Over the past few months I've been reading about ICE's activities against both legal and illegal immigrants with increasing horror. I worry that Trump is trying to get Americans used to the idea of having masked paramilitary forces coming into cities and neighborhoods to snatch individuals and detain them without due process.

I spent many years doing cartoons on the Philippines and reading about how the Duterte administration gave the police and military impunity to harass, jail and even kill individuals without due process. Enforced disappearances has continued with the Bongbong Marcos administration. Among those targeted with enforced disappearances are human rights activists, indigenous rights activists, journalists, lawyers and critics of the government.

During the 1970s and 1980s, autocratic governments in Latin America and the Philippines snatched students, lawyers, journalists, priests, nuns, and human rights activists and subjected them to jail, torture and murder. In Argentina during the military junta of the 1970s and 1980s, a group of mothers whose children had been "disappeared" by the military formed The Mothers of the Disappeared and protested the government for the return of their children.

The U.S. isn't as bad yet as the Philippines or Latin America. But I think we have to hold the line early so that the U.S. doesn't get to that point.

Here's a youtube video on how I created my cartoon https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4FoelCqhns

REFERENCES
"They Saw Their Neighbors Taken Away by ICE. Then They Made a Plan" by Michelle Goldberg for The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/30/opinion/ice-immigration-protest-resi…

"How LA Defeated Donald Trump. And how the rest of the country can too" by Bill Gallegos for The Nation
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/how-la-defeated-donald-trump/

Here's a December 2025 New York Times visual investigation on an ICE raid in Los Angeles and its consequences on a neighborhood
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ws1r6CaSXs

Here's a November 2025 New York Times video where 3 legal immigrants talk about their experience in ICE detention
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4X0hI40a8A

"Tackles, projectiles and gunfire: Many fear ICE tactics are growing more violent" by Meg Anderson for NPR
https://www.npr.org/2025/10/13/nx-s1-5566785/ice-dhs-immigration-tactic…

"Immigrant students experience more bullying as ICE raids cause ‘culture of fear’, says survey" by San Levin for The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/10/immigrant-students-ice-…

"ICE Deletes Rape Protection for Trans Immigrants" by Whitney Curry Wimbish for The American Prospect
https://prospect.org/2026/01/14/ice-trump-rape-protection-trans-immigra…

"Somali Minnesotans opting to stay home out of fear amid ICE influx" by Susan-Elizabeth Littlefield for CBS News
https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/somali-minnesotans-staying-home-…