By Mac Durham
Our great melting pot is currently being dumped through a strainer, removing the unique, rich flavor of dozens of cultures complementing one another. The perpetrator is shameless, wearing a mask to hide its crimes and a vest labeled “ICE” to cover the hole in its heart.
Since the inauguration, the Trump administration has pushed Congress to pass laws that in turn enable Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to run rampant in our country, committing acts of domestic terrorism among the people, documented and undocumented alike.
In September 2025, the Supreme Court made a final decision in the Vasquez Perdomo v. Noem case, removing the temporary restraining order in the Los Angeles district that prohibited ICE officers from using one’s job, race, language, or accent as grounds to detain individuals for “reasonable suspicion.”
According to AceUsa’s article about the case on the Alliance for Civic Engagement, ICE officers can question and detain individuals based solely on their race, accent, or appearance. And in the event the individual has no identification to prove their citizenship, they can expect to be forced into a vehicle and remain in detention for up to 48 hours until citizenship is confirmed.
Let’s stop the sugar coating and call it what it is: racial profiling, funded by our government. These officers have no intentions to make the U.S. a better place. They don’t care about getting foreign threats out of our country, they just want to shove as many people into detention centers as they can.
In fact, according to a graph made by CBS News using official data from a Department of Homeland Security internal report, less than 14% of the nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by ICE from Jan. 21, 2025 through Jan. 31, 2026 had been accused of or charged with violent crimes. In addition, nearly 40% of said immigrants only possessed civil immigration violations.
These immigration agents are rounding up people that are seeking refuge for themselves and their family and then plunging them back into whatever living situation they tried to escape.
This idea of deporting as many undocumented immigrants as possible is a completely illogical objective, for both moral and economical reasons. Of course, morality is subjective, but even if one doesn’t value the lives of immigrants, they can’t deny the facts.
In 2022 alone, undocumented immigrants paid $96.7 billion in federal, state, and local taxes, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a non-profit, non-partisan tax policy organization.
The claim that undocumented immigrants significantly harm our country by not contributing tax dollars is a completely illogical statement. ITEP’s report on tax payments by undocumented immigrants in 2022 reveals just how little of an impact these immigrants’ status has on our taxes.
ITEP reports: “In total, the tax contribution of undocumented immigrants amounted to 26.1 percent of their incomes in 2022. This figure is close to the 26.4 percent rate facing the median income group of the overall U.S. population.”
This means that, on average, American citizens paid just 0.3% more of their annual income in taxes than undocumented immigrants did. Whether people like it or not, immigrants pay their share of taxes, with a large sum of the money they pay going toward funding programs they cannot be active in due to their legal status.
In other words, our government has chosen to fund $75 billion worth of taxpayer dollars over the next four years toward a domestic terrorist organization with the goal of removing hard working, tax paying individuals, harming and even killing citizens in the process.
Due to these officers’ eagerness to grab anyone they can off the street, an indefinite number of our citizens are detained and abused each day. The Department of Homeland Security has no public records regarding how often a detainee is later found to be a citizen, so the exact number remains unknown.
This unknown statistic limits public knowledge, most likely intentionally. This commonly leads people to use information straight from social media, inherently spreading misinformation and phony statistics that further deny or dismiss the atrocities ICE officers have committed.
Despite Department of Homeland Security attempts to keep ICE officers’ unwarranted abductions under wraps, the truth can never truly be hidden. An article posted by Propublica provides a bare minimum number of citizens detained by ICE between Jan 20 – October 4 of 2025.
“We compiled and reviewed every case we could find of agents holding citizens against their will, whether during immigration raids or protests,” writes Nicole Foy, a journalist for Propublica. ”While the tally is almost certainly incomplete, we found more than 170 such incidents during the first nine months of President Donald Trump’s second administration.”
The article goes on to reveal that an alarming amount of these citizens were either held after presenting ID, beaten, injured, held at gunpoint, or denied rights in the process of being detained. As it isn’t possible for me to write about every violent encounter, I heavily advise you, the reader, to look into the article after finishing this.
Among this array of victims was disabled U.S. veteran George Retes, who was driving to his job as a security guard for a marijuana farm when a raid occurred at the farm, sparking a large protest on the surrounding site. A video showcases his car trying to slowly reverse, on the account that he was stuck in the middle of protesters and ICE officers and needed to get to work on time to get any pay.
Agents then proceeded to break Retes’ car window, pepper spray him, and slam him on the ground, kneeling on his neck while they ignored his bumper sticker that explained that he was a disabled veteran.
After being dragged into a vehicle despite his pleas to check his ID in his wallet, Retes was held in ICE custody for three days and denied of any way to contact the outside world, including his lawyer.
During his time of isolation, Retes’ daughter had to celebrate her third birthday with the fear that she may never hear from her father again. His family learned where he had been only after he returned home with cuts all over his legs from broken glass and hands that were stung from pepper spray.
After Retes shared his traumatic encounter online in the form of an op-ed story, the Department of Homeland Security wrote a response on X, stating that he was arrested for assault after he “became violent and refused to comply with law enforcement.” This is a blatant lie. Retes was released with zero charges.
It is clear to anyone who has been following these events that these agents’ crimes know no limits. If you aren’t against them, you are for them. They have shown that they are not afraid to kill a few citizens to remind everyone of their power.
So, what can you do as a citizen? I heavily encourage, if possible, to practice your First Amendment right and protest until you can’t possibly protest anymore. The options are endless. You can go to gatherings, sign petitions, boycott affiliates, donate to victims, and most importantly, educate others.
You don’t have to participate in big debates or spend huge sums of money to help the cause; it could be as simple as posting a picture on your Instagram story. The strength of speech and unity holds more power than any organization could ever dream of possessing. Speak for those who cannot speak for themselves because by the time you are in danger, no one will be left to listen.
This article is the opinion of sophomore Mac Durham. His opinion does not necessarily reflect the view of the Eagle’s Eye newspaper or of Delta High School.
