One Year of Abuse of Power Watch
We have said from the start that attacks on immigrants open the door to attacks on everyone’s fundamental rights. That prediction is now playing out across our screens all over the country
Immigration has never been easy. It has been part of our nation’s story since its founding, and we have struggled, generation after generation, to manage it well. Yet for decades, immigration was one of the few issues where leaders from the right and the left, business and labor, could sit at the same table and find common ground.
That era is over. For decades now, Congress — under Democratic and Republican control alike — has failed to meaningfully update our immigration laws. Instead of governing, both parties have used immigration as a political football, and the result is a system so dysfunctional that Americans have come to see it as unmanageable and intractable. That failure is costing us: our values, our economic interests, and ultimately our humanity.
The Trump administration has taken advantage of that dysfunction and weaponized it. And now we are facing not just a policy failure — but a daily barrage of chaos and cruelty of unimaginable proportions, carried out by our own government against our own people. As an American who believes in this country’s basic tenets, watching this administration pursue its mass deportation obsession with no regard for cost or consequence is more than unsettling. It is a betrayal of what we claim to stand for.
We knew the Trump and Stephen Miller agenda would be unforgiving. In 2024, Trump promised that mass deportation would be “a bloody story.” In his second term, he is living up to that promise, and that is why, one year ago, we launched Abuse of Power Watch, a real-time documentation hub built to expose the harms of mass deportation and government overreach. Still, the brutality, the lack of restraint and the complete disregard for our democratic norms shock the conscience. Renee Good, Alex Pretti, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, and Johan Sebastián have become household names because of the sheer brutality and contempt Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has shown in each case. And here we are still waiting for a modicum of accountability.
Yet, for every case that draws attention, many more do not. The death toll from this deportation agenda keeps climbing, driven by a growing number of deaths inside detention centers. U.S. citizens and legal immigrants are now routinely racially profiled under deadly Kavanaugh stops and threatened with deportation regardless of their status. Families are being separated, leaving U.S. citizens and immigrant kids abandoned. Masked agents in unmarked cars, with no badges, are pulling people off the street from California to Minnesota to Virginia — a tactic that evokes death squads of Central America. And even documented immigrants are being stripped of their legal status. All of this in their effort to meet their goal of 1 million deportations.
The cruelty doesn’t stop there. Thousands of unaccompanied children are now at risk of losing access to legal representation, a change that would lead them into the pipeline to deportation by forcing them to appear in immigration court alone.
As we have seen over the last year and a half, the impacts of the abuse of power are not contained to immigrant communities alone. It is being felt by American citizens, American communities, and America’s children. At America’s Voice, we have said from the beginning that attacks on immigrants open the door to attacks on everyone’s fundamental rights. That prediction is now playing out across our screens all over the country.
Amidst this darkness, there is a ray of hope: Americans are rejecting these abuses. Recent polling shows 60 percent of Americans disapprove of how ICE is doing its job, and a majority — 54 percent — disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration, his lowest net approval on the issue of his second term. And among Latino voters, the numbers are even starker: by a 65-30 margin, they say Trump’s actions on immigration are going too far. Communities are seeing the abuses and they’re repelled.
And it is in this gap between what this administration is doing and what our nation accepts where the work has to happen. As we witness these horrors day after day, we have to guard our hearts and minds against the normalization of cruelty and the tolerance of the intolerable. We have to use this moment to organize — while the country is still watching, still uneasy, still willing to say enough. We need to have the hard conversations, to struggle together with the inherent tensions of a very complex issue, and we have to bring others into our fold. Together, we must demand that our leaders chart a path forward that finally matches our stated values with a functional immigration system that is fair, controlled, and humane.