I've been chatting a little more w people in my life abt the work ive been helping with and have come to the realization that people know the immigration system in this country is very bad but have no idea exactly how horrifically bad and scary it is on a day to day basis. I mentioned before--
-- I was debating whether or not speaking about this sort of thing was better than just quietly doing it, but I'm starting to see some merit in doing so, so I'll talk about some publicly available information little by little going forward.
Recently a current recruiter for ice signed up and was caught during the vetting stage btw🙃
Some of this you probably know, but I'm just gonna go over a bunch of things over the next few weeks as I have bandwidth.
The most important and overarching thing is that people can be detained by ICE at any point during this process. You can be detained at a normal check in, or even at the--
--courthouse. The laws have been changed recently, allowing ICE to perform "enforcement" in the courthouse itself, and ICE decides on its own to detain people, without the judge.
We have had detentions happen during car stops while transporting families with children present to appointments.
Feb 4, 2026 05:46People going through this process at standard check ins will usually ask volunteers to hold onto their valuables, including wedding rings, as once they go into their appointments, they sometimes do not come back with us, and all we can do is inform the family and document what we can.
There are so many people dedicating their lives to this and desperately trying to use their experience and notes from volunteers to try and keep track of how this system is working and changing, but it has been rapidly changing for months, and the situations remain incredibly uncertain.
