Living in the shadow of ICE

How can someone vanish overnight?

Not with an explanation or a warning, but with an empty space at the dinner table, a door left  untouched and a shadow that follows you everywhere — a constant reminder that it could happen again.

That shadow entered my life when I was 7. Someone I loved disappeared abruptly, devastatingly.

It wasn’t an accident or a tragedy. It was ICE that erased him from my world, leaving me with a fear I didn’t yet have words for. 

In that moment, I learned the consequences of living under the constant threat of having your entire life ripped away without notice.

I remember the heavy silence that filled my house the morning after ICE took that person from us, and the way my family moved through the halls like ghosts.

I remember sitting on the edge of my bed, waiting for closure that would never come. His absence carved a void into me and became the measure for everything that followed. 

Every choice, every step and every glance over my shoulder was shaped by that fear.

As someone from the Hispanic community, that shadow is never abstract. Fear lives quietly inside homes and neighborhoods. Some of us know how losing someone you love shapes your every breath. 

As a child, that fear hung over my head. But as I grew older, that personal fear widened into something larger: an agency that wields fear as policy, with devastating consequences for families across the country.

Recent headlines make that clear.

Across Minnesota, ICE operations have expanded into streets and neighborhoods, making daily life increasingly precarious. 

We are only 32 days into 2026, and federal immigration enforcement agents have already fatally shot two U.S. citizens.

In January,  Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, was killed while filming agents on a Minneapolis street, and Renée Good, another U.S. citizen, was killed in a separate federal enforcement action. 

Their deaths only intensified community fear, outrage and protests — not only in Minnesota, but across the nation. 

The presence of heavily armed federal agents has transformed ordinary streets into landscapes of fear. But the harm doesn’t stop on the street. It extends into detention centers, where men, women and children can be held for weeks or months, separated from everything familiar. 

ICE’s reach feels less like law enforcement and more like a permanent threat hanging over daily life. Families adjust routines, and children flinch at sirens. Parents teach their kids to check twice before opening the door. 

Fear becomes deliberate and systematic. It doesn’t fade in the morning, like most nightmares. 

What’s most terrifying is how ordinary this fear has become. Stories of raids, detentions and wrongful arrests circulate like everyday conversation. Life is lived in anticipation of what could go wrong.

Those sirens and raids aren’t just headlines. They’re echoes of the fear I carried as a child —  the fear of losing someone I loved without warning.

As I walk the streets of Bethlehem, built on immigrants’ labor and dreams, I sometimes feel that same shadow whispering that it could take someone I love again. 

For countless families across this country, that shadow isn’t a memory. It’s present every day. It lingers in neighborhoods, in schools, in workplaces and in homes. It shapes how people move, speak and hope.

That reality pulls me back to my childhood, to the way absence carved itself into my life. Knowing that others live with the same fear hurts almost as much as living it myself.

It never truly goes away. You learn to live through it, not beyond it. You blink back tears when that person’s smile flashes in your memory.

Their eyes. Their hug. You would give anything to see them again.

You wish for a better world.