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:
It is unsurprising that as the first anniversary of ICE’s violent Los Angeles crackdown on June 6, 2025—which sparked protests—arrives, hunger strikes have erupted in detention centers in at least four states, including Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, where detainees denounce mistreatment, unhealthy conditions, and inadequate medical care.
Trump’s mass detention and deportation strategy is a multi-headed monster, constantly shifting and active.
The Los Angeles raids on June 6 initiated ICE’s nationwide campaign of terror.
Human Rights Watch put it well in a November 2025 report when it stated that “the United States federal government’s violent campaign of raids and detentions during the summer of 2025 in Los Angeles set the stage for similar and subsequent abuses in cities around the country.”
In 2025, ICE arrested over 14,000 people in Los Angeles County, a number also including arrests in Orange, Ventura, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Barbara counties.
It was a rehearsal for Trump and his advisor Stephen Miller to conduct aggressive raids with masked agents, violating all sorts of rights and legal protections, using racial profiling, and doing so in cities led by Democrats with total impunity.
After protests, Trump deployed 2,000 National Guard troops and 700 Marines to Los Angeles, unrequested, to fabricate a crisis. These actions terrorized communities, separated families, hurt the economy, and led to immigrant deaths while fleeing ICE agents.
In this context, ICE and CBP agents moved into Minneapolis carrying out violent operations and indiscriminate detentions of citizens and legal residents, resulting in the deaths of U.S. citizens Renee Good and Alex Pretti in early 2026.
The public has rejected violence and impunity. Trump’s immigration approval fell, prompting leadership changes in DHS and its agencies—yet violence persists in various forms.
Now, hunger strikes are spreading, and the administration is using this to further dehumanize immigrants, attack advocates, and restrict federal oversight of privately run, publicly funded prisons plagued with complaints of abuse, unsanitary conditions, spoiled food, and denied medical care—where many have died or committed suicide in unprecedented numbers.
The administration’s campaign to detain and deport immigrants who are NOT “the worst of the worst” continues in various forms, whether through traditional raids, delegalizing immigrants, delaying permit renewals, and most recently, according to media reports, “mega deportation hearings.” “More than 100 immigrants are summoned simultaneously to answer for their cases, an unprecedented tactic aimed at increasing the number of deportations,” wrote the EFE News Agency.
Clearly, this administration disregards the humanitarian crisis and its economic impact at a time when Americans already face high food, housing, and medical costs.
An analysis by the Brookings Institution concluded that the escalation of immigration enforcement measures “cost 668,000 jobs and it is estimated that between 51,000 and 297,000 of those would have been filled by U.S.-born workers.”
“The losses were concentrated in sectors with a high presence of immigrants, but they extended far beyond them,” the report adds.
Yet Congress is set to approve another $70 billion for ICE and CBP, on top of last year’s $170 billion.
And all of this is happening just one month before the nation commemorates the 250th anniversary of its independence on July 4, and as on previous occasions, that anniversary comes in the midst of complicated situations that remind us of the fragility of the democracy we are celebrating and that we still have a long way to go when it comes to civil and human rights.
The original Spanish version is here.
