Supporters of anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement activists charged in federal court rally in front of city hall across from the Minneapolis Federal Court building on Wednesday, July 1, 2026.
Richard Tsong-Taatarii/The Minnesota Star/TNS
When cities across the United States were plagued with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests at the dawn of Trump 2.0 and earlier this year, Americans were rightfully outraged.
People took to the streets across the nation, demanding ICE leave our cities and cease terrorizing our immigrants and their communities.
However, the title of a recent piece in the New York Times explicates perfectly how there has been a recent “quiet surge” in ICE arrests that seems to have spanned across the 2026 summer months.
This spike received scant attention from media outlets and self-proclaimed activists alike, unlike those earlier on in Trump 2.0.
Are these ICE abductions less horrific than those that came before it? Are the rights of immigrants honored, at least to some extent, more than they were in the first half of Trump 2.0?
I’ll give a hard no to both questions, to put it inexplicably lightly. So, then, why the lack of outrage?
After rollbacks on Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitian nationals—which was active since the 2010 Haiti earthquake that killed over 200,000 people—in the U.S. went into effect July 27, Haitians living in Ohio have been forced to wear ankle monitors that allow ICE to track their every move.
As of Sept. 21, according to the Haitian National Office for Migration (Office National de la Migration) more than 450 people have been deported to Haiti from the United States since this past July. These rollbacks on TPS affect the approximately 330,000 Haitians who have claimed the status since the devastating earthquake.
A Guatemalan couple was found dead in a sugarcane field in their home country, their hands tied behind their backs, with their one-year-old daughter still alive next to them after the husband was deported by ICE and the wife, in fear of her own potential detention, self-deported.
ICE arrests were at 49,571 this past July, the highest they’ve been since the start of Trump 2.0 and a 70% increase from the 29,241 arrests in February—these were after the large operations, among those were the two in Minneapolis that took the lives of U.S. citizens Renée Good and Alex Pretti.
So I beg the question again—to you, reading this, and anybody who believes in the rights and dignity of undocumented individuals—why the lack of outrage?
When ICE arrests were nearly three-quarters less than they are today, we had, I would argue, 75% more outrage than we have today. It is so flip-flopped it almost seems intentional.
Many people in the Western world, particularly those who call themselves activists, which I have been guilty of, have a tendency to come down with what I would coin “outrage fatigue.”
We are outraged and loud for a few weeks or months about a given issue, but the horrors we claim to be reviled by persist, and eventually, the fire burns out. You hear less about these issues. Your algorithms feed you less of it as you engage with it less due to your fatigue.
Let me be entirely clear—endless outrage content will have you in the same spot those who ignore or quickly tire of these issues are in—still, dormant, doing nothing, helping nobody.
People who have documents in the United States have a moral obligation to do what they can to ensure those who do not have a voice. But not only do they need a voice, they need resources.
If you can, there are countless causes you can donate to, just one being Americans for Immigrant Justice (AI Justice), whose main goal is to release people from ICE custody and avoid deportation.
The organization also observes the conditions of facilities, gives Know Your Rights presentations to detainees at ICE facilities, and counsels and represents clients in immigration court, as only 14% of people in ICE custody report having access to an attorney.
If you cannot donate, please do not stop speaking up. Call out your pro-ICE, anti-immigrant family members and peers, explain the arbitrary, hypocritical nature of citizenship laws, and do not do so sparingly.
Do not let the fear of what might happen if you speak up for those with less power than you stop you from doing it. Our neighbors need us, and have for a long time. There is no more time to wait.
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