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immigration
What You Don't Know About a Mass Deportation—How It Feels
The truth is, few people know. And those who do know aren’t telling. Or can’t. Well, I know. And we should all be horrified.
Jan 12, 2025
Everyone's talking about mass deportations: how much they'll cost; how they'll tank the economy; how they'll tear communities apart, even if the Trump regime can’t realistically corral and expel the millions of people living and working and raising families without status in the US. Even if their promise was only ever meant to stoke terror and drive the MAGA base to the polls.
What's missing from discussions—what’s always missing from the immigration discussion—is the human impact: what such missions look, feel, sound, and smell like as well as the trauma endured by all involved, including the federal agents made to carry out such actions.
The truth is, few people know. And those who do know aren’t telling. Or can’t.
Well, I know. And we should all be horrified.
I interviewed over four dozen people deported en masse under Trump 1.0 by ICE Air and Department of Defense contractor, Omni Air International. I describe their revelations in my book, Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, one of only two public accounts that details what happens to an estimated average of 11,500 individuals on roughly one hundred ICE Air flights every month.
As I am not someone who’s been forced to endure the horrors of an ICE Enforcement and Removals Operation expulsion campaign, I can only imagine the terror and humiliation my sources felt based on the testimonies they shared with me. I, therefore, must ask you to imagine, too…
If you've ever been on a long-distance, economy-class flight, you will know that the body fatigues from sitting in the same position for too long. The joints swell, both from inaction as well as from the cabin's lower-than-normal humidity, which sucks moisture from the tissues and cells, causing dehydration. Shoes become uncomfortably tight; hands lose their grip. Even a six-hour journey across the continental US can be taxing to the lower back, hips, knees.
Now imagine being forced to fly across half the US as well as the Atlantic Ocean with your ankles in manacles, your hands cuffed, and tied tightly to a waist chain. Or your body locked in a torturous “stress position” because ICE ERO agents immobilized you in The WRAP. Imagine the links of the waist chain planting themselves into your spine and back muscles. Imagine not being able to shift or adjust them because you are bound for sixteen, twenty, twenty-four, thirty-six, even forty-eight hours in the case of a botched Omni Air International flight to Somalia documented by Rebecca Sharpless in Shackled (2024).
Imagine sitting for sixteen hours to Douala, Cameroon, your ankles and hands swelling, causing the metal hardware to pierce your skin and eat into your nerves. Imagine your panic at a moment of turbulence when you realize that in the event of an emergency, you will not be able to place over your nose and mouth the oxygen mask that drops from above; you will not be able to open the hatch if the aircraft lands on water; you will not be able to grab a life buoy or to tread water in the event you must deplane in a hurry. You will not be able to hurry. You will be helpless.
Imagine being fed nothing but stale white bread and potato chips. Imagine having to bend over, like a dog, to eat the tasteless, salty fare because your chains are so tight, that you cannot bring your hands to your mouth to feed yourself. Imagine not wishing to eat like a dog and going without, for sixteen hours, maybe more.
Imagine your mouth and nose so parched, the natural, human act of breathing causes you pain. Imagine hours passing before anyone offers you water. Now imagine being physically unable to raise the plastic bottle up to your bone-dry lips and throat.
"To get a drink," recounts Oscar (not his real name), "you had to squeeze both your hands around the container to push the water out the top and try to catch a little on your tongue."
Imagine not being allowed to go to the bathroom without the escort of an armed guard. Imagine having to shuffle your way down the aircraft aisle in manacles and chains with a bladder full to bursting only to find, when you reach the cabin restroom, that the guard refuses to close the door. It is impossible, of course, to lower zipper and trousers with your hands enchained. Imagine missing and soiling yourself. Imagine your escort erupting in laughter, shaming you. Imagine returning to your seat, made to sit in your own urine and feces.
Imagine being a menstruating woman denied a fresh pad; or given one but unable to apply it to soiled panties with bound hands. Imagine even wanting to try with the toilet door left open, and a male guard peering in. Laughing. Imagine.
Imagine that no one has cleaned the toilets and being overpowered by the stench of human excrement. Imagine trying desperately to hold it, but finally giving into the call of nature and the stench being so bad your body takes over. You pee in your pants as you retch, adding to the unholy mess.
I'm told it wasn't just the raw essence of human waste that infused Omni Air International N207AX. There was the constant sobbing of passengers; the ceaseless yelling of guards dressed for war and toting guns; and the odor of nervous, panicked sweat. Again quoting Oscar: "It was torture. You could smell the trauma."
Oscar wasn't the only one to say so. The four-dozen-plus accounts I collected from those forced into this ICE Air torture chamber collectively describe a flying Abu Ghraib. “There are laws preventing even terrorists being treated this way,” states Oscar.
