Crossing the Street in Trump’s America

I have a friend who is so afraid of ICE that he won’t let me write whether he’s my neighbor or my co‑worker, whether he lives in Cambridge or Boston, whether he studies at Harvard or MIT. I’m not going to give him a pseudonym. Elusive as he is, he didn’t want to propose one either. So I will simply call him my friend.

My Arab friend is so afraid that I cannot specify here which European countries he has studied in, or whether the brilliant PhD he is about to complete in the United States is in the sciences or the humanities. I am not making my friend up. This is neither a literary exercise nor do I have imaginary friends.

In Massachusetts there are dozens of non‑profit organizations devoted to helping immigrants with legal advice, community accompaniment, and practical support. Lawyers, university clinics, neighborhood groups, faith communities... And yet my friend still leaves his house as if he were crossing a war front.

He looks both ways when he steps out of his door. He has erased himself from social media. He only goes out when strictly necessary. And he never goes out alone. A network of classmates as scared as he is makes sure that whenever one of them needs to go somewhere, someone with a car will pick them up and go with them. They don’t behave like this because they’ve done anything wrong, but because they have understood that, for ICE, a foreign passport, a “strange” last name, a bureaucratic mistake or a viral video is enough to become a target.

The atmosphere is so thick that, this Christmas, in several churches in New England the baby Jesuses have disappeared from the Nativity scenes. In their place, signs read: “ICE was here.”

ICE Data and the Making of a Policy Myth

The cold numbers explain part of that fear. In fiscal year 2024, ICE carried out 149,070 arrests; of these, 113,431 were administrative arrests by Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO), that is, civil detentions for immigration reasons, accounting for 76.1% of the total.  As of late June 2025, 71.7% of detainees had no criminal convictions. This includes people with pending charges as well as those with no known criminal history. According to AP news, ICE assigns threat levels to detainees scaling from 1 to 3, with one being the highest. Those without a criminal record do not make this list, and are labeled in the system as “not a threat.” 

Many of them are not “dangerous criminals,” but neighbors, students, mothers, restaurant workers, delivery drivers and ––like my friend–– PhD candidates.

In New England the escalation has been brutal: between January and early December 2024, ICE carried out 933 removals; in the same period in 2025, there were 9,987 removals, more than ten times as many, according to the agency’s own data. And all of this in a country where an estimated 50.2 million people born outside the U.S. live today, around 14.8% of the population, one in every seven people. 

From the top, the justification comes in the form of speeches about crime. During his last presidential term, Donald Trump turned MS‑13 into the perfect symbol of his entire immigration policy. In a White House appearance in 2018 he boasted that, in his three years of Presidency , ICE had deported more than 16,000 gang members and arrested more than 2,000 members of MS‑13. He described them as “an evil group of people,” “sick,” and “deranged.” 

It is no coincidence that in his second term, Trump has aligned himself closely with El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, striking a deal that has seen the U.S. deport nearly 300 alleged gang members — including 23 MS-13 suspects and roughly 238 individuals linked to Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua — to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a massive prison Bukele built with a stated capacity of up to 40,000 detainees. However many of those transferred had no documented violent criminal convictions in the United States, and others —  like Kilmar Abrego Garcia — were legal residents, only returned to U.S. custody after stateside advocacy and legal intervention.

Detained in Plain Sight

In Massachusetts, dozens of people arrested by immigration agents in the Greater Boston area have been held for days in a building near the Burlington Mall, in conditions that lawyers describe as “abysmal” and “unsanitary.” There are no proper showers or sinks.

A judge granted Kary Díaz Martínez, a mother of two, permission to remain in the state, but even so ICE transferred her to that Burlington building where, after 18 hours in custody, she had only received “a small cup of oatmeal and an apple,” according to her attorney, Sarah Sherman‑Stokes, who described detention conditions across Massachusetts as “notoriously bad.”

On September 26, 2025, the brutality was on full display in broad daylight in Chelsea. That morning, Hilda Ramírez Sanan, a resident of more than twenty years with a valid green card, was accompanying a family member to a court hearing. Her two teenage children, both U.S. citizens, were traveling with her in the car, which had a disability placard hanging from the rear‑view mirror. Just a few feet from the courthouse entrance, several unmarked vehicles boxed her car in and blocked it. Within seconds, at least eight armed, masked officers—without identifying themselves, giving clear instructions, or asking for documents—surrounded the vehicle and smashed the driver’s‑side windows. Hilda was left covered in glass.

They dragged her out of the car, threw her onto the asphalt, twisted her arms behind her back to handcuff her, kicked her, and slammed her face‑first into the ground, all in front of her children. One of the agents unbuckled the seatbelt of her thirteen‑year‑old son—who is on the autism spectrum—yanked him out of the seat, and began interrogating him about his immigration status, his age, whom he lived with, threatening to arrest him if he didn’t answer or couldn’t “prove” he was here legally. The scene is caught on video, but not even the cameras were enough to stop ICE: only when local police insisted that the agents check Hilda’s ID, and it became clear that she had lawful permanent residence, did they release her. By then she could no longer walk; firefighters had to carry her to a chair, and an ambulance took her and her children to the emergency room.

