ICE Is Not Retreating
The Pro-Immigrant Movement Must Stay on the Offensive
Donald Trump’s assault on immigrants is continuing unabated.
The violence and lack of concern for individual rights or basic human decency remains its hallmark, even if there are reports of a lessening of court appearances.
Consider this recent report from NJ.com (original News 12 report here):
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained a father in Somerset County, then left his two children alone as they drove away, a report says.
This was in Franklin Township, near where I live. The children — 13 and 15 — were left behind with their car to call their mother. The agents said they were taking the teens’ dad to detention in Newark, having stopped him as he was transporting his children to school.
That the agents appeared polite doesn’t excuse the fact that they left two minors behind, unattended and unsupervised — something they obviously knew.
So why do this? Easy. It’s built into the system and will continue to be even with a change atop the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Consider another incident from the last week — this one in Dallas. As reported by The Huffington Post:
Mohammad Nazeer Paktyawal, 41, was preparing to drop his children off at school on Friday morning when multiple agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took him in front of his children, according to the man’s family.
“That moment will stay with them forever,” the family said in a Sunday statement, referring to his children, the youngest of whom is 18 months.
Paktyawal, who Post describes as an “asylum-seeking father of six who fought alongside the U.S. military in Afghanistan,” died on Saturday after being hospitalized for “shortness of breath and chest pains.”
Paktyawal was eating breakfast at the hospital on Saturday morning “when medical staff noted that his tongue had become swollen, prompting a medical response,” ICE said in its Sunday statement. He was declared dead “after multiple lifesaving efforts.” A medical investigation into his cause of death is ongoing.
This is just two admittedly cherry-picked incidents, but they are consistent with the stories we are hearing from immigrant families and from advocates who are working on behalf of those being swept into the vast detention apparatus that is enriching private prison companies and damaging communities.
NJ Spotlight reports that ICE plans to “hire thousands of new guards, some with guns, to blanket major East Coast cities and transport immigrant detainees.” The plan is to contract with a “private company to provide around-the-clock transportation and monitoring of people whom immigration agents have detained.”
The request from ICE is part of a growing nationwide immigrant jail and deportation apparatus, funded through a dense July 2025 law that disproportionally benefits the wealthy while cutting public health care and food programs.
That law contains $45 billion for new ICE detention facilities available through President Donald Trump’s term, making it nearly impossible to defund. From that total, ICE plans to spend about $38 billion to construct a network of detention sites to hold and deport people, according to public records.
This expansion — which includes a planned facility in Roxbury, N.J. — is happening even after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was forced to resign, and it serves as the clearest evidence that President Donald Trump’s domestic war is continuing unabated, even as he wages war in Iran, threatens allies, and rails against the courts and the Democrats.
Operation Metro Surge in Minneapolis has slowed, but operations in other cities continue and continue to spread. And the fallout from Trump’s federal invasion of the Twin Cities continues, with families attempting to rebuild amid a variety of hardships, including extreme economic need.
Trump’s domestic war continues. His troops remain untethered to any kind of accountability, operating without constraint and without concern for the consequences, Families and workers are the targets — despite the lie that the is about criminality. Families, workers, children, entire communities, and even our democracy — these are the victims of Trump’s dirty little war.
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What can you do?
Get involved in one of the ICE boycott movements, or protests. At Rutgers, we are pushing hard to Break Rutgers’ Ties to ICE — to convince Rutgers to sever ties with businesses that also do business with ICE, including rent-a-car companies, charter airlines, hotels, even Target. You can watch this teach-in featuring Eric Blanc for more on this.
