When I.CE. comes to town there may not be signs. You will buy your pita bread and dairy-free yogurt and exchange pleasantries with the cashier who smells vaguely of cigarette smoke. You will go on walks and you will go to work and the sun will still set over the ocean every evening. Life will feel the same.
But you’re you. You spend time online and with the world, and you will learn that life is not, in fact, the same. People are disappearing. From the courthouse. From their homes. From the bus stop on Route 1 near the animal shelter. You attend an orientation. You join the Signal chats. You get involved.
On Wednesday morning, you’re supposed to shadow someone at the jail. What’s happening is this: I.C.E. waits outside the courthouse, the jail, to take people directly into custody. Maybe they’re undocumented, maybe they’re not. But it’s people of color with a minor infraction who are picked up by wannabe government officials and then are taken south to Santa Maria and then L.A. and then out of the country with no rights at all, their families left to wonder what happened to them.
You’re shadowing to learn the basics. But at 7:20 AM, your phone buzz buzz buzzes, communication threads exploding with activity. I.C.E. is already there.
You haven’t been to the jail before, but you figure out which building it is, what entrance to use, and then you’re there. Four I.C.E. agents. Multiple protestors. You’re directed to stay in front of the building and watch. Too many people in the small foyer is a recipe for disaster. It is you and a middle aged woman in workout clothes who tells you she was on her way to the gym when the call for support went out.
You are calm. One eye watches the drama inside, the other the parking lot. A small woman hustles across the pavement. Hello, Nazis, she yells as she enters the jail.
When I.C.E. comes to town, you will read a post written by an Egyptian protestor, a man familiar with revolution against the state. He writes about how no one was anonymous in Egypt during the uprising. You can’t beat the state at its own rigged game of surveillance, and there is power in being known. You think of this when you write a blog post (fourth wall who?) about I.C.E. that is directly associated with you. What is safe anymore? And what does safe even mean to someone of your complexion, your privilege? There’s a lot of power in identity. In saying, it’s me; I was there.
The I.C.E. agents come out with a man in tow. Youngish. Gray shirt. Brown skin. People are yelling and filming and the lead agent takes out his gas can. The woman is still yelling about Nazis. The man tells people to back up. More. More. He takes several pictures of us. One of the I.C.E. cars leaves. The lead agent is short. His face is covered by a cloth bluff and sunglasses. He says that someone is blocking the road and that if they don’t move they will be arrested.
Eventually they all leave. The pin on the gas cannister is never pulled.
One of the organizers leads a debrief. How are we feeling? Do we need any support? How will we take care of ourselves? She is compassionate yet in control, not afraid to cut someone off to move the discussion along. I don’t have much to share. I still feel calm.
I get my introduction after. What to look for. What to do. To choose my level of comfort and engagement. I feel like the best I can do is witness, she tells me. And I hope that after all this ends, these people are held accountable. Gathering evidence. That’s the best I can do. I refrain from telling her that most of the Nazis got away with it.
When I.C.E. comes to town, you will think that you’ve trained your whole life for this. You watched Lord of the Rings, you read Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, and you know what it is like to go up against great evil. You know the bravery required. You know that not everyone makes it out alive.
A man is waiting in the jail foyer to pick someone up. Excuse me, this man is looking for his friend. Is he the one that just got taken? The lady you’re shadowing talks to the two men, one acting as a translator. The man asks for a photo. The lady shows a still of the man who was kidnapped. It’s him. A match.
The man being kidnapped was all adrenaline, all calm. This moment somehow hurts more. A friend, a brother, waiting for his release, only to learn he may be gone forever. You don’t get a lawyer, you don’t get a phone call when I.C.E. picks you up. There is no recognition of humanity. To them, it’s animal control.
Eventually you leave. It’s 9:30. You head to work and arrive late.
When I.C.E. comes to town a video of a man being kidnapped will live on your phone. When you scroll through photos of your cat, it will sometimes come up and you are vaulted back into the violent spasms of our time.
It’s staff training week, and in the afternoon, you’re teaching a lesson on biomimicry. You feel a disembodied fuzziness the whole day. Someone makes a joke about U-haul lesbians as they draw a watershed on children’s construction paper, and you are so tired, and you are grateful for this joyful atmosphere, that people are joking and being kind, and you also feel like none of this matters that much, this watershed, this lesson on nature-inspired engineering, and you feel like you’re still at the jail watching someone get kidnapped, but you don’t bother sharing what you did this morning before work because sometimes you just want to be alone with your feelings, your experiences, before you cauterize them into words.
When I.C.E. comes to town, you will feel split in two. A tree ravaged by lightning. You will be grateful for sunset and winter rains, and you will also feel a ring of hopelessness so dark its indescribable. It will sit and fester in your muscles, and you will wonder what the future could possibly look like.
Night falls. You go for a walk in the light evening rains in just a hoodie and jeans. You listen to the same three songs on repeat and hope that your body will somehow outpace your mind.
The other week you texted a friend that part of you longs for the days when Obama wearing a tan suit was the biggest headline drama, but what you really long for are the days when you were more naive. None of this happened overnight—Obama was nicknamed “the deporter in chief.” It’s just that the older you get, the more you learn, and you realize that this country was rotten all along and that no one is coming to save you, especially not the Democrats. You voted for Clinton in 2016 but couldn’t stomach Kamala’s acceptance of genocide in 2024, and you’re not sure any of it really mattered when the cards were stacked long before this; you’re just now seeing them turned over. You’re nostalgic for when you were young and dumb and the world was a place that loved you and made sense, and now the future is hazy and dark and you feel like you’re stumbling through a long, hazardous corridor—towards what? I don’t know—and you’ll get there, someday, but what even is “there”? What can you possibly hope for at the end of all of this?
Last year, someone told you that millions of people in the world live in countries with bad governments, and you think about this often. Americans always thought they were the exception, but we aren’t. Our time has come for a visible reckoning.
When I.CE. comes to town, you realize that it won’t be over in a month. Not several months. Probably not even a year. Years, maybe. A decade? Who knows. You are in this for the long haul. This is only the beginning. You must stay strong, and you must be brave, and you must figure out ways to show up and do the work for years to come. There will be joy, yes, and perhaps you’ll have to find that too. You’ve read enough about dying empires, both real and fictional, to know what happens next.
When I.C.E. comes to town. But no. That’s not right. I.C.E. doesn’t come to town; they were there all along. They are your neighbors and teachers and garbage men. They will smile at you in the checkout line and threaten you with tear gas all in a day’s work. They are people with families and community, people with values and a firm sense of righteousness. They will not protect you.
If I.C.E. is in my beachside town of 10,000 people, they are in your community as well. They are metastasizing. It could be you—your people, your town—next.
When the alert went out that I.C.E. was at the jail, nearly 10 people showed up within 10 minutes. The numbers of community volunteers is growing. People are getting angrier, more organized. And the government is as well.
I find hope in the people around me. The people telling jokes and educating me about rocks, and the people handing out emergency response cards at bus stops. I only hope that I walk out of this a kinder, softer person.
People in Parks 