Hunger, fear, desperation: What came of an ordinary ICE raid
COVINGTON, Ky. — It had taken a decade for Brandon Tomas Tomas to establish a life in America: a wife, a steady job and five American-born children. It took 20 seconds for that life to be taken away.
An immigration officer looking for someone else spotted him and asked an innocuous question: “Cómo estás?” How are you? Then he asked whether Tomas had papers. In a flash, the 33-year-old Guatemalan was in handcuffs, in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, headed to jail and probable deportation.
Many miles away from the U.S.-Mexico border, authorities are separating families in raids that target immigrants at home and at work, conducted in the name of public safety. Most of these raids go unnoticed outside of the communities affected, but they are integral to the Trump administration’s broader crackdown on immigration that is leading to more arrests, particularly of migrants with no criminal records.
This is the story of one such operation, and the lingering effects it had not just on families but on the community they had come to call home. (Lea la historia en español aquí .)