Washington, DC – Below is a column by Maribel Hastings from America’s Voice en Español translated to English from Spanish. It ran in several Spanish-language media outlets earlier this week:
Annie Ramos’s case has had a happy ending—so far. On Tuesday, she was released by ICE after five days in detention, according to The New York Times.
The 22-year-old, recently married to 23-year-old U.S. military member Matthew Blank, went to Fort Polk, Louisiana, to register as a military spouse. But she was detained by ICE because she had a deportation order issued when she was just 22 months old.
Ramos has been living in the United States for 20 years. She is a biochemistry student and has no criminal record. She will start her immigration adjustment process through her husband.
Media attention on the case prompted Mark Kelly, a Democratic senator from Arizona—where Blank’s family is from—to intercede with DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin.
“This experience has been incredibly difficult, but it has also reminded me of the power of faith, love, and community. I am hopeful for what comes next,” Ramos said upon her release.
Ramos’s detention reveals the administration’s intent to maximize harm simply to meet its self-imposed quota of 3,000 daily arrests, even targeting individuals with no criminal record.
Her case is heartening, but it is an exception. Most cases end with the deportation of people who are not priorities for removal.
The Trump administration’s approach to immigration intensifies its willingness to inflict harm, especially when challenged in the courts, with Stephen Miller shaping a strategy that centers on cruelty and dehumanization.
This administration’s policies directly result in deaths, family separation, and long-term physical and mental harm—outcomes that are central, not incidental, to the overall immigration strategy.
But in their eagerness to meet quotas, people with no criminal history become “collateral damage” of Trump’s deportation campaign.
The press reported on the horrifying case of a three-year-old girl detained alongside her mother when the latter crossed the border at El Paso, Texas. She was then separated from her mother, who was accused of making false statements. Children continue to be separated from their mothers and fathers despite the human tragedy caused by the immoral zero-tolerance policy during Trump’s first term. They do it differently now, but they continue to do it because indiscriminate detentions and deportations result in family separation.
And the new rules imposed by the administration to return these minors to their authorized relatives in the United States mean it can take months for reunification to occur.
In the girl’s case, her father, who is a legal resident, stated that bureaucratic obstacles prevented him from being reunited with his daughter, who had been placed in a foster home where she was allegedly sexually abused by another minor. The girl was in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), who told the father “that there had been an ‘accident’ and his daughter would be examined,” the AP reported.
The girl is now with her father and grandparents, but has experienced trauma that was avoidable.
As with so many other issues where the Trump administration seeks to govern by executive order, trampling on the Constitution and civil rights, in immigration, the sustained action of the community, activists, lawmakers, immigration attorneys, and ultimately the courts has halted many of these policies. The Ramos case is proof of this.
Unfortunately, even if many cases do not proceed, the damage is done. According to the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), “even as the win-loss count for the administration’s immigration agenda is still being tallied in the courts, these policy changes have had drastic impacts on countless individuals, even in litigation where the government has ultimately lost. Prolonged and wrongful detention, interrupted education, the threat of deportation to a far-off country, and uncertainty that has spread even to green-card holders and other legally present noncitizens have all contributed to a climate of fear that has been felt across immigrant homes and communities. It seems likely that stoking this fear is a goal of the administration in and of itself, as an effort to encourage people to leave on their own account.”
This is the Trump-Miller immigration policy at its core: inflicting deliberate harm, regardless of whether cases advance.
The original Spanish version is here.
