the truth. It is ICE that is obstructing justice—spreading fear, misinformation, and chaos in order to justify its actions."
A protester holds a sign at a rally outside a Houston CoreCivic facility on June 13, 2025. (Photo by Mark Dow)
*
The media and public have tuned into a previously obscure aspect of the immigration process. Communities around the country are organizing, and experts are training people to observe court proceedings and support immigrants through "accompaniment." On a smaller scale this has been happening for years. Now in Denver, the American Friends Service Committee has over 100 volunteer court watchers. In San Diego, when pastors showed up at immigration court, ICE agents "scattered" and there were no arrests.
The administration has responded. In a high-profile incident, New York mayoral candidate Brad Lander was arrested outside a courtroom. Such violence and interference are widespread. Federal agents have detained or arrested immigration court observers in Denver and New York. In Sacramento, a volunteer observer was roughed up by agents when she tried to accompany an immigrant. In Phoenix, activists were barred from distributing "know your rights" cards.
She told me that my presence put the applicant in danger—never mind that she was trying to deport the applicant to Cuba because (among the reasons which the judge had read aloud) the multiple beatings at the hands of Cuban police were "not excessive."
For now at least, federal law allows public access to immigration court except in certain specified situations. But in Houston that didn't stop judges from telling observers and journalists, myself included, that they had to leave the courtroom, or needed to make an appointment first, or could not take notes. In Sacramento, the government has repeatedly stopped volunteers and reporters from entering the federal building, and a Sacramento Bee reporter was threatened with detention himself for standing in a hallway near immigration courtrooms.
*
When I walked into one immigration courtoom in Houston during a recess, the judge and the DHS attorney were chatting about the latter's military service. There were no other observers or respondents there. The lawyer suggested that the judge tell me to leave. The judge said he saw no need to close the hearing and went back "on the record" to order the removal of respondents who had "failed to appear." The proceeding was over in a few minutes. There wasn't even something to hide. In the hallway I asked the attorney, a DHS supervisor, why he'd wanted the judge to close a public hearing. He said, "Have a good day, sir," and kept walking.
I know that lawyer's name because when judges go on the record, they announce their own names and those of the lawyers and respondents who are present. But reporter Debbie Nathan wrote in The Intercept that an IJ in New York recently refused to say a DHS lawyer's name even "after stating her own name and those of the immigrants and their lawyers" because (the judge said) "'things lately have changed.'" This makes sense, of course, as the equivalent of agents hiding their faces.
In another courtoom I listened as a judge read aloud his reasons for denying political asylum to someone. Again, there were no other observers—just me, the judge, his clerk, an interpreter, the DHS lawyer, the asylum applicant, and her lawyer. When the judge finished reading, he told the applicant her deadline for filing an appeal. The applicant nodded to me as she left with her lawyer. The judge and the clerk left. Then the DHS lawyer asked me who I was, and I told her. She began screaming, "Security!" over and over again.
She told me that my presence put the applicant in danger—never mind that she was trying to deport the applicant to Cuba because (among the reasons which the judge had read aloud) the multiple beatings at the hands of Cuban police were "not excessive." She kept screaming. I sat down to wait. The security guard who came rushing in recogized me. We had chatted on my previous visits, and he told the DHS lawyer that I was just observing immigration court. She kept yelling. The judge's clerk came in. Then the court administrator came in and asked if I'd wait while they all spoke to the judge.
Asylum applicants are entitled to confidentiality (although the US government has often violated it), and according to immigration law an IJ may closes an asylum hearing at the request of the applicant or at their own discretion. According to the law, and as I've confirmed with a different immigration judge, my presence in court was legal. EOIR's own webpage says so here and here (last accessed September 3, 2025). A sympathetic if overly cautious DOJ official still suggested it would be safer to avoid writing about this.
After about 10 minutes, the court administrator returned and said, "Sorry you were on the receiving end of that" and "We'll talk to DHS about that."
*
After about three weeks, we learned the name of the man arrested. He had been transported by ICE with the Cuban man whom Santorini spoke to in the garage, and the Cuban knew his first name. That was enough to let us find his full name on a copy of the day's docket. ICE's "online detainee locator" said that Carlos wasn't in the system. But an employee at one GEO-ICE immigration prison north of Houston helped, and we found him at another, GEO-ICE's Montgomery Processing Center in Conroe, Texas.
A group went through security, up the elevators, through a series of corridors with remotely controlled locked doors at both ends, and then to a row of cubicles where visitors spoke to prisoners through plexiglass on telephones. One family shared a single chair among several adults and young children to visit a man in his 70s. Why do "administrative detainees" only get to visit family and friends through heavy plastic and without privacy? It's not about security; visiting hours were arranged according to security level, and these were the lowest-security inmates. An employee out front said, "It's always been like this."
