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[Alondra says her dad wept when she was first able to visit him in detention and told him that community members had contributed $25,000 to his GoFundMe — and on a later visit, she told him, “If you were crying at 25K, you’re really going to be crying now, Dad.”

Sure enough, he cried again.

Judging from what unfolded here in Yamhill County, voters may have wanted a tightening of the border and the deportation of criminals — but not the arrest of a longtime neighbor. They wanted Trump to pursue gangsters, not destroy small businesses. Many people here sought some middle ground on immigration and felt they didn’t get it from Biden, but now they find they’re not getting it from Trump, either.

Even for Americans who welcomed more deportations, there’s something chilling about the militarization of the crackdown and the echoes of police state practices: plainclothes officers wearing masks, refusing to give their names, grabbing people off the streets and hustling them into unmarked vehicles. Something like that happened to me once in China — but State Security there treated me far better than ICE treats immigrants here.

Consider also the financial cost of all this. ICE says that “the average cost to arrest, detain and remove an illegal alien is $17,121.” Thus the administration’s goal of one million deportations would cost $17 billion — and presumably be repeated annually. For comparison, that’s more than all 50 states spend together on pre-K.

Trump has more than tripled the annual ICE budget to $28 billion, making it the most expensive law enforcement agency in the federal government. Indeed, that’s more than the current annual budgets for the F.B.I., the Bureau of Prisons, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives put together. Trump is also using officials from other law enforcement agencies to build a deportation army, meaning that fewer law enforcement officers are left to deal with homegrown criminals.]


Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/19/opinion/immigrants-ice-deportation.html