The armored vehicles and masked agents patrolling elementary schools were always going to produce backlash. After ICE officers killed two US citizens during a Minneapolis blitz, the administration made a strategic pivot: same mass-deportation machine, lower media profile. New DHS secretary Markwayne Mullin said plainly at his confirmation hearing that his goal was to stop being the lead story every day. Six months later, mission accomplished — but the machinery is bigger and faster than it ever was. The numbers tell the story. Bolstered by $75bn in congressional funding, DHS has more than doubled its workforce to over 22,000 officers and staff. ICE has signed more than 2,500 287(g) agreements deputizing local police, sheriffs, highway patrol, and even fish and wildlife agents as immigration enforcers. The result is a distributed arrest apparatus that doesn't need to announce itself. Detentions now happen in roughly 90 seconds — a person taking out trash, pumping gas, or walking from a school bus stop is in an unmarked vehicle before anyone can react. The 287(g) agreements are the force multiplier that makes the math work. A Cuban man detained while taking out trash in Miami. An Ecuadorian father arrested seconds after putting his six-year-old on the school bus in Danbury, Connecticut. A 25-year-old US citizen, Brian José Morales García, born in Denver, deported to Mexico by Gillespie County sheriff's deputies working with ICE because officers didn't believe he was American. He was eventually allowed back after his lawyer submitted proof of citizenship. Immigration attorneys report systematic racial profiling, with enforcement concentrated in Hispanic neighborhoods and Latino construction sites. Simultaneously, the administration is manufacturing new categories of deportable people at industrial scale. The Supreme Court cleared the path to end temporary protected status for 350,000 Haitians and Syrians, with 1.3 million TPS holders from other countries also at risk. A new tactic of "mega-master" hearings — mass court sessions scheduled at the last minute — produced 53,808 removal orders in absentia in June alone, a 55% increase. More than 13,000 of those followed hearings with a hundred or more people. Each no-show becomes immediately deportable. The administration is also expected to revoke business and tourism visas for up to 200,000 foreigners. The "third-country" deportation pipeline may be the most structurally novel element. More than 23,000 people over the past year have been expelled to countries where they have never lived and have no ties — some to countries with active armed conflict and documented human rights abuses. This effectively neutralizes judicial orders that previously blocked deportation to a person's home country on torture or persecution grounds. A Venezuelan man identified only as Y was nearly deported despite a judicial order explicitly prohibiting it; ICE agents admitted the error only after he was already on a departing aircraft. The violence hasn't disappeared — it's just less visible. Last week, an ICE agent shot Wilber Rafael Garcés Pérez, a Venezuelan asylum seeker in Austin, Texas. He was discharged from a hospital with a bullet near his spine and transferred to ICE detention. The same day, a Guatemalan man died in a fiery crash while fleeing federal agents in Grand Rapids, Michigan. But these incidents break through sporadically; the operational design ensures most arrests happen before witnesses, cameras, or lawyers can arrive. What the administration has built is a system where the rules shift daily — one person leaves an ICE check-in without incident, another with identical status is detained the next day. The unpredictability is the mechanism. Combined with a public-benefits rule that blocks lawful permanent residency for anyone whose relatives use Medicaid, food stamps, or student financial aid, the net effect is a chilling architecture that extends far beyond the people actually arrested. The 90-second arrest is the visible output; the invisible output is millions of people rearranging their lives around the possibility that any routine errand could be their last.