He and the others were not terrorists. They were asylum seekers, fleeing a dictator’s war in which they had become human targets.
In the waning months of the first Trump administration, Omni Air International’s Boeing 767 wide bodies took off multiple times from Alliance Field in Fort Worth, Texas, a hub for defense contractors and cargo operators like Amazon, which is also the majority shareholder in Omni’s parent company, Air Transport Services Group (ATSG). Omni Air charged US taxpayers an estimated $1 million per mission.
How many such flights will it take to exile millions? And how many crimes against humanity will be committed by the so-called “leader of the free world” in the process? You do the math.
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'Don't Be Fooled': Laken Riley Act Not About Crime by Migrants—It's a Right-Wing Power Grab
"This bill is political grandstanding at its worst," said one lawmaker.
Jan 10, 2025
With the U.S. Senate poised to vote on the Laken Riley Act on Friday, immigrant rights advocates are warning that—despite claims from proponents that the bill is aimed at protecting American communities from violent crime—supporters of the legislation are actually advancing a dangerous "Trojan horse" and securing a power grab for xenophobic right-wing authorities.
The bill is named after Laken Riley, a Georgia woman who was killed last February while she was jogging. Jose Antonio Ibarra, an undocumented immigrant from Venezuela, was convicted of her murder in November, and the case was a focal point of President-elect Donald Trump's campaign last year.
But as Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of immigrant rights group America's Voice, said Thursday, the bill "is filled with unrelated and sweeping measures that won't improve public safety."
Central provisions in the legislation, which passed in the House on Tuesday with the support of 37 Democrats along with the entire Republican caucus, would require immigration officers to detain undocumented immigrants who are accused of theft, including shoplifting—an apparent response to the fact that Ibarra was cited for shoplifting in Georgia but was not detained before he killed Riley.
Critics have expressed outrage over the provision, with Cárdenas saying it would trample "important due process principles—greenlighting detention and deportation for those accused, rather than convicted of low-level crimes."
"It's no surprise Republicans are continuing to exploit a horrific act of violence and portray immigrants as dangerous threats to America, despite the reality that immigrants have a lower crime rate than the native-born," said Cárdenas. "And it also should be no surprise to any close observers of right-wing politics that the bill being pushed this week doesn't seek to improve public safety or even focus on public safety threats."
At Arizona Republic, editor Elvia Díaz advised readers, "Don't be fooled by soundbites."
"Republicans and now Democrats, too, want you to believe the Laken Riley Act is about deporting shoplifters," she wrote. "It's a power grab by states to dismantle federal authority over immigration enforcement."
In a column at MSNBC on Wednesday, Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, wrote that Republicans pushing the bill are asking the question: "Who runs the U.S. immigration system?"
The answer, backed up by numerous courts, has been the federal government, but the bill would give broad new authorities to state officials, such as attorneys general, to file legal challenges in order to have specific immigrants detained and to force the State Department to block visas from countries that won't accept immigrants who are deported.
"Giving states a veto power over thousands of decisions made every day by federal law enforcement officers and leaders will complicate immigration issues in every community and threaten to set off international incidents which could hurt U.S. interests around the globe," wrote Reichlin-Melnick.
The visa provision could impact countries such as China and India, which have "historically not cooperated fully with the United States on deportations," and where more than 1.8 million immigrant and short-term visas were issued to nationals in 2023.
"Because the United States is so intertwined with these countries, administrations of both parties have been unwilling to threaten blanket visa bans as a punishment for not accepting deportees," wrote Reichlin-Melnick. "Yet should the Laken Riley Act become law, that decision may no longer be in the hands of our nation's top diplomats and law enforcement officers; it could be in the hands of a single federal district court judge in Texas or Louisiana."
He continued:
What could this look like in practice? Imagine a person from China living in Texas on an H-1B visa who commits an offense that leads to a deportation order. If China does not accept the deportation, [Texas Attorney General] Ken Paxton could go to court seeking to force the federal government to ban all visas from China (or maybe just all H-1B visas) without having to worry about taking the blame for the economic or diplomatic fallout to the United States.
"What happened to Laken Riley was a terrible tragedy, and the perpetrator has been sentenced to life in prison for his heinous acts," wrote Reichlin-Melnick on Wednesday. "But just as Willie Horton's bad acts decades ago were not a justification for supercharging a system of mass incarceration, the heinous acts of Jose Ibarra should not be an excuse to flip our system of constitutional governance on its head and empower individual states and federal judges to run immigration law."
Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.), who opposed the bill this week, said he has heard from "a lot of people who say they support this bill, but who don't seem to know what it really does."
"For example, if this bill is signed into law, a 12-year-old kid brought here by a parent could be LOCKED IN ICE DETENTION if they are accused—not even convicted, simple accused—of stealing a candy bar," McGovern said in a post on X, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement..
