Earlier this month, three unmarked vehicles made their way through a quiet suburb of Austin, Texas. They stopped outside a house and — according to the family and their lawyer — rushed at a man who was washing the family’s car and chased him into the backyard. The man picked up his toddler daughter and fled into his house, but it took hours for the agent – wearing an ICE ERO vest – to leave the backyard and the neighborhood.
There’s little doubt that this family was targeted; that is to say, that federal agents had decided to come find them in hopes of arresting them. The question is why. And while it’s impossible to know for sure, the family believes — and there isn’t yet any evidence to the contrary — that ICE decided to go after them because their older daughter is making the government look bad.
See, this is the family of Any López Belloza, a college student who was arrested and swiftly deported to Honduras last month after trying to get on a domestic flight to surprise her parents by coming home for Thanksgiving. The Lópezes allegedly have an outstanding order of removal dating back to 2015, when Any was nine, and when their application for asylum was denied by an immigration judge. (Their lawyer says she has found no record of the order.) And for the last ten years, the family had not attracted the government’s attention.
When Any was arrested at the airport, she was told it was because of a deportation order. Her case quickly drew both media attention and a federal court suit in which a federal judge ordered the government not to remove her while he considered the case. She was deported the day after the order was issued in a move that has continued to raise questions from members of Congress and advocates. And Any became one of the very few unauthorized immigrants in recent months to break through to the public as a sympathetic individual case, as concern has generally focused either on the feds’ aggressive tactics in general, or on people with green cards and U.S. citizens being arrested and detained.
Going after the Lópezes in Austin may not have been deliberate retaliation on ICE’s part; it may simply have been that public coverage of Any’s case brought the family to local agents’ attention. But for the Lópezes themselves, or anyone who might consider going public about their interactions with federal agents, that’s a distinction without a difference: The point is that they weren’t on ICE’s radar, and now they are.
In the context of immigration enforcement, “targeted” usually means that immigration agents know who they’re looking for when they go out to arrest someone. That’s in contrast to the “Kavanaugh stops” and sweeps that the Trump administration has been conducting and hyping over the last few months — and, if recent reporting is to be believed, the administration is now moving back on, pivoting instead to a “targeting”-centric approach.
But if targeting just means that agents know who they want to arrest in advance, it raises the question of how the person came to their attention, and — just as importantly — why they decided to go after that person instead of others.
Any López Belloza, for example, was herself a “targeted” arrest. As the New York Times reported last week, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has started sharing flight manifests with ICE to check the immigration status of passengers on domestic flights, and Any’s record was flagged before she got to the airport. When federal agents arrested her as she stood at the ticket counter, that was because they had already made a decision either to devote resources to arresting her specifically, or to devote resources to arresting anyone who the TSA check revealed to be unauthorized.
Even as the Trump administration keeps developing new ways to bring immigrants to ICE’s attention, many immigrants are still hoping to stay under the radar. But that means anyone with a story they want the public to know about risks exposing not only themselves, but their loved ones.
When I was a beat reporter during the first Trump administration, nearly every immigrant I talked to for stories was leery of providing their full name. They were undocumented, or they had family members who were undocumented, or they simply felt too vulnerable in their immigration status to take any risks. At the time, I usually told them that I had never seen, or heard of, a case in which someone was retaliated against for talking to a reporter.
Obviously, I wouldn’t say that today.
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The problem for the administration, though, is that fighting a case — in federal courts and in the court of public opinion — has its upsides. Federal habeas lawsuits seeking to release immigrants from detention have become not only commonplace, but commonly winnable (thanks in part to judicial backlash against the administration’s detention policy). The government still does occasionally back down and reverse mistakes in the face of public scrutiny, with Kilmar Abrego Garcia as the highest-profile example.
And even when media coverage doesn’t prevent someone’s deportation, it can end up protecting others. If Any López Belloza’s case hadn’t generated such interest, the public might still not know about the domestic-flight TSA checks, but now that they do know, people who might be arrested on their next flight can make other plans to protect themselves.
The question of whether to go public or not with your situation is always going to depend on your individual circumstances — assuming you have a choice at all. In an age when the federal government itself will post unblurred photos of deportees for propaganda, and where any ICE activity in an urban area is likely to be recorded by bystanders with smartphones, immigration cases are simply playing out in public now. For better or worse, everyone is under more scrutiny — and unlike ICE agents, immigrants can’t simply turn front-porch cameras away to ensure they’re not identified as the next target.
