Liberty and Justice for Whom?
How can the US be the land of the free when immigrants are under siege?
The Fourth of July feels like a hollow promise this year, even more so than usual. The United States has never truly lived up to its ideals of liberty and justice for all. Founded on genocide and built through violence and subjugation, the US has always perpetrated violence while preaching a philosophy of freedom. Chattel slavery, Jim Crow, mass incarceration, and innumerable other horrors undermine that message of freedom and equality for all. In 2025, those principles seem farther away than they have in decades, particularly for immigrant communities.
In the immigration sphere, we’re witnessing unprecedented cruelty -- in a system already known for its brutality. In the first six months of the Trump presidency, we’ve seen:
Unprecedented levels of ICE detention, with 71.7% of those detained having no criminal record (as of 6/15/25).
Horrendous conditions in inhabitable, overcrowded ICE detention centers.
The rapid expansion of expedited removal in previously unheard-of ways, in an effort to deport as many people as possible with as little due process as possible.
Third-country removals to dangerous places where immigrants have no prior connections.
The construction of a literal concentration camp in the Everglades, where people will undoubtedly suffer and die.
The stripping of humanitarian deportation protections from immigrants; efforts to denaturalize US citizens; and a push to obliterate birthright citizenship.
A spike in deaths in ICE custody -- a setting already known for its abhorrent medical care.
Masked, plainclothes ICE agents refusing to identify themselves or produce warrants, and a resulting spate of ICE officer impersonations.
This is a non-exhaustive list, and these atrocities are not only happening to immigrants. Other marginalized groups also endure daily injustices: from trans youth losing gender-affirming care, to women being denied life saving medical care, to Medicaid cuts, no one is safe. The net continues to widen, as fascists are wont to do -- starting with the marginalized and expanding outward. Even US citizens have been caught in the mass deportation dragnet, a phenomenon that is sure to become more common as ICE strives to meet unrealistic daily quotas and engages in rampant racial profiling.
Liberty and Justice for Whom?
Celebrating Independence Day while ICE detention is at an all time high feels disingenuous and hypocritical. In the words of activist Fannie Lou Hamer, “Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” At least 59,000 people are currently detained by ICE, as of June 16, 2025. We should all be forced to bear witness to the barbarity that they are experiencing.
ICE detention is vastly misunderstood, its cruelty and pain greatly underestimated. As a young immigration attorney in 2016, I felt shocked and horrified when I realized that ICE detention is actually just prison. I don’t just mean that ICE detention is similar to prison. I mean that ICE detains people in literal prisons. In many cases, ICE detention occurs in prisons that are simultaneously used to detain people in the criminal context. ICE detention facilities can be owned and operated by ICE, a state or local entity, or a contractor. When state and local entities are involved, ICE often utilizes county prisons to detain immigrants alongside those with criminal cases. In terms of the day-to-day experience of detainees, there is essentially no difference between being detained by ICE and being detained in a criminal context. Nonetheless, the US government upholds the legal fiction that ICE detention is “non-punitive,” because the detention is civil, not criminal.
In light of the steep increase in ICE enforcement, public awareness about the inhumanity of ICE detention is finally starting to break through. For many years, though, there was a vacuum of knowledge about the reality of ICE detention, and many people in the general public still fail to grasp the extent of the horrific conditions in ICE detention. As someone who works in the immigration sphere, it seems to me that many people are only now, in 2025, waking up to the very existence of ICE enforcement -- even though the agency was founded in 2003 in response to 9/11. In reality, ICE has been tormenting immigrants for decades.
In ICE detention, immigrants routinely experience:
Lack of access to immigration lawyers
Lack of access to friends and family
Mental health deterioration
Freezing cold temperatures
Having to sleep on the cold, hard floor with no mattress or other bedding
Lack of personal hygiene products
Lack of menstrual products
These conditions are not new, but things are getting worse every day due to overcrowding, as the Trump administration detains many more people than the ICE detention system is equipped to handle. One expert estimated in early June that “ICE is at 125% detention capacity.” If the ICE detention system cannot adequately care for the people it detains when it is not overcrowded, how can it do so now?
This overcrowding, plus a no-holds-barred attitude among ICE agents under the new administration, has led to ever worsening conditions. These include a spike in deaths and medical emergencies, putting ICE on track “for one of the deadliest years for immigrant detention” and children and adults fighting for limited clean drinking water.
