Against Trump and ICE, Mercy Is Only for People Who Generate Headlines
You get detained by ICE. If your case goes viral? A quick release. If you're the other 99% of people? You sit in ICE detention forever.
Photo via Unsplash, Milad Fakurian Splinter ICE
One of the most frustrating things in writing stories about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the midst of the brutal second Trump administration is that you are keenly aware that the cases getting stories written about them, the ones capturing national attention on any given day, are hardly representative of the average person’s experience with ICE, DHS and a callously indifferent federal government that simply does not care what happens to the people it imprisons.
To be certain, plenty of terrible shit does get highlighted in the tireless work of journalists, all the way up to the level of the death of Geraldo Lunas Campos, the detainee witnesses said was strangled to death by ICE agents at Texas’ Camp East Montana, in a case the medical examiner ruled a homicide but has to date resulted in zero charges against anyone. But the vast, vast majority of cases are people we will never hear about; names we will never know. There are around 70,000 people currently in ICE detention, and only a few media cause célèbre are available in any moment. If you become one of those people, those victims of the week? Then you actually stand a pretty good chance of being released or publicly spared. If your case doesn’t generate headlines? Then you’re stuck where you are forever, until the Trump administration decides it’s finally time to send you somewhere you’re likely to be persecuted, or ships you to a prison in a random African country you’ve never heard of before, much less visited.
Breaking news: An employee of El Paso County’s Office of the Medical Examiner said it is likely to classify the death of Geraldo Lunas Campos at an ICE detention center as a homicide. A detainee says he witnessed Campos being choked to death by guards.
— Adam Parkhomenko (@adamparkhomenko.bsky.social) 6:06 PM · Jan 15, 2026
This is a truth of the current ICE and DHS deportation campaign that you can’t help but notice and acknowledge if you follow this topic in the slightest bit: Those with media exposure receive their due process, or get released from detention to argue their case from the comfort of a loving home with family. But when those families can’t get their local media to bite on an all-too-familiar (and thus easy to tune out) sob story, there’s almost no chance for that person to be released from detention. And that’s a problem, because another reality is that the detained are spending longer and longer on average in these makeshift prisons as the detainee population climbs and there aren’t enough immigration judges or courtrooms to keep up. In February, PBS reported that there were 7,252 people in the ICE detention system who had been in detention for more than six months. There were 79, meanwhile, who had been detained for more than two years, in a detention system that is seeing its prisoners dying at a record place, even as the Trump administration also changes how it reports those deaths.
This all comes to mind in the wake of a story that has become typical: This week it was reported that the immigrant father of a U.S. sailor stationed aboard the troubled USS Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier had been released to his family by ICE after a period of detention. Luis Manuel Aviles, a native of Nicaragua who has lived and worked in the U.S. for 20 years, was released following social media pleas from son Joshua Aviles, a Navy handling airman aboard the Abraham Lincoln whose posts went viral for saying the following: “This is heartbreaking for me. I don’t know how I can mentally continue working 12+ hour days knowing that my dad is somewhere, possibly being treated like a criminal. My dad’s only ‘crime’ was coming to this country to give my siblings and me a better life.” DHS released Luis Aviles while still insisting that it will pursue his deportation case, saying “Having a family member in the military is not a free pass to violate our nation’s laws.” Son Joshua Aviles, meanwhile, is finally returning aboard the tarnished Abraham Lincoln following equally publicized accounts of attempted sailor suicides aboard the ship following more than 200 days at sea with no land stops.
Immigration authorities arrested Luis Manuel Aviles, a handyman with a work permit whose son was serving as a sailor on the carrier at the time.
When Luis Manuel Aviles was arrested by immigration authorities, (cont.)
www.huffpost.com/entry/uss-li…
— RoseMarie (@rosesbloom24.bsky.social) 6:53 PM · Aug 23, 2026
Does anyone doubt that the circumstances of Luis Aviles’ detention would have been different if his son wasn’t a U.S. soldier whose post bemoaning that detention went viral, resulting in follow-up reporting and media spotlight? There are, after all, many other military spouses and family members who have been detained or deported by ICE, and only a handful of them rose to the necessary level of media/political intervention to get them released.
One of those cases that was especially absurd? That would be what happened to Maisa Lopes Eliaser, the wife of Army Staff Sgt. Alexis Jaramillo, who was detained at an immigration appointment in July, causing her husband to need to take leave of his duties at Louisiana’s Fort Polk in order to care for his 5-year-old stepson. Jaramillo subsequently enlisted the help of everyone he possibly could in attempting to secure his wife’s release, including Democratic Sen. and Navy vet Mark Kelly of Arizona, but nothing he did could seemingly prevent Maisa Lopes Eliaser from being put on a deportation flight to her native Brazil. She was halfway to Brazil on said flight earlier this month when ICE officers on the plane reportedly received a phone call–source still unknown–instructing them to instead bring her back to the United States. The understandably confused woman was then released from ICE custody. As her husband put it: “Who made the call? We don’t know. But someone made the phone call, and then she came back.” Imagine the fate of your spouse being at this kind of seemingly random whim.
