The public face of Immigration and Customs Enforcement is a brutal, paramilitary force of masked men who hunt immigrants and terrorize American cities on behalf of the president of the United States.
The not-so-public face is somehow even worse.
ICE operates detention facilities across the country, holding tens of thousands of people arrested on immigration charges. President Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill included $45 billion for the construction of new detention space, including facilities with tent-like structures meant to house a growing influx of people seized by ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents.
These facilities, human rights researchers and former detainees report, are cramped, squalid and dangerous. “The food they gave us was not edible,” according to one woman initially detained at a Chicago airport along with her 5-year-old daughter. “We didn’t eat anything for days. They didn’t even give us water to drink.” Eventually, the woman and her daughter were transferred to the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Dilley, Texas, which the woman “described as a living hell.”
“Sometimes my daughter doesn’t want to leave our room because she is so sad and just wants to leave this prison so badly. She cries and cries about all of this. I am so worried that I barely eat,” the woman said.
After conducting two oversight visits to Camp East Montana — an ICE detention facility on the grounds of Fort Bliss in El Paso, which served as an internment camp during World War II — Representative Veronica Escobar of Texas warned of “dangerous and inhumane” conditions in a letter to the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem:
It is increasingly clear that it is not a safe nor professionally managed facility. Continuing to detain people at Camp East Montana means continually exposing people to risks from bad water, unhygienic conditions, poorly built facilities and a general lack of security and reliable management.
A separate letter to Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, sent by the American Civil Liberties Union and other human rights groups, described hellish abuse at the facility: “Detained immigrants are held for weeks at a time with no access to the outdoors in cramped, squalid soft-sided tents with 72 people per unit, where toilets and showers flood eating areas with raw sewage.” Detainees allege that they were threatened, beaten or sexually abused as punishment for conduct ranging from simple requests for basic necessities to refusing to sign deportation orders. Based on interviews with more than 45 detained immigrants, the groups wrote that “Officers have beaten detainees and used threats of violence, criminal charges and imprisonment in attempts to coerce people held at Fort Bliss to leave the United States and cross the border into Mexico, even if they are not subject to a removal order to Mexico.”
One Cuban man detained at Fort Bliss reported that officers crushed his testicles with their fingers, slammed him against a wall and beat him such that he couldn’t touch the left side of his head without pain for about a month, all because he wouldn’t accept deportation to Mexico.
Officers at the same facility beat one detainee, a teenager, so badly that he “sustained injuries across his body, lost consciousness and had to be taken to a hospital in an ambulance.” His offense? He had switched off the overhead light in a housing unit.
At least 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025, making it the agency’s deadliest year since 2004. In just the first ten days of 2026, four people died in ICE custody. One of these deaths — of a Cuban migrant held in solitary confinement at Camp East Montana — was ruled a homicide.
It is worth remembering that immigration enforcement is a civil procedure and that most people detained by ICE do not have criminal records. In the main, these are not violent people threatening the safety and integrity of the nation; they are ordinary men, women and children who have been caught in an authoritarian dragnet. Their treatment is less a necessary part of immigration detention than it is a punishment — deliberate pain inflicted on migrants in order to force them out of the country, whether or not they have a legal right to be here. (And it should go without saying that people found guilty of criminal offenses have an absolute right to fair and humane treatment.)
Back in 2024, I argued that Donald Trump’s plan for mass deportation was an atrocity in the making.
Imagine the conditions that might prevail for hundreds of thousands of people crammed into hastily constructed camps, the targets of a vicious campaign of demonization meant to build support for their detention and deportation. If undocumented immigrants really are, as Trump says, “poisoning the blood of our country,” then how do we respond? What do we do about poison? Well, we neutralize it.
I also noted that any mass deportation effort would involve a “mass campaign of racial and ethnic profiling” that would almost certainly stoke “strife and pervasive civil conflict.”
There is an idea, among those sympathetic to the president’s efforts to reduce illegal immigration, that you could have a more humane program of mass deportation and accomplish the overall goal of increased removals without a surfeit of brutality. This is a fantasy. Mass removal is itself inhumane. There is no way to accomplish it without subjecting countless people to the treatment we are seeing now in the streets and in the jails. And when the architects of mass deportation are themselves motivated by racial contempt for their targets, then — as my friend Adam Serwer once wrote — the cruelty will inevitably be the point.
What I Wrote
I wrote about the madness on display in President Trump’s letter to the president of Norway.
There is no need to go on about the lunacy of this letter. Not even the president’s most eager apologists could spin this as anything other than what it is: a disgrace. The letter is an astonishing glimpse into the mind of a man who rejects the core duty of his office, faithful representation of the American people. The only thing he cares about — the only thing that motivates him — is the immediate satisfaction of his every impulse.
I also joined my colleagues Kathleen Kingsbury and Ross Douthat in Los Angeles to discuss the first year of the Trump administration.
Now Reading
Laurence Tribe on amending the Constitution for The New York Review of Books.
David Austin Walsh on Zohran Mamdani and his brand of “sewer socialism” for Boston Review.
Marisa Kabas on the experience of a “Kavanaugh stop” for her newsletter.
Toby Buckle on the collapse of conservatism for Liberal Currents.
Ali Breland on the Trump administration’s Nazified social media presence for The Atlantic.
Photo of the Week
A red pickup truck, seen in Charlottesville, Va.
Now Eating: Spiced Olive Oil Cake With Orange Glaze
There is a good chance I’ll be snowed in, and so my plan for this weekend is to do a lot of baking. This snackable cake is on the menu. Recipe from NYT Cooking.
Ingredients
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Nonstick cooking spray
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1¾ cups/225 grams all-purpose flour
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1 cup/200 grams granulated sugar
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2 teaspoons ground ginger
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1½ teaspoons baking powder
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1¼ teaspoons baking soda
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¾ teaspoon ground fennel, cardamom or coriander (see Tip)
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½ teaspoon kosher salt
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¼ teaspoon freshly ground black pepper (see Tip)
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¾ cup/180 milliliters extra-virgin olive oil
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⅔ cup/160 milliliters whole milk
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2 large eggs
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2 tablespoons dark rum (optional)
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Freshly grated zest of 1 orange plus 2 tablespoons orange juice
For the glaze
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½ cup/60 grams confectioners’ sugar
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2 tablespoons orange juice, plus more as needed
Directions
Heat the oven to 375 degrees. Coat a loaf pan with nonstick cooking spray. In a large bowl, whisk together the dry cake ingredients, including ground spices. In another bowl, whisk the oil, milk, eggs, rum, orange zest and juice until smooth.
Pour the wet ingredients into the dry. To prevent clumps, stir together starting from the center of the bowl, gradually drawing in the dry ingredients. Mix just until smooth. The batter will be thick. Pour into the prepared loaf pan.
Bake in the center of the oven for 1 hour, rotating after 30 minutes. When done, the cake will be just firm and dry on top and a tester inserted into the center will come out clean.
Meanwhile, make the glaze: In a measuring cup with a pouring spout, whisk together the confectioners’ sugar and 2 tablespoons orange juice until smooth. The texture should be runny; add more orange juice if needed.
Let the cake cool in the pan on a wire rack for 10 minutes, then turn out. While it is still warm, drizzle the glaze over the top, making messy, Jackson Pollock-style zigzags by moving the cup back and forth over the cake. Let cool completely to set.
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The post The Public Face of ICE Is Bad Enough appeared first on New York Times.