The Montgomery Processing Center was holding some 1,500 prisoners in July. Carlos was in a pod with 80 other men. The GEO employees answering the phone and managing the sign-in sheets had been polite, but the guards treat the men as delinquentes, or criminals, Carlos told me. Carlos had entered the US legally more than a year earlier and had appeared for his court date. He wasn't accused of any crime. But they were all wearing prison uniforms and they were incarcerated, after all.
In defending an executive order "guaranteeing... protection against invasion" by "aliens," the deputy assistant attorney general avoided giving a clear answer when the judge asked him whether the President could simply order that any border-crosser be shot
In the visitation area, a guard told me it was impossible to give Carlos a lawyer's business card, so I held it up to the plexiglass. Carlos put the phone reciever down, using one hand to hold a crumpled paper napkin in place and the other to copy down the information with a short blunt pencil. Years ago an immigration prisoner in Louisiana cautioned me that reporters focus on stories of beatings and overlook the small indignities that make detention unbearable. Even when there is no "mistreatment," every aspect of the detention system is meant to dehumanize—dehumanization is both cause and consequence—and it works. Carlos decided against exercising his legal right to appeal because that would have meant staying inside even longer. He had met prisoners locked up for months even after agreeing to be deported. His only hesitation was that if Venezuela stopped accepting deportees again, he had no idea where the US would send him.
In late July, Carlos' phone access was cut off. His wife was used to speaking to him every day and now she was terrrified because she couldn't reach him. A legal assistant had explained that ICE does that within 24 hours of a scheduled removal. But for so-called "security" reasons again, ICE would not say where Carlos was or when he might actually be flown out. A volunteer advocate named Tom Cartwright of Witness at the Border monitors deportation flights, and he provided information about upcoming ICE removals to Venezuela. That gave Carlos' family some reassurance at least.
I'm only writing about Carlos because I happened to be there when he was arrested, and I'm hesitant because his case might give the wrong picture. Carlos has been treated unjustly. But unlike others, he was not sent by the US to be tortured in a Salvadoran prison. He wasn't sent to the "lawless enclave" of Guantánamo, or deposited in a country to which he has no connection, such as Eswatini, Rwanda, South Sudan, or Uganda. He wasn't locked up for a week in a temporary "holding area" outside the immigration courtrooms in Manhattan, where a guard would squirt some water into prisoners' mouths when they were thirsty enough. He wasn't held in a sewage-flooded cell in Estancia, New Mexico. He wasn't sent to the new "soft-sided" immigration prison in the Florida Everglades, where guards chained a Nicaraguan asylum-seeker hand-and-foot outside in the sun for six hours without water—and then did the same to a Honduran man who protested.
But the same unchecked authority makes everything on this spectrum available to the government thugs and bureaucrats. That's why, in defending an executive order "guaranteeing... protection against invasion" by "aliens," the deputy assistant attorney general avoided giving a clear answer when the judge asked him whether the President could simply order that any border-crosser be shot.
*
Carlos' renewed work permit arrived at his home while he was detained. It didn't matter. In July, with no chance to pick up his possessions or tell his wife goodbye, he was moved from the Conroe detention center by bus some 400 miles south to an airport near the US-Mexico border. He was shackled—encadenado—at wrists, waist, and ankles for the bus ride and then, with some 300 others, for a flight from Harlingen, Texas, to Honduras. There US officials removed the waist and ankle chains, and they replaced the handcuffs with plastic flex-cuffs for the final trip to Venezuela. Altogether the transport took about 32 hours. Prisoners were given a cheese sandwich, an apple, and water.
Six weeks earlier, on the day Carlos was arrested, I had overheard two non-ICE federal employees chatting as they passed through the walkway to the garage where the Cuban's family had been screaming a few hours earlier. One man said casually, "I heard they were rounding people up."
"It is a dark and dangerous moment for this country when our government chooses to target orphaned 10-year-olds and denies them their most basic legal right to present their case before an immigration judge," a lawyer said.
In an effort reminiscent of US President Donald Trump using the Alien Enemies Act to send hundreds of migrants to a Salvadoran prison, his administration just tried to deport more than 600 unaccompanied children to Guatemala over Labor Day weekend—though for now, a federal judge's order appears to have halted the plan, unlike last time.
CNN exclusively reported Friday morning that the Trump administration was "moving to repatriate hundreds of Guatemalan children" who arrived in the United States alone and were placed in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Subsequent reporting confirmed plans to deport the kids, who are ages 10-17.