The family left with a diagnosis of concussion, bruises, a painful nerve injury from the twisting of her arm, a teenage girl in shock, and a boy who, ever since, wakes up in the middle of the night screaming, “Don’t kill my mom.” For weeks, the car sat unusable in the driveway, its windows shattered, while Hilda paid for taxis to get to medical appointments and to move her children around. No agent ever explained why a family with lawful status was treated this way. In December, LCR, Lawyers for Civil Rights, has filed a complaint under the Federal Tort Claims Act, the step required before a federal lawsuit, alleging unlawful detention, warrantless arrest, assault, battery, false imprisonment, and intentional infliction of emotional distress, as well as violations of the Fourth and Fifth Amendments. For LCR attorney Jillian Lenson, what happened to this family “is an act of extreme and senseless cruelty” and part of “an alarming pattern” of aggressive and illegal ICE operations in Massachusetts.

Mutual Aid in the Shadow of ICE

In the face of this terror, a current of solidarity has sprung up. In Burlington, the group No Fear Street Theater plants itself every week on Burlington Mall Road, right in front of the federal building, under the banner of “joyful, tenacious resistance to ICE terror.”

This past Christmas, on December 22, 23, and 24, the group gathered several hundred people to sing carols outside the detention complex. The classic English hymns rang out and, woven among them, José Feliciano’s ubiquitous “Feliz Navidad” and “El burrito sabanero,” sung by voices with every accent. From inside the building, detainees answered with shouts that took people’s breath away.

“The only crime many of the people in here have committed is having brown skin. The worst thing they go through isn’t the physical discomfort, it’s the psychological torture of feeling alone, without a watch, without mail, without a phone, with no idea that their family or their community is out here unable to reach them,” one of the organizers, Michael, told the crowd. “That’s why we’re here, to show them they’re not alone,” he added.

The MIRA Coalition coordinates more than 140 organizations across the state to advance the rights and integration of immigrants and refugees. Lawyers for Civil Rights runs an emergency hotline to respond to raids and detentions. Latino groups such as Centro Presente, La Alianza Hispana, or Latinos Unidos en Massachusetts work to turn panic into paperwork, into English classes, “Know Your Rights” workshops, support groups, and sometimes simple kitchen‑table conversations where people cry and laugh in Spanglish.

In Boston, organizations like LUCE offer legal advice, accompaniment for appointments and help with paperwork. They also maintain a phone line to alert the community to where ICE is conducting raids in the city. One of its representatives, Juan Soler, told The Parlor Magazine on January 6 that on Three Kings’ Day—a holiday much celebrated in the Latino community—they had received 50 calls before 10:30 in the morning. That day, Soler said, ICE was moving through neighborhoods and towns in East Boston, though he added that “because of the holidays, the presence” of federal officers “has gone down.” The phone, in any case, never stops ringing: every call is someone who has seen vans, bulletproof vests, unmarked men on the corner.

A Terrifying Precedent

And while fear has settled deeply into places like East Boston and Chelsea, it has also sharpened nationwide. Just this past week, on January 7, 2026, ICE agents shot and killed a thirty-seven-year-old U.S. citizen, Renee Nicole Good, during a federal operation in Minneapolis—she was not undocumented, not the subject of an investigation, and not accused of any crime.

President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem immediately framed the killing as an act of “domestic terrorism,” with Noem alleging the driver “weaponized her vehicle against law enforcement”. Yet video recordings of the encounter and eyewitness accounts clearly show the woman driving away from the scene without hitting the officer. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, after viewing fuller footage, denounced the federal narrative as “bulls---,” directly challenging the administration’s version of events. 

This event follows the shooting of two Venezuelan nationals in the city of Portland Oregon just a day prior: a man named Luis David Nico Moncada and a woman named Yorlenys Betzabeth Zambrano-Contreras. The shooting was defended by national officials on the basis that both individuals were alleged “Tren del Agua” gang members, despite no evidence to support this claim. And just last night in Minneapolis, an ICE agent shot a man in the leg during a confrontation reflecting an escalation in the use of firearms during immigration enforcement operations.

The events have created a terrifying precedent.  Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez accused ICE of becoming an “anti-civilian, paramilitary organization” in response to the Minneapolis shooting, and she has called for the ICE agent involved to be arrested and prosecuted. This raises a deeper question for U.S. citizens and immigrants alike: if a white U.S. citizen can be killed by a federal agent in broad daylight without committing a crime — and that agent continues to operate with impunity — what remains of safety for the rest of us?

***

My friend’s terror began after seeing the footage of Rumeysa Ozturk’s arrest back in March, just a few minutes from where he lives in Greater Boston. Masked men with no visible identification abducted her when she stepped out of her house to meet friends and break the daily Ramadan fast. ICE agents took her away when she had not eaten all day. Flouting state and federal law and ignoring court orders, they transferred her to New Hampshire, Vermont, and Louisiana. In Somerville, Cambridge, and Boston, protests followed one after another demanding the release of Rumeysa, a Turkish, pro‑Palestinian PhD student in psychology specializing in childhood trauma.

I can’t say which country my friend is from, because my friend is very afraid. But since there are ten Arab countries that produce olive oil, I’ll tell you something about my friend.

When I met him and he found out I’m from Andalusia, the conversation naturally turned to olive trees. He has just come back from spending the holidays in his homeland, with his parents and siblings. Like one of the Three Kings, he brought me a plain, unlabeled bottle of deep, delicious extra‑virgin olive oil from his family’s harvest.

That bottle of oil—dense, dark green—remains in my kitchen, proof of what is lost when neighbors become suspects,  when a university town breeds fear instead of belonging, causing anyone with dark skin, or a foreign-sounding name, to think twice before leaving home.