On Looking Over My Shoulder for ICE
On an overcast Sunday in August, when my daughter turned seven, we visited my father in Corona, Queens. He filled an inflatable pool in the parking lot of the three-story apartment where he rents, and the kids played, his young daughters and their neighbors, a riot of giggles and splashing. Next to them adults chatted about the camps and the masked agents. As we went around taking turns in conversational roulette, pausing to take swigs of beer from a bottle, a neighbor swung in his portable rocking chair, throwing cursory glances at every car trundling past. The expressions in his eyes semaphored signals to his wife about the degree of danger, should she need to bolt into hiding.
“You better be looking over your shoulder,” Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar,” said in 2024 before Trump’s second term began. And that’s exactly what the neighbor was doing. Eventually, we all joined in. The darker the experiences we shared grew, the more anxiously the beers sweated, the more visibly necks craned to catch the plates of cars, the more eyes narrowed to peer into tinted windows of every car on the road.
My father recounted, in a show of Dominican bravado, how he cursed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents when they came to the building, pounding on the door months ago. He told the neighbor that he was a citizen, and he would stand up to them if they harassed him. He pointed to me, saying I alerted him of an ICE sighting by Our Lady of Sorrows Roman Catholic Church months ago. When it was my turn to speak, I said that mass deportation required detaining every Latino, regardless of status. To puncture his false sense of security, we joked wryly how my father’s indigenous features would make him a prime target, unwanted and disposable.
I spoke about my time in Minnesota reporting on the Midway Blitz ICE operation, and the mass revolt against it. A neighbor spoke about how a co-worker stopped working in construction and did bartending to earn a living, but then had to stop as there was a raid at the restaurant. They spoke about how they had legal status via asylum paperwork. But they feared they’d be stopped and sent to a camp in Africa, or somewhere else where they didn’t speak the language.
“We’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator if they escape prison,” Trump said after the detention camp “Alligator Alcatraz” opened in South Florida’s Everglades. As federal agents fan across U.S. cities, they’ve hit ignominious milestones in the number of arrests, surging to nearly 50,000 for July 2026. The U.S. had over 100 detention centers in January 2024. That figure is about 220 to 456 today. Once you build it, you have to fill it.
“That is the logic of the camp: fear, hate, punishment, torture, banishment, death,” writes John Washington in How to Close a Camp. Every day, I walk around thinking whether today will be the day that I’m snatched. I lost my license in June, and I walked around wondering if I’d be stopped without documentation. In 2014, I organized as part of labor and community efforts to win municipal identification cards for immigrants in NYC. I also organized to win drivers’ licenses for undocumented immigrants. And here I was in 2026 wondering: if I were racially profiled and failed to produce a license, would it spell the end of my freedom to move about freely in the City I’ve called home for most of my life?
Since then, the looming fear of my detention grows more probable. Not only have they knocked on the doors of my family members, but they’ve also targeted union members and institutions that I’ve interacted with in my journalism and organizing work. Last year, I wrote in Jacobin: “Fear is the point,” in reference to brazen detentions and assaults on immigrants in Massachusetts. “Why don’t they come and snatch me already?” I’ve taken to saying, frustrated with the paralysis of not knowing when I’ll be detained.
I tell my confidants that what I fear most is that when they come to get me, they’ll do it while I’m taking my kids to school. I want to go standing. But if they come for me with my children, then I don’t know what I’ll do.
I’m Luis Feliz Leon, a reporter on the labor beat and an associate editor at Labor Notes. My writing has been featured in The Nation, In These Times, The New Republic, Jacobin magazine, The Baffler, and elsewhere. I’ve won no awards aside from the disdain of bosses, and compliments from workers who read what I wrote.
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