Fearing their imminent removal after the administration reportedly reached an agreement with the Guatemalan government, the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) launched a class action lawsuit around 1:00 am Sunday, seeking an emergency order that was granted just hours later by a federal judge in Washington, D.C.
"Plaintiffs have active proceedings before immigration courts across the country, yet defendants plan to remove them in violation of the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the Constitution," NILC's complaint explains.
Efrén C. Olivares, vice president of litigation and legal strategy at the NILC, said that "it is a dark and dangerous moment for this country when our government chooses to target orphaned 10-year-olds and denies them their most basic legal right to present their case before an immigration judge."
"The Constitution and federal laws provide robust protections to unaccompanied minors specifically because of the unique risks they face," Olivares noted. "We are determined to use every legal tool at our disposal to force the administration to respect the law and not send any child to danger."
Politico's Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein reported on the judge's moves:
U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan issued the order just after 4:00 am Sunday, finding that the "exigent circumstances" described in the lawsuit warranted immediate action "to maintain the status quo until a hearing can be set."
The judge, a Biden appointee, initially scheduled a virtual hearing on the matter for 3:00 pm Sunday, but later moved up the hearing to 12:30 pm after being notified that some minors covered by the suit were "in the process of being removed from the United States."
Sharing updates from the hearing on social media, Cheney reported that Sooknanan took a five-minute recess so that US Department of Justice attorney Drew Ensign could ensure that the details of her order reached the Trump administration—which is pursuing mass deportations. Ensign confirmed to the judge that while it's possible one plane took off and then returned, all the children are still in the United States.
Following the judge's intervention, NILC's Olivares said in a statement that "in the dead of night on a holiday weekend, the Trump administration ripped vulnerable, frightened children from their beds and attempted to return them to danger in Guatemala."
"We are heartened the court prevented this injustice from occurring before hundreds of children suffered irreparable harm," he added. "We are determined to continue fighting to protect the interest of our plaintiffs and all class members until the effort is enjoined permanently."
If this machine succeeds, it will not stop with immigrants. It will become the blueprint for domestic control and the silencing of millions.
"What is done cannot be undone, but one can prevent it from happening again."—Anne Frank
US President Donald Trump has federalized the DC police department and put more than 2,000 National Guard troops on city streets, even as crime remains at historic lows. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is seizing more than 1,000 people every day. Palantir is rolling out its AI-powered “ImmigrationOS,” designed to fuse the private details of millions into a single surveillance grid. These are not accidents or isolated headlines. They are pieces of a larger architecture: a disappearance machine that erases lives quietly while making absence look routine.
The system is not hypothetical. It is funded, operational, and expanding. What began with undocumented immigrants now extends to visa holders, asylum seekers, parolees, aid workers, and dissenters. By the government’s own numbers, more than 20 million people are potentially vulnerable. Many are not accused of crimes at all. They are flagged by association, by proximity, by the digital trails of daily life. And still there is no clear plan for where millions would be sent.
This is not only about immigration. It is about what happens when disappearance becomes policy, not error. It is about how authoritarian systems succeed, not through spectacle alone, but by presenting themselves as orderly, legal, and necessary. History offers its warning: Absence becomes normal, silence becomes institutional. If this machine succeeds, it will not stop with immigrants. It will become the blueprint for domestic control and the silencing of millions.
The machine does not announce itself with spectacle. Its danger lies in its efficiency, humming beneath the noise of everyday life. The quotas, contracts, and deployments pile up like the hum of an engine, so constant that many people stop hearing them.
ICE has already blown past its legal detention limits, booking more than 31,000 people in June alone. Overflow has been moved into tent camps on military bases and newly leased private facilities. But the real innovation lies beneath the numbers: the wiring of the system. Department of Motor Vehicle records, school rosters, medical files, protest photos—all are now drawn into ICE’s databases, where AI-driven analytics map not only who people are, but who they know.
That wiring has corporate architects. Palantir. Amazon Web Services. Anduril. Palantir’s AI engines feed the machine with millions of cross-linked records, turning raw fragments into actionable targets. Anduril watches from autonomous towers. Amazon stores the data that makes it possible. Each contract transforms misery into revenue, turning deportation into a line item on a balance sheet. Together they prove a brutal truth: Deportation is not just policy. It is profit.
What binds people to one another—love, kinship, faith, compassion—becomes evidence against them.
Congress has widened the channel further. The “One Big Beautiful Bill” earmarks $170 billion for detention, deportation logistics, and 10,000 new ICE agents. If enacted, ICE would surpass the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Drug Enforcement Administration, and Marshals combined budgets and operational reach. Contracts like these rarely expire. Facilities like these rarely close. Permanence is the point, and permanence is the profit.
