Imagine a world in which kidnappers ride around in unmarked cars, carry large guns normally used for war, and have federal authority to stop, detain, and deport people without any legal due process. In this world, even those with access to power are equally vulnerable as the poor.
On Monday, a New York City Council staffer was detained in Nassau County after the same armed henchmen snatched him up while he was leaving a routine immigration appointment. This city council staffer was in the country legally and works with newly elected New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. When Mamdani and staff were frantically working to find the Venezuelan man, who was legally (can’t overstate this) in the country until October, they literally couldn’t find him.
“We are doing everything we can to secure his immediate release, and we demand swift and transparent action by the federal government on this apparent overreach,” New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin said in a statement.
Menin would later add: “I just want to be clear, as speaker of the city council, I cannot even call this ICE detention center to collect information or demand his release.”
“I’m an elected official running a body, and I cannot contact a federal facility. What kind of accountability or transparency is that?” she asked.
That’s Trump’s America. Where Immigration and Customs Enforcement operates like law enforcement, a judge, and a jury. They have become a roaming tribunal that decides who gets to stay and who disappears.
Here’s how it works in practice: someone is detained—often without warning, most times without a warrant. They are taken to a facility that may or may not be near where they were arrested. Their phone is taken. Their name may or may not appear in a public database. Their family gets no notification that they have been kidnapped. Lawyers get bounced around through endless bureaucratic handlers. Loved ones call jails, hospitals, ICE field offices, and get the same answer over and over again: We don’t have them. Or worse: We can’t tell you anything.
That’s not due process. That’s a black hole.
And it’s functioning just the way that the Trump administration intended it to. Because they don’t value Black and brown life, they don’t care who they arrest or who they deport. A report found that just last month, there were more people without records in ICE custody than those who actually committed a crime at some point in their lives. And you know who couldn’t care less? The Trump administration sees the Constitution as toilet paper for cleaning the soles of their shoes.
And ICE answers only to them. So, after a federal kidnapping, there are no Miranda warnings. No speedy trial. No public defender. No requirement that families be notified. Just a person locked away in a system designed to be opaque on purpose.
When ICE detains someone, they are not merely holding them for a hearing. They are effectively passing judgment in advance. Detention itself becomes the punishment. Some have disappeared in facilities with limited access to representation. There are transfers in the middle of the night that move people hundreds or thousands of miles away from their families and attorneys. And all of this before a judge ever weighs in—if a judge ever does.
That’s the quiet trick: by the time the law catches up, the damage is already done.
ICE has detained U.S. citizens. ICE has detained people with legal status. ICE has detained people because they were in the wrong place, had the wrong name, the wrong accent, the wrong skin tone, or the wrong paperwork in a system that eats paperwork for breakfast.
So what happens when ICE gets it wrong?
Nothing.
They function with impunity. A New York City Council staffer has the full weight of everyone in New York’s government behind him, and he still hasn’t been released. There is no automatic accountability mechanism when ICE wrongly detains someone. No flashing red light that stops the system and says, Our bad. There is no public apology tour. Often, the person who was wrongly detained has to work from the inside to prove their own existence and their right to be here.
Imagine being locked in a facility while your family scrambles to locate you, while your job evaporates, while your kids wonder why you stopped calling, while bills stack up, while your life gets quietly dismantled—all because an agency decided you looked deportable enough.
That’s not a mistake. That’s structural violence.
And the cruelty isn’t incidental—it’s baked in. The uncertainty. The fear. The isolation. ICE doesn’t just detain bodies; it detains information. It hoards it. Withholds it. Uses it as leverage. Families are left in limbo, oscillating between panic and false hope, because the system refuses to confirm what it has done.
Think about it this way: If a local police department locked people away without charges, refused to tell families where they were, and delayed access to lawyers, we’d call it unconstitutional. If a foreign government did this, the United States (under a normal presidency) would call it a human rights violation.
This is federal kidnapping of people whose skin doesn’t match the ruling class, and the violence in Minneapolis, the uprising to ensure that ICE knows their federally sanctioned violence will be met with resistance, is justified. Because ICE doesn’t get to occupy cities wearing full war gear and think there won’t be a battle.
ICE’s power thrives in the shadows, and it’s long past time we stopped pretending that this is some neutral bureaucratic process gone awry. It’s a system designed to disappear people first and ask questions later—if ever.
And until that changes, the real verdict is already in.
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