On Thin ICE: In Solidarity with Immigrant Communities

As we began working on this editorial, those of us on Affilia's board who immigrated to the United States reflected on our own journeys as students, researchers, social workers, and academics. We remembered navigating an unfamiliar immigration system with its complex processes and paperwork, enduring long waits and jumping through countless hoops, all amid the uncertainty of whether we would be able to live and work in this country, and importantly, wondering what that future might look like. Today, the reality faced by our immigrant family members, friends, and communities in the United States is far more alarming.

The current US federal administration's catastrophic immigration policy is carceral, racist, classist, violent, antifeminist, inhumane, and antithetical to every value and principle of social work. In his second term, President Trump's administration has not only promised to deport millions of people but has also upended longstanding immigration and enforcement policies (American Immigration Council, 2025). Individuals re-entering the country or appearing in court to advance an immigration case now face the risk of immediate detention. Some have been deported to third countries they have never been to, even in defiance of court orders (Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, 2026). Children like 5-year-old Liam Conejos Ramos in Minneapolis have been searched and detained without a family member present (American Civil Liberties Union, 2025, 2026; Bogel-Burroughs & Rao, 2026). In 2025 alone, at least 32 people died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody: the highest number in more than two decades (American Civil Liberties Union, 2025). These practices run counter to the principles of due process and the democratic ideals we hope to see in the immigration policies of a democratic nation.

ICE is one of the most visible and feared symbols of the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. Raids in neighborhoods, courthouses, workplaces, hospitals, and even schools are staged as public spectacles of state power. Masked officers in unmarked attire routinely detain and transport individuals without warrants, transparency, or meaningful access to legal counsel (Human Rights Watch, 2025). Reports from across the country describe incidents in which ICE officers have shot and killed individuals, including the fatal shooting of 38-year-old Silverio Villegas González in Chicago on September 12, 2025, and the killing of 43-year-old father of two Keith Porter Jr. by an off-duty ICE officer in Los Angeles on Dec 31^st, 2025 (Hassen, 2026). In January 2026 alone, at least six people have died while in federal immigration detention facilities (Hesson, 2026).

Increasingly, the reach of ICE enforcement extends beyond undocumented immigrants. Refugees, asylum seekers with pending claims, lawful permanent residents, and even naturalized citizens have been subjected to detention, surveillance, or violence, as documented by civil rights organizations and federal records (American Civil Liberties Union, 2025; TRAC, n.d.). At the time of this writing, ICE enforcement has expanded even further: individuals perceived as interfering with or challenging ICE operations have themselves become targets. This expansion of state violence was made brutally clear on January 7, 2026, when an ICE agent fatally shot US citizen, mother, and poet Renee Good in Minneapolis (Gibson, 2026). Subsequent incidents in Minneapolis followed. On January 14, 2026, Venezuelan national Julio Cesar Sosa-Celia was shot in the leg by immigration officers during an enforcement operation. Ten days later, on January 24, 2026, federal agents fatally shot 37-year-old US citizen Alex Pretti (Thompson, 2026). These incidents are reminiscent of enforced disappearances of activists and dissenters in authoritarian countries. The Trump administration has unleashed a terrifying regime of fear that affects all: not only those who are targeted and victimized, but those who bear witness, resist, or attempt to provide aid.

Race lies at the core of the current administration's immigration enforcement strategy. ICE routinely targets individuals based on skin color, language, clothing, and occupation to justify surveillance, detention, and violence (CAIR Los Angeles, 2025). In recent months, the US has become an increasingly hostile and punitive environment for immigrants and for Black and Brown communities, regardless of legal status. This is by design and reflects the underlying logic of immigration enforcement as a racial project. Understanding this logic is crucial for meaningful critique and resistance.

ICE enforcement is neither randomly distributed nor is it primarily driven by public safety concerns, as proclaimed by the current administration. Data consistently show that men, particularly men from Latin America, are disproportionately detained and deported, many without criminal convictions and many with long-standing ties to US communities (TRAC, n.d.). As Golash-Boza (2015) argues, deportation functions as a racialized system of social control that renders migrant labor simultaneously exploitable and disposable. Migrants are conditionally included when their labor is needed and forcibly excluded when they become politically inconvenient or economically expendable.