It brings to mind the heartbreaking scene in Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir Night, when prisoners en route to the Buchenwald concentration camp fight one another for scraps of bread. Wiesel describes an elderly man beaten to death by his own son for a piece of bread, while German civilians look on and laugh. Today, MAGA supporters are downright gleeful as they imagine immigrants being eaten by alligators in Trump’s new concentration camp, selling “Alligator Alcatraz” merch while they dog whistle, harkening back to a racist trope about Black children being eaten by alligators.
Despite the fact that it cannot handle current detention levels, ICE is looking for ways to expand its detention capabilities. For example, ICE has revived “family detention,” a program that really should have stayed dead. “Family detention” allows parents and children to be detained together in the same awful conditions described above. The Trump administration is also seeking to decimate the Flores Settlement Agreement, which protects children in immigration custody. If that happens, Trump could detain children and families indefinitely and strip children them of other basic protections, like the right to food and clean water. As I wrote a few weeks ago, detention does lifelong, irreparable harm to children. Flores is imperfect, but its protections are essential, and I shudder to think of how children will be harmed in immigration custody without it.
“Alternatives” to Detention
Physical detention in ICE custody is not the only way to have your freedom impinged by ICE. In the digital age, ICE has found new and ever more insidious ways to limit immigrants’ freedom and keep tabs on them. Methods of monitoring include a smartphone app, GPS ankle monitors, and telephonic check-ins.
Rather than using these methods to decrease detention rates, the opposite has happened. As immigration researcher Austin Kocher writes, “[Is Alternatives to Detention] really an ‘alternative’ to detention program?... In short, there are several factors that point to ATD being more of an addition to detention rather than an alternative to detention.” ICE is using technology to expand its control and surveillance over the lives of immigrants, even those outside its detention centers.
Profit Over People
Of course, detention and “alternatives” to detention are a lucrative business. Private prison companies profit extensively off the detention of immigrants. These corporations that profit from the detention of immigrants include the GEO Group, CoreCivic, and LaSalle Corrections. Their profits have all risen sharply as a result of Trump’s mass deportation campaign. Similarly, contractors who run ATD programs earn billions of dollars by surveilling immigrants. Even nonprofits profit from the detention of immigrant children.
A Climate of Fear
Finally, in addition to these very physical, visible methods of detention or limiting freedoms, ICE has also succeeded in creating a climate of extreme fear. Immigrants are afraid to leave their homes, even to go to work. Children are afraid to go to school. Parents are afraid to go to their children’s graduations. Families are afraid to go to church. Even US citizens are afraid of being racially profiled. It bears asking: how is this a free society?
Would you have been on the right side of history?
As the US plunges headlong into a dictatorship, a Fraenkel-esque “dual state” where the courts abdicate all power and responsibility to the executive branch, about 43% the country seems blind to what is happening and even actively supports it. That group has no problem with the increasing detention, deportation, and dehumanization of immigrants, failing to recognize that history is repeating itself.
It’s easy to look back on history and think things like:
I would have been an abolitionist against slavery.
I would have hidden Jewish people from the Nazis.
I would have opposed the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor.
We are able to look back on those events today with the moral clarity of hindsight. As the 43% prove, however, it’s much harder to recognize such events happening in real time. Throughout history, there have always been activists who opposed injustice. But there have also been a majority of everyday people who stood by and allowed those injustices to happen, blindly believing the oppressor’s justifications.
In the immigration context, apologists justify state violence against immigrants by saying that immigrants are here “illegally” (see my recent post for why that statement is so problematic).
Yet, they forget: chattel slavery, the Holocaust, the imprisonment of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbor, and every other atrocity had supposed justifications, too. Oppressive governments use “legal” justifications to dehumanize their victims and make bystanders, well, bystanders.
For example:
Justifications for chattel slavery included religious justifications; economic justifications; the idea that slavery was for the good of the enslaved people; the idea that enslaved people were incapable of living free; and more.
Hitler was democratically elected and stripped German citizens of their citizenship, leaving them stateless -- an eerie parallel to the modern day United States. Hitler used similar justifications to those that were used in chattel slavery, and actually emulated the US on purpose.
The US government justified the imprisonment of Japanese-Americans after Pearl Harbor with national security concerns. Similar rationales have been used to justify human rights violations and Islamophobia post-9/11.
Those in power will always provide a justification for their heinous acts. It’s up to us to see through it and resist. As Frederick Douglass asked in 1852, “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?”
And so, I ask you, dear reader: “What, to the imprisoned, deported, or terrified immigrant, is your 4th of July?” The answer: utterly meaningless.