Kylie Cheung of Jezebel pointed out that while Republicans have held the Laken Riley Act up as essential legislation to protect women from violence, "these lawmakers don't care about women's safety or high rates of femicide perpetrated by people with citizenship—they've cut all actual resources for victims. They just want to gut basic civil liberties."
Immigration attorney Ben Winograd of the Immigrant & Refugee Appellate Center offered a hypothetical scenario under the bill: "Imagine a man who is a U.S. citizen marries a woman who entered the country illegally. He abuses her constantly, and after learning that she intends to leave him, he calls the police and (falsely) claims that she stole some of his property."
"If the police arrest the woman, she would be subject to mandatory detention while in removal proceedings—even if the police determined that the accusation was bogus," said Winograd. "The Laken Riley Act would allow any person with a grudge against an undocumented immigrant to make them subject to indefinite mandatory detention simply by leveling a false accusation of theft."
All the Senate Republicans are sponsoring the bill, which was cleared for a vote on Thursday, with Sens. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) and Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) joining them. In order to overcome a filibuster the GOP needs just six more Democrats to support the legislation.
Sen. Andy Kim (D-N.J.), one of nine senators who opposed advancing the bill on Thursday, said he is in favor of "bipartisan action to fix our broken immigration system."
"I stand ready to work across the aisle to get it done," he said. "Let's start from a foundation grounded in our Constitution."
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Staring Down the Abyss of 2025
The basis of hope for a better future, I believe, is the courage to accept reality. A change of collective consciousness is our best shot at not only surviving but thriving.
Jan 05, 2025
2025 offers an intriguing mix of the certain and the uncertain.
Here’s what is certain: Democratic institutions will continue to crumble, witness the erosion of the rule of law in the U.S. and elsewhere; long-standing norms governing public affairs, such as a bar to prosecuting political opponents, will loosen their grip on behavior; countless species, especially among birds and insects, will go extinct; a host of “unnatural” disasters attributable to climate change, like wild fires and floods, will devastate wondrous landscapes and settled communities; politically or environmentally-induced mass migration, as experienced now in the various parts of the world, will become more pervasive; income inequality between the top 0.01% and the lowest 50% will increase; economic stability, as in the world-wide acceptance of the U.S. Dollar, will wane.
While not a certainty there’s reason to give added credibility to the risks of nuclear warfare, catastrophic climate tipping points, metastatic ethnic cleansing, and a world-wide pandemic, with mass extinction the result.
Within our own narrower, national context, certainties include the highest ever figures for extraction of natural gas and oil, continued increases in chronic diseases such as Type-2 diabetes and cancer, ballooning healthcare costs per capita, upward swings in gun sales and school shootings, dramatically increased levels of homelessness, and more intrusion of microplastics into the oceans and into our bodies.
An unfettered grasp of our situation can offer up considerable light, hope, even optimism; and it can strengthen our resolve and solidify our resilience.
Uncertain are the targets, timing, locales, extent of severity, and designation of victims related to these eminently predicable developments in the world and in our country. Unclear is what will constitute right and effective action in the face of this inevitable political, social, and environmental unravelling. Finally, the grounding for individual and collective action—spiritual moorings, moral anchors, forms of mutual aid—remains inchoate.
To be human is to know we are going to die. This is certain. With each passing day of 2025, my physical being will be undergoing its own forms of unravelling, making death more proximate. What I don’t know is when and under what circumstances it will occur. Nor do I know for sure what my attitude and affect will be should I be conscious at the time.
With increasing disintegration worldwide and the social fabric in this country fraying, what can one do, how should one approach and contend with encroaching forms of “death” in the world and in this country? What are citizens’ essential responsibilities? For me what are mine as a mate, a father, grandfather, and friend?
You, the reader, might conclude, as you absorb all this, “How pessimistic, how fatalistic!” It will likely surprise you that that is not my mind set at all. Rather I am of the mind that the truth indeed sets one free. An unfettered grasp of our situation can offer up considerable light, hope, even optimism; and it can strengthen our resolve and solidify our resilience. Take a hard look at the obverse: that burying unvarnished realities has improved our prospects. Hardly! Denial, obfuscation, euphemism, soft- pedaling, and distraction have not improved things. In fact, a strong case can be made that they have produced exactly the opposite, a deepening of our plight.
So I beckon my fellow citizens to adopt a different strategy, one that willfully accepts our dire circumstances, without wallowing in them, thus offering the chance of achieving more positive outcomes than our current predicament presages. The basis of hope for a better future, I believe, is the courage to accept reality. A change of collective consciousness is our best shot at not only surviving but thriving.
That I will die soon is certain. That 2025 heralds negative trend lines on multiple fronts is certain. But this is where the parallel can end. With a willingness on all our parts to accept our dire lot we can begin to veer away from what now seems a foregone conclusion.
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