Inside the Dystopia of Covering ICE Raids
State care. Lawlessness. And the long, slow violence of the American state.
WASHINGTON — The worst thing about covering immigration isn’t the raids, the statistics, or even the cruelty. It’s how casual it all feels now. Like a weather pattern. Like everyone’s just learned to live with it.
The raids come fast. Unmarked vehicles, masked men, rushed grabs. People dragged out of cars, homes, courtrooms, clinics. Sometimes with cameras rolling, sometimes without. And always with this deadpan, bureaucratic rhythm—like they’re checking off a spreadsheet row.
There’s no ceremony to it. No accountability. Just disappearance.
We’ve spent the last six months listening—mothers calling lawyers, kids hiding in stairwells, boys caught outside graduation halls, grocery stores, gas stations. ICE doesn’t care if you posted a photo, said something online, took the wrong turn on a road you didn’t know wasn’t allowed. That’s the point. It’s a gamble. You don’t know when or how or why—but you know it’s coming.
Everyone’s on edge. Phones fully charged, lawyer numbers memorized or folded in wallets like emergency prayers. This is not a country under law. It’s a country in waiting. And everyone knows it. No one says it out loud, but the terror is ambient. Routine. Institutionalized.
What’s more terrifying than the raids is that we’ve come to expect them.
I try to picture the agents sometimes. What do they tell themselves when it’s over? That they’re keeping people safe? That it’s just paperwork? That they’re just doing their jobs?
We’ve heard that line before.
I grew up in the Romanian orphanages, and then later, in the American State Care system—what Americans would call an orphanage or institutions. I was sixteen when the system here labeled me “unruly” and threw me into State Custody in Missouri. Military-run. Razor wire. Strip searches. The same institutional aggression ICE uses on immigrants, they used on kids like me. We were housed, processed, restrained. No letters. No calls. Just floors and walls and silence. When you cried, they ignored you. When you resisted, they slammed you and didn’t care if they broke your arm. When the court talked about deporting me back to Romania, they only stopped because I had been adopted and was a U.S. citizen.
Imagine that.
Most Americans don’t know how many of their kids disappear inside the child welfare system. Or how the same logic that governs ICE—enforce first, explain later—runs through juvenile halls, state homes, immigrant detention centers. What connects them all is this: no one’s watching.
It’s easy to get lost in politics. Biden, Obama, Reagan—they all funded this machine. Democrats talk dignity while approving ICE budgets. Republicans strip it all bare, shameless and proud. Same system, different dialects. Democrats make it look respectable. Republicans don’t even bother.
Democrats say they want reform. They’ll tell you Trump broke the system. But ask anyone who’s been raided under Obama and they’ll say the same thing: it still hurts the same.
Truth is, I don’t trust either party. Not after what I saw. Not after four years in state facilities run like boot camps, where “rehabilitation” meant disappearance. Not after I watched Trump rise again because Democrats couldn’t let go of the fight long enough to understand why people were tired of it.
Being credentialed now—covering Congress, the White House, the Supreme Court—I’ve seen how empty this city really is. It’s a stage play with bad lighting. Senators who’ve never read the bills they vote on. House members who spend more time on Twitter than in hearings. Democrats wagging fingers at Trump while quietly approving budgets that make the raids possible.
And still, the raids continue.
The ICE agents I see today don’t look like the agents of a decade ago. Back then, they came with warrants. They knew the law. They wore badges you could see. Now they wear masks. They don’t announce themselves. They don’t explain. They disappear people the way you delete a line in a spreadsheet.
And Americans? They’re watching. And for once, they’re shocked.
They can’t believe people are being snatched at hospitals. That children are being picked up at school. That peaceful protesters are being thrown into vans in the middle of intersections. What happened to due process? To warrants? To innocent until proven guilty?
The problem is no longer political. It’s spiritual. Moral. We are losing the story of who we are.
We’ve created two monsters. One is fast, aggressive, and proudly cruel—that’s the Republican kind. The other is slow, polite, and suffocating—that’s the Democratic version. Both are lethal. One stabs. The other starves.
We should’ve known this would happen. When I was in State Care, I remember thinking, “No one cares.” There were no cameras. No reporters. No press briefings. Just cement walls and blank stares. Now, we have the cameras. The articles. The evidence. And still—no one’s stopping it.
Maybe it’s because we still believe the system will save us. That one more law, one more election, one more party switch will fix it.
It won’t.
What we need is each other.
Immigrants survive not because of the government, but in spite of it. In churches, on WhatsApp, in community kitchens, in courtrooms with volunteers and overworked lawyers. We survive through each other’s care. Through the refusal to abandon dignity, even when the state has.
The agents won’t stop. The raids won’t stop. The Democrats won’t save you. The Republicans never tried.
But we can stop turning away. We can build other ways. Mutual aid. Neighborhood defense. Digital safety networks. Storytelling. Memory. Solidarity.
The only way to end this violence is together. No saviors. No slogans.
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We aren’t losing the story, we are devolving the 3/5th constitution since 1880 with the 14th reclaimed by Citizens United for corporations and billionaires.