Human suffering caused by ICE operations in the United States

Thursday 22 January 2026

The United States has always insisted that her immigration enforcement system is administrative rather than punitive. Immigration detention, in the formal language, is civil. Yet for the people who experience it, and for the families and neighbourhoods that live with its consequences, the distinction can feel academic. The machinery of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, with its early-morning arrests, sudden transfers, prolonged detention and hurried removals, is capable of producing a kind of suffering that is both intimate and structural: a fear that settles into daily life, a medical crisis that unfolds behind secure doors, a child’s attachment interrupted by a parent’s disappearance and a community’s social fabric frayed by uncertainty.

To understand that suffering one must begin with the manner of enforcement. ICE operations are often designed to be swift and disorientating. Arrests take place at workplaces, outside homes, in courthouses and during routine appointments. The practical aim is obvious: to prevent flight and to secure compliance. The human effect is equally obvious: people vanish from ordinary life with little warning, leaving spouses, children and employers scrambling for information. In many cases, those left behind cannot even determine where their relative has been taken for days. Transfers between facilities, sometimes across state lines, add a further layer of dislocation: legal counsel becomes harder to maintain, visits become impractical and the detainee’s sense of time and place becomes unmoored.

That dislocation is not merely inconvenient. It is psychologically corrosive. The American Psychological Association has described how fear of detention and deportation can contribute to anxiety, depression, stress-related symptoms and a broad deterioration in wellbeing, including amongst children who may themselves be citizens but who live with the sense that a parent might not return from an errand. Research literature likewise links exposure to detention and deportation within one’s social network to worse mental health outcomes, suggesting that enforcement radiates harm beyond those directly apprehended.  In practice, the fear is communal: school gates, places of worship and hospitals can become anxious spaces when families suspect that visibility itself may carry risk.

Children sit at the centre of this story because immigration enforcement converts adult vulnerability into childhood instability. Workplace raids and arrests of caregivers have long been associated with abrupt family separation, economic shock and emotional distress for minors, effects recorded in congressional testimony and other public evidence over many years. Even when the state does not formally separate families at the border, interior enforcement can reproduce separation by another route: a parent taken into detention, a child left with relatives, neighbours or, in the worst cases, the care system. The ACLU’s accounting of the earlier family separation policy highlighted the scale and geographic dispersal that can follow when children are removed from parents and moved through far-flung facilities, a pattern that remains relevant as a cautionary tale about how bureaucratic systems can overpower family bonds. 

Detention itself, however, is where suffering becomes most concentrated, because it combines confinement with uncertainty. Detainees often do not know how long they will be held, where they may be transferred next or whether they will be deported. That uncertainty is not incidental: it is a predictable by-product of a civil detention system that is nevertheless carceral in its daily realities. The World Health Organization’s European office has stated plainly that immigration detention is harmful to health and that alternatives should be prioritised, noting evidence of severe mental health impacts. Such observations are not ideological slogans; they reflect a basic truth about human beings. Confinement, especially indefinite confinement, is a stressor. Confinement in an environment where the detainee may struggle to obtain consistent medical care, translation, legal advice or even reliable information is worse.

In recent weeks, the human cost has been illustrated with brutal clarity by reporting on deaths in ICE custody and by the scrutiny of a particular facility. An autopsy report into the death of Geraldo Lunas Campos, a Cuban immigrant held at Camp East Montana in Texas, classified the death as a homicide caused by asphyxia due to neck and torso compression.  Whatever the legal outcomes, the account is an emblem of vulnerability: a person in state custody, reportedly in solitary confinement, dying during a physical restraint and then becoming the subject of conflicting official narratives. It is difficult to imagine a more concentrated expression of powerlessness than dying in an immigration facility, separated from one’s family and dependent upon guards and contractors for the most basic safety.

This case has also drawn attention to wider patterns. Reporting and official correspondence in recent weeks have pointed to unusually high numbers of deaths in immigration custody in 2025, alongside renewed questions about accountability, medical provision and the role of private contractors. For the public, these numbers can become abstract. For families, each death is a private catastrophe compounded by the peculiar grief of bureaucracy: delays, opaque processes, inconsistent explanations and the gnawing suspicion that a civil system has quietly become punitive in everything but name.

Enforcement’s reach is also expanding in ways that shape suffering. One recent report from the American Immigration Council describes a sharp rise in the share of people held after an ICE arrest who have no criminal record, a shift that, if accurate, implies that detention is increasingly reaching people whose principal “offence” is a civil immigration status issue.  This matters because the moral story the state tells itself about detention often rests on the claim that it is aimed at dangerous individuals. When detention broadens to include people without criminal histories, the human impact spreads into more settled communities: long-term residents, mixed-status families, workers with deep ties and children for whom deportation is not an abstraction but the collapse of home.

Local partnerships can deepen that reach. Programmes such as 287(g), which deputise local law enforcement to collaborate with federal immigration authorities, have been criticised by civil liberties organisations for fostering abuse and fear, particularly in state jurisdictions where oversight is weak. Whatever one’s view of immigration control, there is a pragmatic point here: when communities perceive local police as an extension of immigration enforcement, victims and witnesses may avoid reporting crimes, domestic abuse may go unreported and public safety can deteriorate. Suffering then becomes a collective phenomenon, not confined to migrants alone.

All of this is made harsher by the ordinary realities of money and law. Many detainees cannot easily obtain legal representation. In a system where outcomes turn on paperwork, deadlines and hearings that may take place in distant jurisdictions, the absence of counsel is not a minor disadvantage but a structural vulnerability. Families may exhaust savings on bonds, travel for visits and legal fees, only to face removal regardless. Children may move home, change schools or be sent to live with relatives. Employers may lose workers abruptly. Churches, mutual-aid groups and neighbourhood associations may step in, but charity is not a substitute for predictability.

The defenders of robust enforcement argue that the state has a right, even a duty, to control borders and to remove those without lawful status. That argument is not frivolous. A state that cannot enforce her laws is not fully sovereign. Yet sovereignty is not the only measure of legitimacy. A state’s moral credibility lies in how she wields power, especially over the powerless. The suffering caused by ICE operations is not only a by-product of enforcement but a reflection of choices: whether to rely on raids rather than summonses, detention rather than supervised release, remote facilities rather than accessible hearings and private contracts rather than transparent public responsibility.

What would a less injurious approach look like? It would not require open borders. It would require recognising that most of the harm described above arises from shock, separation, uncertainty and confinement. Alternatives to detention, which international public health bodies have urged, are one place to start: community-based supervision, reporting requirements and case management are not novel ideas but administrative tools that can secure compliance without carceral conditions. Improved access to counsel, limits on transfers that disrupt representation and stricter medical oversight would reduce the likelihood that civil detention becomes lethal. The human suffering caused by ICE operations is therefore not an inevitable cost of immigration control. It is, in significant measure, the product of how the United States has chosen to enforce.

In the end, the question is not whether the United States may enforce immigration law. She may. The question is whether she can do so without inflicting avoidable harm that reverberates through families, classrooms and neighbourhoods long after a raid has ended and a bus has departed. The present evidence, from mental health impacts to the grim ledger of deaths in custody, suggests that she is failing that test.