Feminist scholarship at the intersection of deportation and gender can further unpack how immigration enforcement is not gender-neutral but rather a form of racialized and gendered state violence. Deportation disciplines labor, regulates families, and produces reproductive injustice (Briggs, 2017; Hernandez, 2019; Hondagneu-Sotelo, 2017). The social and economic costs of deportation are redistributed onto women, children, and extended kin networks through family separation, displacement, caregiving burdens, legal precarity, violations of bodily autonomy, and economic instability. These harms have been intensified by the massive expansion of enforcement infrastructure: ICE is now the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency, with appropriations increasing dramatically over the past decade (USAspending.gov, n.d.).

While this scale of visibility and enforcement has been alarming, the carceral state of immigration enforcement in the United States is neither new nor uncommon (Kim, 2020). The authors and editors of Affilia have long argued that anti-immigrant violence is deeply rooted in US histories of colonialism, racial capitalism, and imperial governance. They have pointed to the racist and punitive attacks on immigrant bodies that directly contradict basic human rights and our feminist social work values and principles (Gomes & Ross-Sheriff, 2011; Kim et al., 2021; O’Brien et al., 2020; Park, 2019). In her 2019 editorial, Dr. Yoosun Park underscored the “utter lack of originality” (p. 413) in the then-Trump administration's racist and bigoted immigration policies, noting that, historically, the United States and its Congress have passed legislation that openly discriminates against immigrants based on race and ethnicity. That editorial also called social workers to action. It condemned the profession's troubling silence during a time when the Trump administration separated children from their families and enforced a so-called “Muslim ban”.

In 2026, the urgency has only intensified, prompting us to ask: What does it mean for our profession and for the work we do when ICE officers abduct immigrants from our streets, homes, schools, universities, and workplaces? What does it mean when refugees, asylum seekers, and even US citizens also endure such state violence? The ban on Muslim-majority countries persists, and the separation of children from their families is at risk of becoming routine. Meanwhile, racist rhetoric directed at African, Latin American, and Asian immigrants has become alarmingly commonplace and normalized in mainstream political discourse. Immigrants are increasingly framed as simultaneously “criminal,” “lazy,” “disposable,” and “subhuman” (Flowers et al., 2025; Nakamura, 2018).

Immigrants in America are exhausted by a relentless barrage of vile, hateful rhetoric that has nothing to do with who they truly are and everything to do with the color of their skin. This language and imagery operate as a weaponized ideology grounded in white supremacy, patriarchy, and colonialism. Such rhetoric deliberately strips immigrants of their humanity, normalizing the idea that only white, able-bodied, economically productive migrants are “good migrants”.

Social work needs to step up. We need to say more and do more. As critical feminist social workers, what is our ethical and professional obligation at this moment when immigrants and racialized communities face such persecution and violence across the United States – and elsewhere?

Affilia's editorial board reflected deeply on these questions and identified three key themes around meaningful resistance: 1) Naming and Exposing Violence, 2) Building Solidarity, and 3) Feminist Praxis to Reimagine Justice.

Naming and Exposing Violence

“Naming the wound” is the first step towards healing from trauma (Kaimal, 2022, p. 154). As such, we name enforced disappearances and anti-immigrant rhetoric as egregious violence enacted upon immigrant and racialized bodies, minds, and epistemologies. In line with Audre Lorde's (1977) missive to speak our truth, we refuse to be silent bystanders. We also recognize that not everyone can speak up. To voice dissent - or simply to appear non-compliant - means to draw attention, particularly carceral attention, or as recent killings illustrate, even to risk one's life. But that silence speaks volumes: about the fear that immigrants and non-immigrant racialized people are enduring, about the risks they take every time they speak up.

Building Solidarity

To be solidarious means to want justice for all. It means to want for others what we want for ourselves. Now is the time to build solidarity across differences. That is not easy in a climate of political polarization, fear, and punishment, where federal responses are swift and merciless. When an Afghan refugee shot National Guard officers in Washington DC, the federal administration used this act to justify halting the processing of immigration cases for citizens from 39 nations (Nakamura, 2025). In another example, a shooting spree at Brown University by a Portuguese migrant provoked the cancellation of diversity visas for all (Ferreira Santos, 2025). Such governmental actions reduce trust between communities and reproduce racial divides.