The military presence seals the fusion. Guard units have been mobilized in 19 states. Marines handle logistics. In Los Angeles, Washington, and other threatened cities, troops now patrol the streets. Each deployment erodes the line between military and civilian. Each step embeds martial presence deeper into ordinary life.
This is the machine. Arrests that exceed the law. Contracts that bind the future. Corporations cashing in. Soldiers on our sidewalks. A van arrives. A door closes. A name disappears. It does not need to announce itself loudly. It hums through budgets, contracts, and signatures. It looks procedural. It looks harmless. And that is the danger.
Silence allows it to run. And what it runs toward is not enforcement, but disappearance.
Once the machine is in motion, it does not deliver justice. It delivers absence. Disappearance is not a malfunction. It is the product the system is built to deliver.
When ICE takes someone, the trail goes dark by design. Families call and hear nothing. Lawyers search and find no records. Facilities deny they are holding anyone. Transfers happen within hours, often across state lines. A man leaves for work and never returns, his vehicle still running, lunch packed, a child’s car seat strapped in. Fields go unharvested, animals untended, trucks unloaded. This is not error. It is method. Not accident. Design.
Authoritarian regimes have long understood this power. Nazi Germany perfected registries, codes, and camps placed far from public view. The parallel is structural, not identical. Then it was files and cattle cars. Today it is biometric databases and chartered flights. What once took days can now be done in seconds with AI-driven servers and algorithms.
This is the innovation: speed. A protest photo flagged. A clinic visit cross-matched. An address linked to a file. Palantir’s AI system merges millions of fragments into real-time triggers. ICE no longer needs loud raids. It can knock softly, often. A van at the corner. A name missing the next day. Absence hardens into fact. Silence hardens into complicity.
This system punishes not only identity but connection. In it, solidarity itself is criminalized. The machine does not only target individuals. It ensnares through association.
If you share an address with someone flagged, your file may be tagged. If your number appears on a church roster, a school list, or a protest sign-in sheet, it can be enough. If you drive a neighbor, open your home, or hand someone food, you may be prosecuted for “harboring.” AI-powered algorithms do not need guilt. They need only connection.
This logic makes solidarity itself dangerous. What binds people to one another—love, kinship, faith, compassion—becomes evidence against them.
We are already seeing it in practice. Arizona volunteers charged for leaving water in the desert. Texas laws making it a felony to drive undocumented neighbors to church. In Florida, vehicles parked near churches or immigrant-serving sites were scanned and flagged by law enforcement using surveillance data accessible to ICE. The ordinary acts of care that sustain community are reclassified as crimes. The message is unmistakable: Kindness itself can put you on the list.
These are not outliers. They are the system. Piece by piece, the fragments form a net.
Public debate still circles around the figure of “11 million undocumented.” But that number is a mirage. The government’s own statistics show a pool of vulnerability far larger.
In fiscal year 2023, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) reported nearly 400,000 visa overstays. US Citizenship and Immigration Services lists 1.1 million people on Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and another 525,000 enrolled in Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). DHS reports show more than 530,000 parolees admitted from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. Executive Office for Immigration Review and Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse data confirm over 2 million asylum cases pending and 3.7 million in active removal proceedings. To this must be added parolees from Afghanistan and Ukraine, more than 200,000 new foreign F-1 student visa recipients each year, and several hundred thousand seasonal or temporary workers.
The risk is not only to millions already vulnerable. It is to every one of us, to the very possibility of a society that remembers, that dissents, that refuses to be silent.
Taken together, these categories already exceed 22 million people potentially at risk. And that does not include the at least 4.4 million US-born children in mixed-status households, whose futures hinge on their parents’ deportability.
This is not just a pool of migrants. It is a blueprint: proof of how entire populations can be flagged, managed, and erased.
Most chilling of all, many of these groups—DACA recipients, TPS holders, parolees—were once granted provisional protection. Their status was designed to provide safety, but now those same categories function as easily revoked permissions. What was once stability has become a list. What was once recognition has become a trap.
The system works on two levels at once, and the tension is intentional.
It is quiet, bureaucratic, relentless. Arrest. Transfer. Conceal. Data-matched names pulled into custody. People erased without a headline.
It is also loud, theatrical, meant to frighten. Guard patrols in DC. Raids at food pantries and churches. And in the Florida Everglades, a detention complex nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz,” built in just over a week on an abandoned airstrip. With 200 cameras, miles of barbed wire, and capacity for thousands, the camp was raised almost overnight and showcased as proof of federal resolve. It was not only a camp. It was a message: that human beings can be caged faster than homes can be built. The spectacle was the point: Not only could the government erase, it could do so at speed, in full view.
