US President Donald Trump promised his voters a strict migration policy and wants to deport one million people per year. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency received an additional budget of 75 billion dollars this year and is conducting an unprecedented campaign of arrests, raids and deportations. Trump says his priority is to deport ‘the worst of the worst’.
But the harsh migration policy does not only target serious criminals. It is affecting increasingly broad sections of the population, including people with residence status or work permits. Often these are citizens who have been living and working in the US for years. From all corners of the country, there are stories of people who, sometimes for inexplicable reasons, are being arrested and deported. Increasingly large groups of Americans live in constant fear of deportation.
Living Under ICE follows Desiree from El Paso, among others, who is fighting for the release of her partner Xochitl. She was arrested without much explanation and locked up in a detention centre. We witness a strange spectacle in which migrants are summoned in groups for an administrative check-up. When they show up, they risk being arrested seemingly at random and immediately transported away by bus.
‘I'm not a criminal, so why should I be treated like one?’ says a young mother who fled the authoritarian regime in Venezuela with her daughter. After nearly ten years in the US, they are being detained and the woman must prove that she has not committed any crime. She enlists the help of the tireless lawyer Amanda. ‘You see ICE everywhere,’ she says, ‘in parks, at the market, at the courthouse.’
Local journalist Uriel García from El Paso calculated that a quarter of all ICE arrests under Trump took place in Texas, the highest number of any US state. He sees increasing arbitrariness: ‘The government is threatening to take away the citizenship of anyone it doesn't like.’ Louise's colleague and podcast creator Mando, born and raised in the US but with Mexican roots, also had a run-in with ICE.