Many Americans appear to accept anti-immigrant rhetoric in the name of safety or crime prevention. Immigrants are called upon to explain themselves and signal their attachment to American nationalism. This fearmongering is not new; it draws on long histories of racist propaganda that have positioned Black people, Indigenous peoples, Asian immigrants, Latinx communities, and Muslim and Arab peoples as threats to white safety and prosperity. Each iteration appeals to contemporary concerns while maintaining the same fundamental logic: that those marked as Other are responsible for social problems created by the powerful. Feminist social work must resist this logic and instead build analyses that connect the struggles of migrants with the struggles of all people harmed by capitalism, white supremacy, and state violence.

Solidarity demands that we resist divide-and-conquer strategies that pit communities against one another in the name of security. Recent policy responses, such as halting immigration processing for entire national groups following isolated acts of violence, exemplify how the state manufactures collective punishment and racialized fear (Ferreira Santos, 2025; Nakamura, 2025). Feminist social work must counter these narratives by connecting struggles across race, citizenship status, and national origin, and by insisting that safety is produced through care, redistribution, and justice rather than punishment.

ICE, then, is best understood not as an aberration but as a continuation of US colonial governance: from Indigenous removal and the regulation of enslaved Africans to exclusionary immigration laws and cyclical labor recruitment and expulsion (Dunbar-Ortiz, 2014; Golash-Boza, 2015; Ngai, 2004). As we wrote in a previous editorial, these are the same logics used to support genocide and displacement in Palestine and other sovereign lands, while using the same technologies of surveillance and control (Diaz et al., 2025).

What is new, however, is the rapidly evolving terrain of visibility, discourse, care, and resistance. Digital platforms have drastically changed how we witness state violence (Etim et al., 2025). Social media allows acts of injustice to be broadcast, scrutinized, analyzed in real time, and to contest dominant narratives or outright media silence. It can also support rapid organizing, mutual aid, and collective care, transforming how marginalized communities and their allies coordinate support and challenge institutionalized violence (Bonilla & Rosa, 2015; Spade, 2020). We must hold on to and build on this, and use these tools to create what Spade (2020) defines as a radical alternative to charity, a form of collective survival that directly confronts the structures causing the crisis. These digital spaces can also enable connections among previously isolated struggles. Solidarity can be forged where movements come together.

Feminist Praxis to Reimagine Justice

As feminist social workers, we acknowledge that borders are technologies of violence that determine who belongs and who does not. The US border enforcement regime uses detention, family separation, surveillance, and criminalization to surveil and control migrant bodies. As anti-carceral critical feminists, we must interrogate the role that social work plays in these processes. For instance, students have brought to our attention that US Customs and Border Protection recruiters have been attending university career fairs and luring students, including social work students, to work for them. We must take a principled stance against such incursions.

Our collective reflection is only a starting point for critical feminists and social workers as we embark on this long and laborious journey of resistance together. More broadly, our feminist praxis must involve connecting struggles across borders and contexts. The forces that criminalize migrant bodies are the same forces that surveil Black and Indigenous communities, that displace communities of color through gentrification, that separate families through the child welfare system, and that incarcerate people en masse. These systems are interconnected, and our resistance must be too. Social work has a long and troubling history of complicity with state violence, but it also has traditions of radical organizing, mutual aid, and transformative justice that we can draw upon as we reimagine what is possible. As Hinojosa Hernandez (2019) argues, analyses that separate border studies from feminist and reproductive justice frameworks fail to grasp the full scope of harm and the full potential for coalition. Resistance must be intersectional, transnational, and collective.

ICE abductions and other enforcement activities in Los Angeles, Minnesota, Portland, and Maine should serve as a warning sign for all. In a series of lectures in 1946, German Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemöller acknowledged his inaction in the face of the Nazi regime and reflected on the guilt he felt at his complicity, often using the phrase “First they came for…” (Holocaust Encyclopedia, n.d.; see also Zelnick et al., 2023). This quote is part of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where it serves as “an indictment of passivity and indifference during the Holocaust” (Holocaust Encyclopedia, n.d.). We must heed the warning that it is our collective responsibility to oppose the rise of fascism. We must not wait till they come for us before we speak up.

We encourage submissions to Affilia that explore what we can do today to resist racist and anti-immigrant actions and policies. How can critical scholarship center the voices and experiences of migrants, interrogate power and privilege within social work, and offer concrete examples of liberatory practice? We invite authors to examine feminist social work practice with migrants across all levels, from direct practice with individuals and families to community organizing, policy advocacy, and transnational solidarity work. Let's come together to imagine a future that belongs to all our communities and work to make it happen.