The New Yorker:

Under Trump, the Homeland Security agency responsible for processing visas and green cards has become a site for easy arrests.

By Jonathan Blitzer

One morning last month, a Minneapolis resident, whom I’ll call Anna, was pulling into the parking lot at work when she noticed a fleet of dark, unmarked S.U.V.s idling nearby. A group of immigration agents dressed in street clothes emerged from the vehicles before she could get out of her car. One of them called her by her name. “I know who you are,” he said. “I know you’re a refugee.”

Anna’s first thought was to explain that there was some mistake. “I wasn’t afraid,” she later told me. At the end of 2024, she and her family, including her four children, who are from a country in Central Africa, were granted refugee status in the U.S. The federal government had resettled them in Minnesota, a state which they found cold and strange but mercifully quiet. Her immigration papers, which she always carried with her, were in order. “I thought I was going to talk to the man and show him my documents,” Anna said. Instead, as soon as she opened her car door, he put her in handcuffs.

For the next several hours, Anna sat in a room at a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement office, forbidden from calling her family or a lawyer. No one told her what was happening. At around eleven that night, wearing shackles around her wrists and ankles, she was put on a plane and flown to an immigration jail in Texas. Outside the cell where she would spend the next five days was a makeshift sign that read “USCIS Cases.”

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