These displays are not mistakes. They are signals, designed to spread fear.
The precedent is clear. Nazi Germany paired hidden registries with public raids. Bureaucracy made atrocity look like procedure. Spectacle made fear look like power.
The result is devastating. Efficiency makes absence seem administrative. Spectacle makes fear seem permanent. One normalizes disappearance. The other normalizes submission. Like two sides of a coin, the system flips back and forth, but the outcome is always the same.
Nazi Germany balanced quiet registries and files with public terror. The paperwork processed millions. The raids displayed the strength of the state.
The parallels here are structural, not identical. Then it was racial laws and household registries; now it is DMV databases and predictive analytics. Then it was cattle cars; now it is charter flights. Then it was propaganda films; now it is press conferences and televised ICE raids.
The point is not to equate outcomes, but to recognize how bureaucracy and spectacle normalize atrocity in slow motion. In Germany, disappearance was accepted because it looked like order—files, trains, uniforms, procedure. The danger now is the same logic in digital form. When arrests are by algorithm, when transfers vanish into databases, when detention is described as “routine,” absence can be made to feel like administration instead of atrocity.
Ordinary Germans tolerated disappearance because it looked like order. That is precisely the risk now: authoritarian disappearance creeping forward one administrative step at a time, while the public is told everything remains under control.
What begins with immigrants does not end there. Once a disappearance machine exists, its reach expands outward.
The list is already long: undocumented residents, visa overstays, TPS and DACA recipients, parolees, asylum seekers. Around them ripple aid workers, clergy, family members, volunteers, neighbors. Association is enough.
And the warning is clear: If there is a list, there are many. No one’s record is spotless. To be added requires only an electronic click, a database match, a fragment of data. Protest and your photo may be flagged. Write and your words may be logged. Share a home or a meal, and your act may become evidence. The logic is merciless: No category is safe, no community beyond reach. It does not stop at the border. It does not stop at citizenship.
Two hundred detention sites are already locked into contracts. Offshore deals with countries such as Rwanda and El Salvador, and negotiations with many others, are ongoing. Daily arrests now number over a thousand, with internal targets aiming for 3,000 or more. A deportation system scaled for millions now exists, but the government has offered no clear plan for where those millions would go.
History warns what happens when removal outpaces destination. Nazi Germany built camps faster than authorities could decide what to do with those inside. Bureaucracy outran policy, and atrocity followed. The United States is not there yet, but it is building a machinery of disappearance faster than it can credibly process.
When numbers overwhelm the system, detention becomes indefinite. The American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch have documented cases in which migrants were kept in prolonged detention without legal basis, sometimes without access to lawyers or family, effectively leaving them with no country of return or lawful destination. Congressional Research Service reports flag the capacity gap. In practice, that means expanded camps, more offshore transfers, and prolonged detention for those who cannot be removed.
The time to act is not when the machine is finished. It is now, while it is still assembling.
The danger is that a system built in the name of immigration control becomes one of social control. People are held not because they will be deported tomorrow, but because their absence today serves the machine. This is not immigration enforcement. It is the architecture of social control. Giorgio Agamben called this the creation of “bare life”: existence reduced to custody and stripped of political standing. As Hannah Arendt warned, the first loss is political: lose the “right to have rights,” and a “rule by Nobody” normalizes erasure from public life.
What cannot be done is to pretend this is merely immigration policy. What should not be done is to accept disappearance in any form as ordinary. What can still be done is to name the system for what it is, to resist normalization, and to defend the human ties that the machine seeks to criminalize.
The risk is not only to millions already vulnerable. It is to every one of us, to the very possibility of a society that remembers, that dissents, that refuses to be silent.
What once seemed unimaginable is quickly becoming routine. Daily arrests in the thousands. Troops on city streets. Contracts that turn human beings into commodities. Each day the machine expands. Each day Americans adjust, telling themselves it is not their concern.
But immigration is not the endgame. It is the cover story. Behind it, a larger project advances. The same AI-powered system that is designed to erase millions will erase dissent. The same silence that excuses raids will excuse repression.
This is how atrocity is normalized: not with sudden rupture, but with forms, files, and procedures that look ordinary until it is too late to resist them. History shows how absence can be made to feel like order, and how silence can become institutional.
The time to act is not when the machine is finished. It is now, while it is still assembling. Before the erasure of those targeted becomes irreversible. Before mass erasure becomes routine. History will not care about our excuses. It will remember our silence as complicity. It will ask not whether we knew, but whether we spoke.