The Man ICE Took Was Already in a Museum

Criselda Vasquez's father posed for one of the most celebrated immigrant portraits in American art. Federal agents detained him on a California street.

WASHINGTON — He is a man who went to work every day, raised four American children, and grew old in a country that never officially said he could stay. His daughter painted him into history anyway.

In 2017, Criselda Vasquez, a Chicana painter working out of California, reimagined Grant Wood’s American Gothic — the one on the refrigerator magnets, the one every American schoolchild knows — and put her parents in it. Her mother and father, both immigrants from Mexico, standing together, holding cleaning supplies and a hoe, a red truck behind them. Not in front of a Midwestern farmhouse. In front of their life.

She called it The New American Gothic.

The Lucas Museum for Narrative Art in Los Angeles bought it in 2021. It hangs there now, or in storage, or somewhere in the permanent collection of American cultural memory. Her parents are in it. They are dignified. They are permanent.

Her father is not permanent. On the morning of Tuesday, March 31, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents st…