When we, the public, watch immigration raids being carried out in the U. S., many of us dwell on the human toll, the individual tragedies that these raids often occasion. The harm done to the targets of the raids is obvious. What about the agents who carry out the raids? How do the raids affect them? What about us, those of us who are witnesses to these act?
In defiance of a court order, DHS conducted an immigration raid at a Home Depot in Southern California last week. According to Fox News, "DHS told Fox News that the violent MS-13 gang has a chokehold on the area, which is why the highly optic immigration raid was carried out at the location."
However, the circumstances of the raid belie the DHS explanation.
The raid was conducted at 7 a.m. This, despite the fact that 7 a.m is an odd hour for gang members to gather. A 2018 article in Propublica asserted that MS13 "...members attack in groups, in the woods, at night, luring teens to their deaths with the promise of girls or weed." And, another source, Vivint, a home security business, states that the least likely hours for criminal activity, overall, are between 3 a.m. and 7 a. m.
If DHS wanted to catch the highest concentration of gang members in one spot, 7 a.m. would have been just about the worst time.
Maybe the people who run DHS are simply misinformed? No. That doesn't seem to be the case.
Not only was their truck in a parking lot at one of the worst times to catch criminals, but their agents came in what they called a "Trojan Horse". With this subterfuge, they were hoping to lure criminals.
What did they use as a lure? Gold watches? Piles of cash? Shiny new home appliances? Weapons?
Oh no. DHS agents, in their Trojan Horse, promised the dangerous criminals, the MS13 gang members, jobs. Jobs for just a day. Hard labor, with low pay. No benefits. Just work and go home.
How do I know this? Because the Penske truck in which the agents arrived promised work to the laborers who mustered in the parking lot. Likely those laborers got there at 6:30, or 6:00, to be sure they didn't miss out on work. The Penske truck was the typical vehicle a contractor would rent.
According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, "A man driving a Penske truck pulled up to day laborers at the Home Depot and told them he was looking for workers, recalled one day laborer."
So the DHS ruse was perfect...to catch MS13 members, or to catch non-criminal, undocumented immigrants?
Wow! Dangerous criminals who show up in the morning looking for hard labor. That's a rare breed indeed.
Immigrant hawks may be thinking, They are breaking the law by being here, so they are criminals. I respond, "Okay, then say that. DHS should announce that it is conducting a raid in the Home Depot parking lot so its agents can catch hard-working immigrants who lack documentation".
Why doesn't DHS say that to everyone, out loud? I know why. They likely--surely--say those things among themselves. But as a statement of policy for the wider U.S. audience, it is politically unpalatable.
One fate awaiting those rounded up by ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement):
ICE Tactics
Increasingly, polls show the public turning against ICE Trojan-Horse-type tactics. One poll, published on WCBV, Boston, showed that, "... no more than 30% said they support Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in public places or homes, while 30% or more of respondents strongly opposed the raids in each situation."
Another publication, The Wall Street Journal (which tends to support the current political regime), published an article that stated, "...two steps under Trump’s mass-deportation push were opposed by 58% of voters. The first is detaining and deporting people believed to be in the U.S. illegally without them seeing a judge or getting a hearing. The second is deporting immigrants to prisons in other countries, such as El Salvador and South Sudan, where they have no personal connections."
And, the website Good Authority reports on two polls that show a precipitous drop in approval for ICE since the start of the Trump Administration: "...ICE’s favorability rating was 13 points underwater (39% favorable vs 52% unfavorable) in a late-June poll by YouGov-Yahoo! And Quinnipiac University’s June 22-24, 2025, survey similarly showed that 56% of registered voters (and 64% of independents) disapproved of how ICE is doing its job."
As I watch the ICE raids, and read descriptions of them, I ask myself, what happened to the country I thought I lived in? I was born in 1947--two years after WWII ended. Throughout my childhood I watched movies that showed Nazi raids. These movies featured families being dragged away and taken to internment camps. The victims cowered behind closed doors, in fear of being caught. Sometimes they were hidden by compassionate neighbors.
The case of Ann Frank captured the heart of my generation.
We tried to imagine what it was like to hide from the government, and then to be arrested and sent off to an internment camp. It all seemed so far away. I thought surely those government agents that dragged Ann Frank from hiding must be evil.
