It was never about keeping us safe
2025 has proven once and for all that the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant obsessions were never about law and order or reforming an outdated immigration system, but instead about using the issue of immigration to root out anyone deemed undesirable by mass deportation architect-in-chief Stephen Miller, abusing its authority in order to consolidate power, stomping on our personal freedoms, and silencing perceived critics, just to name a few areas. Impacted under this agenda have been an array of Americans and immigrant neighbors. Below are just ten examples of the administration’s horrifying immigration-related offenses from this past year.
JAVIER DIAZ SANTANA
The administration’s message to DACA recipients like Javier Diaz Santana has been clear: get out. Diaz Santana, who is deaf and mute, was at his car wash job this past July when masked agents descended on his worksite like it was a warzone and “shouted commands that he could not hear or understand,” NBC Los Angeles reported at the time. When he tried to use his phone in order to communicate with them, they snatched it away. When he asked to be uncuffed so he could use his hands to try to communicate with them, they refused. He would spend nearly a month in detention. He later shared that the court interpreter at his hearing “was the first time in weeks someone communicated with him using sign language.”
JAIME ALANÍS GARCIA
In July, farmworker Jaime Alanís Garcia tragically lost his life when he fell off a roof during a chaotic raid that targeted a central California farm and resulted in the arrest of 300 other workers. Alanís, 57, “had worked at the farm in Camarillo for 10 years and provided for his wife and daughter who live in Mexico,” Democracy Now! reported. In a separate incident targeting the laborers who feed us and keep the agricultural industry alive, disturbing viral footage depicted deportation agents chasing a farmworker through fields. “They’re just taking innocent people who are trying to build their own American Dream,” said the UFW Foundation’s Daniel Larios.
KILMAR ÁBREGO GARCÍA AND ANDRY HERNÁNDEZ ROMERO
Maryland dad Kilmar Ábrego García and makeup artist Andry Hernández Romero are just two of the hundreds of men who were unjustly purged to El Salvador earlier this year by the administration. Ábrego García would get just one weekend back with his family after more than 160 days apart before officials again targeted him for deportation. Like Ábrego García, Hernández Romero said he was abused while in El Salvador. “In my particular case, I was sexually abused by the same Salvadoran authorities who guarded us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week,” Romero said. During an Oval Office meeting with Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele this past spring, Trump stated that he wished to purge American citizens as well. “Home-growns are next. The home-growns,” Trump was heard telling Bukele. “You gotta build about five more places. It’s not big enough.”
MARIE ANGE BLAISE
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Marie Ange Blaise became one of the at least 25 individuals to die while in ICE custody this fiscal year, when she fell seriously ill while detained at the abusive Broward Transitional Center in April. “We started yelling for help, but the guards ignored us,” said a woman who witnessed her passing. “By the time the rescue team came, she was not moving.” 2025 has been ICE’s deadliest year in 20 years, with some families saying their deceased loved ones had no medical issues prior to detention and federal lawmakers raising alarms that immigration officials are lying about the circumstances relating to some of these deaths. “They told Congress that Chaofeng Ge died by suicide, but he was found with his hands and feet tied,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal said earlier this month. “That simply doesn’t add up.”
MAHMOUD KHALIL AND RÜMEYSA ÖZTÜRK
Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil and Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk are just two international students who have been targeted under the administration’s weaponization of the immigration system in order to stifle free speech. In March, Khalil was targeted by Marco Rubio over an op-ed he didn’t like, leading to the student’s arrest. During the three months Khalil was detained, he missed his graduation and the birth of his first child. That same month, Öztürk was abducted in broad daylight, again over an op-ed. She would not be freed for weeks. “Going through this brutality, which began with my unlawful arrest and 45 days of detention at a shameful for-profit ICE prison in Louisiana, I feel more connected to everyone whose educational rights are being denied,” she said.
NARCISO BARRANCO
This past summer, horrific footage captured by a bystander showed Narciso Barranco, a landscaper and dad of three U.S. Marines, being punched and kidnapped by masked mass deportation agents while he was working. “On his first call to his son after the detainment, Barranco was less concerned with his injuries and more concerned with his job,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “He told him where his truck and equipment were and asked him to speak with his client and finish the job, the younger Barranco said.” Narciso, who has lived here for more than three decades, was finally released on bond after weeks in immigration custody and was visibly distraught following his ordeal, his family said. “We’re willing to give all this for this country and then they take our parents like this,” said his son Alejandro. “I don’t think it’s fair.”
GINA POLICARD
The administration has tried to make immigrants with legal status deportable by seeking to revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) from more than one million individuals, including approximately 600,000 Venezuelan and 500,000 Haitian nationals. Gina Policard, a home health worker originally from Haiti, said she began her career path as a way to support herself. “But I love the job because I love taking care of people the same way I do for my family,” she said. Now she’s among those whose lives hang in the balance. Not only will this be at detriment to the home health industry, it will hurt American families. “They will have to confront the possibility of returning or being subjected to deportation proceedings,” said CLASP, “resulting in separation from their jobs, homes, and children, over 250,000 of whom are U.S. citizens.”
FEBE, ANGELO, AND ISAAC PEREZ
2025 also proved that U.S. citizens were not going to be immune from Trump’s mass detention and deportation agenda. Siblings Febe, Angelo, and Isaac Perez tragically lost their dad to COVID five years ago. But this year, ICE took their surviving parent as well. They were asleep when deportation agents in full tactical gear invaded their home and took their mom. CNN reports that its investigation has identified at least 100 U.S. citizen kids, “from newborns to teenagers, who have been left stranded without parents because of immigration actions this year.” Said CLASP’s Wendy Cervantes: “It’s literally a kid’s worst nightmare having someone come take your parents in the middle of the night. No matter the outcome, you are turning a kid’s life upside down.”
REV. DAVID BLACK AND HANNAH KARDON
Rev. David Black, a minister in the Presbyterian Church, had his arms raised in peaceful prayer at an ICE detention facility outside Chicago in September when federal agents positioned on the roof of the building suddenly opened fire on him, shot him in the face with a pepper ball, and then laughed about it. The Rev. Hannah Kardon, a United Methodist pastor, said that officers have also shot at her, “including while she was praying with her eyes closed and hands lifted, wearing a clerical collar and stole,” Religion News Service reported. “I am praying for all of the people inside to be returned to their communities,” she said. “These are our friends, our family, our cousins, our uncles. These are our community members, and they are being stolen.”
OUR COMMUNITIES
From Seattle to Los Angeles to Chicago to Charlotte and most recently New Orleans, the administration has deployed (sometimes unlawfully) troops and federal agents to occupy American neighborhoods and harass our neighbors, stifle local economies, disrupt education and religious services, and wreak havoc. But community members are also coming together to push back and protect each other, including by blowing whistles in order to warn about immigration enforcement actions. “I’m going to walk the streets with my whistle and I want to keep my neighbors protected,” said one Charlotte resident, “because they deserve protection and they deserve to live in a world where they’re not scared.”