Earlier this month, The Associated Press highlighted Maisa Lopes Eliaser as one of dozens of spouses or parents of U.S. troops who had been detained after Trump’s administration rolled back protections for military families amid its push for mass deportations. (cont)
www.huffpost.com/entry/wife-s…— RoseMarie (@rosesbloom24.bsky.social) 7:48 PM · Aug 14, 2026
And as you read or write about these cases, you come to find that this is the norm: If it’s highly publicized, then the person suddenly receives notably more cushy treatment. It’s no surprise, for instance, that 56-year-old Sister Leticia Ugboaja, a Catholic nun from Nigeria who was detained while on her way to mass, wearing her habit, only spent a day in ICE custody before someone with a working brain cell determined that the optics of this were really, really bad. Even within that one day period, Ugboaja already had members of Congress petitioning for her release. The same goes for catching coordinator Oswaldo Pirela of the San Diego Padres organization, whose case we recently highlighted: It was reported this week that he had been quietly released on bond, with the Padres making absolutely no comment about any of it after their initial, noncommittal refusal to even condemn their own employee being locked up by the Trump administration. Both Ugboaja and Pirela’s cases benefited from the unique circumstances of their jobs, making them either more visible or more instantly sympathetic to the public. But what about the thousands of other American residents who look just like both of them, who can’t command so much as a local newspaper write-up? Republicans often complain of a “two-tiered” system of justice, but that’s what exists here: The tier of victims supported by media attention, and the tier who are not. Their outcomes are very different.
The one other way an average person manages to get out of ICE detention without simply being deported or shipped off to a third country is if you’re lucky enough to have a federal judge intervene directly on your behalf to order your release. That was the case for someone like Jose Trinidad Rojas Pliego, who was one of three men who witnessed the ICE shooting death of Houston resident Lorenzo Salgado Araujo because he was in the same van at the time. Federal immigration agents looking for an entirely different person stopped Araujo’s van and then claimed he attempted to “weaponize” his vehicle before shooting him dead on the spot; the witnesses unsurprisingly say that the feds are lying. In not-at-all suspicious fashion, ICE then detained the three witnesses to the event and immediately attempted to pressured them to sign self-deportation papers, seemingly in a bid to remove the possibility of testimony if Texas ever dared to bring prosecution. A federal judge threw a wrench into that DHS plan by ordering that the government could not deport the men.
Judge bars deportation of witness in fatal ICE shooting of Mexican homebuilder
Jose Trinidad Rojas Pliego was one of three passengers in a van driven by Lorenzo Araujo Salgado when Araujo Salgado was shot by an ICE officer.
www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news…
— Emma Jean Kitty (@emmajeankitty.bsky.social) 2:26 PM · Jul 22, 2026
But again: That’s if you, the detained person, have specifically caught the attention of a federal judge before the federal government has a chance to cajole you into leaving the country, and in that case we’re still talking about an inciting incident (the death of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo) that attracted a ton of media attention and reporting. Everyone else not generating reams of copy? Good luck squirming your way to the front of a crowded docket.
Nor is there some kind of solution, as far as I’m aware. The Trump administration’s tactic since the beginning of its beefed up immigration campaign has been to process so many people, in such soulless capacity, that they completely overwhelm any attempt at treating or viewing individual detainees as human beings, in an effort to transform the image of humans into something more akin to pests or livestock to be relocated or exterminated. Seeing each individual dot on a graph as a human being with hopes, dreams and family makes this all too difficult, so they’ve trained the MAGA hordes to afford absolutely no empathy of any kind toward anyone caught up in the system. Hell, they’ve got men still supporting the broader deportation campaign even while their own wife is being prosecuted under it! To normie America, meanwhile, one of the few things that can pierce that veil of complacency is a well-tuned deluge of reporting on an individual case, turning that victim into a brief media celebrity or internet cause célèbre–think of the image of 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos in his bunny ears, or ChongLy Thao, the man marched into 10 degree weather in his underwear, two of the most searing images of ICE’s fateful deployment in Minnesota.
They got public attention. They got released from ICE detention, though the government is still pursuing the deportation of Ramos’ family. But when there are 70,000 human beings with variations upon the same tragic story to tell, they’re forced to share a limited reserve of media curiosity and American empathy.
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