Kerem Yücel / AP Photo

The absolute atrocities that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been committing across the nation, including the inexcusable murders of Alex Pretti, Renee Nicole Good, Keith Porter Jr. and others, have been nothing short of horrifying. These cases are shocking, devastating and morally indefensible. While this violence is unprecedented in scale, I find it unsurprising. Considering President Trump has time and time again disregarded rule of law, turned a blind eye to discrimination and brutality and even emphasized his goal to have the largest amount of deportations, no one should be surprised that Trump is acting in line with his word. However, I simply cannot fathom how Americans allowed this to happen.

I want to be clear – I am not attempting to shift blame away from Trump, the Department of Homeland Security and ICE. It goes unsaid that those in positions of power are directly responsible for these atrocities; their authority enables this violence, and their decisions sustain it. I am, however, seeking to argue that those who voted for this and are shocked right now failed to listen to all the warning signs that preceded this. 

We are living under an administration that built its political identity on punitive immigration enforcement. When confronted with state violence, Trump has often justified or minimized it. One of the most infamous cases is the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. The entire country witnessed his perpetuation and encouragement of blatant violence from advising the insurrectionists to come, to pardoning over a thousand of them. Even with Renee Good, his initial response suggested she had a “disrespectful” attitude, claiming she was a “paid agitator” and “violently, willfully and viciously ran over the ICE agent officer.” He claimed the officer shot her in self defense, shifting the blame towards the “racial left” and his sympathy towards the officer. While these are more recent examples, this behavior is not out of character.

Long before Trump was elected, he made immigration enforcement a focal point of his campaign. He repeatedly promised a deportation force that would remove millions of people living in the United States without authorization. During his 2024 campaign, he promised to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history,” with similar sentiments during his 2016 campaign. 

“We have at least 11 million people in this country that came in illegally,” Trump said. “They will go out.”

This was a harsh promise that signaled disregard for due process and caution around enforcement consequences — something that was additionally stated by Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller.

“Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Miller said in 2023. 

While Trump claimed to target criminals, data within just the first few months of his presidency indicated otherwise, exposing how enforcement expanded to include many with no criminal history. Throughout his 2016 campaign and afterwards, Trump has used inflammatory, dehumanizing language to address immigrants, setting the stage for tolerance of violence against them. He described unauthorized immigrants as criminals, “illegal monsters,” drug dealers and “aliens who rape children.” When he announced campaign in 2015, he claimed they were “savage, illegal alien criminals who have been raping, pillaging and killing our cities and our towns.” During his first term, he showed little remorse to immigrants through his zero tolerance policy, locking them in cages and separating thousands of families at the border. In his 2024 campaign, he claimed that immigrants commit crimes because “it’s in their genes,” an absolutely baseless claim that simply exposes his xenophobic justifications historically used to excuse brutality. 

“They’re not humans. They’re animals,” Trump said.

Through using this vivid, dehumanizing imagery, he was able to convince Americans that immigrants pose a large threat to their wellbeing, leaving Americans more likely to support the violence taken against these often innocent immigrants. This pattern of political rhetoric and images of savagery is used to characterize enemies and to justify otherwise unacceptable actions, which I believe many Americans naïvely fell for.

My core question lies with how people did not see this coming. Those who claimed they supported him due to his stance on immigration, which I witnessed both in person and online, were simply ignorant and naïve for failing to foresee this administration’s immoral capabilities. Especially given consolidation of Republican power in the House, Senate, Supreme Court and in the executive branch, it was not hard to presume that abuses of power were bound to occur. In short, when a president campaigns on mass deportations, consolidates power across all branches of government and repeatedly signals indifference to state violence, the result is not ambiguity, it is inevitability. 

That inevitability is already visible. In the past few months, ICE has detained hundreds of children, expanded the use of warehouses converted into mass detention centers capable of holding 80,000 people and deployed tear gas against protesters and children alike. These are not isolated incidents but rather the predictable result of an administration that has framed immigrants as threats and normalized extreme enforcement as necessary.

This is why I believe it is crucial to keep informed on politics prior to major elections. This past election was one that changed the trajectory of millions of lives – it is simply not acceptable to turn a blind eye to narratives and proposed policies that will ultimately have a significant impact on people throughout the nation. 

So to those asking how this could happen, the question must be reversed: where have you been? Shocking? Yes. Disgusting? Absolutely. But surprising? No. If the events unfolding in places like Minnesota feel sudden or unbelievable, it is not because the signs were absent, it is because they were ignored.