runs on suspicion, spectacle, and the performative humiliation of those it decides are outsiders. When the agents seized Hermosillo, they said he “looked foreign.” That was enough. The cell door closed, his name evaporated, and the government began speaking over him.
In 2019, before this second Trump era, another American boy sat in another cell. His name was Francisco Galicia — born in Texas, shackled by ICE for more than three weeks because officers decided his documents were “suspect.” He later said he considered signing deportation papers just to escape.² The terror of being forced to choose between physical freedom and national exile is something most Americans never imagine — until their government places them in that choice.
When Trump launched his campaign in 2015, he did not begin with jobs or health care or foreign policy. He began by telling America that Mexico was sending “criminals” and “rapists” — “some,” he allowed, were good people.³ Even then, the crowd understood: they were being offered an enemy.
Enemies simplify things. They absolve us of having to ask why the schools failed or why wages collapsed or why loneliness has carved its way through entire generations. If someone else is the enemy, then we are righteous.
That escalator speech hardened into law the moment Trump signed Executive Order 13769 — the Muslim ban — in January 2017.⁴ Airport terminals became holding sites, legal limbo zones. Mothers were told their children could not cross with them. Green-card holders were handcuffed. Translators wept in corners as husbands and wives waited on opposite sides of glass.
Then came “zero tolerance.” Family separation. “As many children as possible,” internal discussions said, because trauma was the deterrent.⁵ We once imagined that America could commit harm only by accident. The record shows the policy was the harm.
Inside ICE field offices, spreadsheets began writing a different story. Non-criminal arrests doubled nationwide in early 2017.⁶ In Atlanta, the number skyrocketed fivefold in six weeks.⁷ Trump said the net was designed to catch the “worst criminals.” But the majority of people detained by ICE — then and now — have no criminal record at all. In 2019, that number was 64 percent. Today, it is nearly 74 percent.⁸
That hum returns, louder now, more structural — as if the entire system vibrates on a frequency tuned to fear.
The Government Accountability Office later found that between 2015 and 2020, ICE arrested 674 people, detained 121, and deported 70 who were “potential U.S. citizens.”⁹ The word potential is federal-speak for “we never bothered to check.”
Galicia, asked later what frightened him most, did not mention food shortages or cold concrete or the sound of men trying not to cry. He said, “They told me I wasn’t who I said I was.”² When a government takes your identity and tries to hand you a new one, your passport becomes set dressing.
In Minnesota this year, Trump stood onstage and called Somali immigrants “garbage” who should be deported.¹⁰ In the audience sat a woman in a red scarf who later said to a reporter, “He is talking about my neighbors. My son’s teacher. Me.”
Then — the voice that changed the oxygen in every room where it was uttered:
**“Animals. That’s what I’ll always call them. Animals.”**¹¹