Maybe they were evil people, but they were not lawless. And I'm fairly certain they did not see themselves as evil.
Nazi internment of families, of millions of people, was sanctioned by law, as the actions by ICE are sanctioned today. Preventative detention laws had been in effect Germany for years. These laws allowed for the indefinite detention of individuals, without consulting a court, "for the protection of the people". Anyone declared a danger to the people was a target: dissenters, Jews, socialists, etc. If Germany occupied a territory, these laws extended to that territory.
When I was a child and watched the Nazis in the movies, I wondered how they, as individuals, could be that heartless. Did they have children, families? Were they able to turn off their cruelty when they went home?
Today, as I watch ICE raids on TV, I have the same questions. How can they be so heartless? They look so eager, so pleased to chase down terrified people who are doing no one any harm. It's true the 'fugitives' have violated immigration laws. Do they lose their humanity, their rights as human beings when they violate that law?
On August 5th of this year, The CATO Institute published an article in which it revealed the results of research it conducted. The CATO Institute is regarded by many as right wing. It describes itself as a libertarian think tank. In the article the Institute asserts, "ICE agents are deliberately targeting workers in heavily Latino jobs and neighborhoods, sometimes based on its community tip line where residents claim to “see” illegal immigrants in their areas, but more often based on nothing at all."
According to CATO: "one in five ICE arrests is a Latin American on the streets without a criminal history or a removal order."
Here is an example of one ICE action:
https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1936428147345404065
What this ICE process suggests to the authors of the article is that such government action endangers the liberty of everyone, not just immigrants and Latinos. People are stopped and challenged randomly, based on their location and appearance. Here's another video (salty language) that shows ICE agents tackling a U. S. citizen while he is at work:
As I watch enthusiastic ICE agents chase down terrified workers, I ask myself, who are these agents? How do they feel about what they do? Do they go home to their children and friends with a sense of satisfaction and pride?
The Nazis who chased down Ann Frank's family were not agents of a rogue government. When Hitler was appointed Chancellor in 1933, 39% of the electorate had voted for his party, the Nazi party. In very short time, public support for the Nazis grew. One estimate (Journal for Multimedia History at Albany University,) places that support in 1936 at "...probably over 90% of the German people... As Alfons Heck, a member of the Hitler Youth and one of those interviewed in the film puts it, if Hitler had died in 1938, he would undoubtedly have been remembered by most Germans as one of their greatest leaders."
A sobering article by the British Academy, explains that Hitler's Nazi rule grew popular as time went on. "...if terror did play a role in consolidating the regime," the article states, "then it was the terror the Gestapo and the criminal police exercised against social outsiders, which helped convince the overwhelming majority of ordinary Germans that law and order were at last being restored."
Who is responsible for the policies and tactics of ICE? Is it the government that formulates policy? Is it the courts (esp. the Supreme Court) that enable some of these dehumanizing practices to go forward? Is it the agents who carry out the orders of their superiors? Or, is it us?
With the Nazis, all of the above were responsible. The government made policy. Agents carried it out. Legislator endorsed the new regime. And the people, many, many people, condoned it.
Is CATO correct? Does the flagrant disregard for rights endanger not only immigrants, people of color, people who speak another language, but also all of us? And what of the agents who carry out these brutal policies?
How do the ICE agents reconcile their actions with their private lives? Do they put on a shelf their normal capacity for kindness? Do they compartmentalize their actions so that what they do at work does not influence what they do at home, at the grocery store, at their children's schools? The ICE agents wear masks. Who are they? They don't want us to know. They want to blend seamlessly with the rest of us.
Does the mask allow them to compartmentalize more easily? I frankly don't believe they can leave it behind like that. That callousness, that cruelty, has to bleed over into the rest of their lives.
So, as I watch workers scramble, desperate to get away from ICE agents, I am aware that these masked agents are among us. They are inevitably influenced by the acts they carry out, day after, by the way they are able to dehumanize others. It makes me uneasy to think that one of those agents could be my neighbor, my child's soccer coach, the deacon giving a sermon at church.
Trump's brutalization of our immigration laws surely has hurt and will hurt tens of thousands of immigrants. But the harm will not end there. The rest of us either stand by and watch...what does that do to us...or we participate, and what does that do to society?