By Special to the Miami Herald
This is what we wanted. This is what we chose.
It’s the bitter truth that haunts your heart as you watch ICE Cold, a short film by four-time Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist Carol Guzy. In six minutes of still images and somber music, you bear witness as migrants line up at the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in New York for their court appearances, only to have masked agents of the Immigration Customs and Enforcement agency sweep down upon them and haul them away.
And families are physically pulled apart. And children’s faces are contorted with terror. And a man weeps. And a woman snarls in fury. And a photojournalist is thrown to the floor, then carried out on a stretcher. And due process be damned, news reports informing us that the ones with papers and the ones without, the legal and the illegal, the guilty and the good, all get taken away together.
And looming through it all, you see the ICE men and women, see human beings turned into faceless automatons by their balaclavas and mirrored sunglasses, freed by the anonymity these devices bestow from the obligations – compassion, respect, or just simple acknowledgment of shared personhood – that being human otherwise places on us all.
What we wanted. What we chose.
Watching ICE conduct its grim business, the resonances of history that arise can feel both overly fanciful and at the same time, frighteningly on point. Families physically pulled apart by uncaring hands over the outraged screams of the bereft? Was that the Jacob K. Javits Center in New York in 2025, or was it a flesh auction in Montgomery in 1830? Was it the home of some aboriginal family in Brisbane in 1921, or a railroad depot at Theresienstadt in 1943? Is this really just a so-called immigration crackdown orchestrated by Donald Trump’s second administration? Or is it not fresh and superfluous proof that humanity’s capacity for gleeful cruelty is without bottom or end?
And even if history had not seen this before, this generation certainly has. Indeed, while you may be appalled and dismayed by the images Guzy brings to you, the one thing you cannot be is surprised. In the last year, after all, heartrending images like these have become part of the ordinary, the everyday, the commonplace. We are used to this now. This is America now. And that is its own brand of loss.
What Guzy documented in New York, she could have also seen in Los Angeles, Omaha, Chicago, Philadelphia, Denver or Miami. It’s a live possibility anywhere in the country where people from those places Trump has declared “shithole countries” (i.e., countries with black and brown populations) are gathered, particularly those places containing people with Spanish accents and surnames. If it hasn’t come to your community yet, just wait. As a graffito at the end of ICE Cold puts it, “If it can happen to ______________, it can happen to any one of us.”
Some profess to be shocked by this. Back in June, Florida State Sen. Ileana Garcia, co-founder of Latinas For Trump, made headlines when she went on social media and decried the “unacceptable and inhumane” practices of ICE. “This,” she declared, “is not what we voted for.”
But it is precisely what they voted for. Indeed, in the 2024 campaign, Trump repeatedly and explicitly promised the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” He could hardly have been clearer about what he planned to do. Granted, maybe you as an individual loathed those plans, maybe even voted against them. But the aggregate voice of America cried out 77 million strong, the likes of Ileana Garcia prominent among them, in support of what he promised, which is to say, this chaos, this heartbreak, this now-familiar tragedy.
This is what America wanted. And by God, this is what we got.
We did not, it must be noted, want to fix a broken immigration system. Had that ever been the goal, it could have been achieved as far back as 2006 when President George W. Bush – no namby-pamby liberal, he – proposed a common sense bill that would have addressed the issue, only to see it shot down by his own political kin. In 2018, Trump himself helped scuttle bipartisan talks that might have produced immigration reform. In 2024, he used his influence to again kill a bipartisan immigration reform measure enthusiastically embraced by conservatives, and his stated reason for doing so was that passage of that bill would be detrimental to his chances of regaining the presidency by depriving him of a politically useful issue.
In other words, he valued the problem more than the solution. And again, that problem is not the need to fix a broken system but rather, the coming to this country of too many people from Trump’s less-favored countries and particularly those people with Spanish accents and surnames. Like Rodriguez, Ortega, Ramos … and Garcia. The problem is a need to show those people who’s boss.
This is what we wanted. This is what we chose.
And in every frame on Carol Guzy’s film, that choice is implicitly and emphatically damned. A security guard weeps for a woman and a little girl. A traumatized child clings to her father’s shirt. Anonymous ICE men and women face the camera. Donald Trump glowers from his official portrait, which hangs from a wall on which are etched words from the preamble to the U.S. Constitution: “We the people of the United States…” And all throughout, a question intrudes itself on your conscience. A simple question, really.
Couldn’t we have made a better choice than this?
Read more at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/immigration/article314037286.html#storylink=cpy
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