On New Year’s Day, I puttered around the house, played computer games and made pork and sauerkraut. After dinner, my husband and I watched TV together.
It was a nice day, but I kept comparing my freedom and comfortable surroundings with what immigrants are enduring in federal detention centers.
ICE has bragged about snagging the killers and rapists whom Donald Trump campaigned on deporting, but NBC News reported last month that data shared by the Berkeley Deportation Project showed more than a third of the agency’s roughly 220,000 arrests in his administration’s first nine months had no criminal history.
They range from car wash employees and day laborers to entrepreneurs. Some are swept up at their workplaces or at home improvement store parking lots. Others are taken when they show up for court dates or even routine appointments with immigration officials.
If they’re picked up in Pennsylvania – or anywhere in the Northeast — they’re probably condemned to an indefinite stay at the for-profit Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Clearfield County.
In mid-September, the Philadelphia Inquirer said a check-in with ICE landed Jose Francisco Velasquez Manaure there. For nearly seven weeks, he’d been confined with 75 other men to a space the size of a basketball court, sharing three toilets and six showers.
Under President Joe Biden, the Department of Homeland Security’s internal watchdog investigated allegations of inadequate medical and mental health care and of excessive force and abuses by guards, but the Trump administration closed that probe, the Inquirer reported.
Even Summer Lee and Mary Gay Scanlon, two Democratic congresswomen from Pennsylvania, couldn’t get into Moshannon last August to look into the allegations. (An ICE spokesman told the Inquirer that the facility consistently meets or exceeds federal benchmarks of safety, security, and lawful treatment of detainees.)
A reign of terror
Velasquez, a former police officer who prided himself on working and following the rules, sought asylum here because he feared for his life in Venezuela, where he’d joined an opposition party. He apparently isn’t a detainee anymore, but it’s not clear what happened to him.
That’s just one example of the senseless cruelty of the Trump/Project 2025 administration’s immigrant roundup quotas.
They should concern us all, for no one can be sure who this White House will scapegoat and demonize next.
It’s hard to see how our country benefits from detaining and deporting otherwise law-abiding taxpayers (including the “job creators” the GOP claims to love) who’ve spent decades here and contributed to their communities.
But ICE’s daily arrest quotas, which were tripled to 3,000 in May, show that to this administration, statistics matter much more than individual circumstances.
Naturally, immigrants are terrified.
Family members are watching what they say or only speak freely if reporters don’t name them. In Chicago, where arrests surged during DHS’s “Operation Midway Blitz,” a U.S. citizen who was helping people without papers said they were hiding like Jews did from Nazis.
Incidentally, people convicted of violent crimes accounted for only 3% of Windy City detainments from early September, when the crackdown began, until mid-October, according to CBS News, while two-thirds had no criminal records at all.
Since many federal agents have left for other cities, Chicago can breathe again, the citizen said in late November, but “it’s not really better – it’s just not in our face.”
We must demand better
Now that ICE is targeting people who’d ordinarily check enough boxes to meet standards for remaining here, the need for a more humane and practical system is more obvious than ever.
From agricultural workers to medical professionals, we need immigrants in our labor force. A Washington Post analysis shows the jobs they’re vacating aren’t being filled by people born here.
But dehumanizing certain groups is part of Trump and his Project 2025ers’ playbook, as ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons demonstrated last April at the 2025 Border Security Expo (yes, a trade show).
Lyons told the corporate attendees that he wants to handle deportations the way Amazon ships its packages, the Arizona Mirror reported.
And the Washington Post recently revealed a draft proposal by ICE to convert warehouses, including one in Tremont, into facilities for processing detainees before delivering them to regional hubs.
“If you accept that noncitizens have no right to due process, you are accepting that citizens have no right to due process,” “On Tyranny” author Timothy Snyder said. “All the government has to do is claim that you are not a citizen; without due process, you have no chance to prove the contrary.”
That’s just one reason for standing up for decent people the administration is targeting. You don’t know who’ll be in its cross-hairs next.
Canary note: Opinions expressed in any Op-Ed column appearing on this site are the views of the writer and are not necessarily the opinions of Coal Region Canary.
Want to be a columnist with Coal Region Canary? Contact us at newscanary@gmail.com.
Image: Nano Banana
Subscribe to Coal Region Canary
Get email updates from Coal Region Canary by becoming a subscriber today. Just enter your email address below to get started!Support Coal Region Canary
Like our reporting and want to support truly local news in Schuylkill County? Your small donations help. For as little as $5, your contribution will allow us to cover more news that directly affects you. Consider donating today by hitting the big yellow button below ...
Josephine
January 7, 2026 at 7:50 am
It is sad to see what our once great nation has become. People who are applauding detentions should be looking over their shoulders, because you are correct, we don’t know who will be the next target. Thank you for a great article.