A COUNTRY UNDER ICE

Since June 2026, immigration raids have significantly disrupted daily life across cities nationwide, resulting in family separations, workers missing work, and divisions among local leaders over the implications of the federal crackdown.

The events on June 6, 2025, at the Home Depot in Pico Union and at Ambiance Apparel in Downtown Los Angeles were not isolated incidents. Instead, they marked the start of a broader mass-deportation effort that spread to other cities, transforming immigration enforcement from routine raids into widespread social disruption.

In Los Angeles, the raids did more than remove people from workplaces and street corners; they tore apart neighborhoods, frightened families, and triggered protests, economic losses, school walkouts, and the deployment of the National Guard and Marines.

The enforcement activities went beyond Los Angeles, suggesting the June raids were part of a larger nationwide crackdown.

In August 2025, the National Guard was deployed to Washington, D.C., alongside a significant federal presence, including agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO).

Several “sanctuary cities,” including Memphis, Tenn., Charlotte, N.C., and Portland, Ore., faced threats or were in the planning stages for ICE to carry out large-scale immigration raids.

In the first week of September 2025, Operation Midway Blitz launched in Chicago, Illinois, focusing on the most wanted individuals. However, instead of targeting its intended group, federal agents arrested people off the streets through racial profiling, using the same tactics employed in Los Angeles.

After ICE agents arrested a Latino family and their 3- and 8-year-old children at Millennium Park in Chicago, Gregory Bovino, the head of the operation, told a reporter about their criteria for detaining people, “Obviously, the particular characteristic of an individual, how they look. How do they look compared to, say, you?”

People were unlawfully detained, beaten, and transported in unmarked cars that resembled cages or animal enclosures to a detention facility for an indefinite period.

In early December 2025, as the Chicago operation drew considerable attention, a large Immigration and Customs Enforcement deployment was also planned for Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) initiated “Operation Metro Surge,” dispatching thousands of federal agents, mainly to focus on the Somali community.

In January 2026, the administration ramped up enforcement by assigning 2,000 additional federal agents to Minneapolis, marking one of the largest immigration operations in U.S. history, under the pretext of fraud at Somali-run day care centers that a right-wing influencer had posted online.

In Minnesota, several incidents sparked national outrage, including the shooting and death of Reene Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen, and an ICE agent shooting a Venezuelan man in the leg. A few days later, on January 18, ICE agents forcibly entered a Minnesota home, detained a senior U.S. citizen at gunpoint without a warrant, and then took him outside in his underwear during freezing weather.

On January 20, a 5-year-old boy returning home from school was detained by ICE along with his father and taken to a Texas detention center. Zena Stevnik, the Superintendent of Columbia Heights Public Schools, reported that federal agents removed Liam Conejo Ramos from a moving car in the family’s driveway and told him to knock on the door to check if anyone was inside, effectively using him as bait.

On January 24, 37-year-old Alex Pretti was fatally shot by a CBP agent. The officer’s claim of self-defense was contradicted by the bystander video.

On February 12, 2026, the administration announced the conclusion of Operation Metro Surge, an unusual decision. Meanwhile, immigration authorities made no similar announcements about Chicago, Los Angeles, or other cities.

Throughout the year, ICE and CBP detained, stopped, and arrested thousands of individuals, including U.S. citizens, journalists, local officials, and California Senator Alex Padilla, a highly respected member of the U.S. Senate.

A year later, it’s clear that the raids starting in June 2025 were driven not only by immigration issues but also by desires for power, visibility, economic benefits for private prison operators, and racial prejudice.

In a recent speech at the opening of The Obama Presidential Center Museum in Chicago on June 18, 2026, the former First Lady Michelle Obama said the following:

“These folks, these folks aren’t Americans too. They are America. They are the beating heart of this country. They are us, and we are them. And to ignore the simple truth, to refuse to respect the contributions and experiences of people who aren’t exactly like us, y’all puts us all at risk,” said the Former Lady.

“Failing to see the humanity in all people puts us all on a slippery slope. And once that slide starts, there’s no telling where it stops. A dangerous precedent that flies in the very face of our faith. And of the founding promise of this democracy that all of us, all of us are created equal, that each of us is a child of God with inherent value. And no one, and I mean no one, has the right to sit in judgment of who’s American enough,” she said.

Los Angeles served as the testing ground, said Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, illustrating how enforcement becomes a spectacle that endangers human lives and harms communities.

The country should stand against the normalization of mass raids. It’s worth asking whether a government that rules through fear truly serves the public’s best interests.

Leave a comment