What We Call It Matters

ICE, Kidnappings, and the Meaning of Disappearance

I. Why This Blog Exists

I’ve resisted starting a blog for a long time.

It always felt self-indulgent — like adding one more voice to an already deafening public conversation. And honestly, I wasn’t sure I had anything new to say. The news cycle spins so fast. Everything feels urgent. Everything is broken. What could one more post possibly do?

But lately, silence feels less like humility and more like complicity.

In moments like this, what we do with our voice matters. This blog, Means and Meaning, is my attempt to use mine differently. To slow things down. To reflect. To trace the structures beneath the headlines, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive them. To see how the material and the moral are tangled up in each other — and what that means for how we resist, imagine, and rebuild.

So I want to start here — with a story that should have stopped us all cold.

II. The Scene: Masked Men, Unmarked Vans, and a Public That Thought It Saw a Kidnapping

Earlier this year in Los Angeles, a group of masked men dragged a woman into an SUV. A bystander called 911 to report a kidnapping.

When LAPD officers arrived, they didn't make arrests. They didn't investigate. Instead, they formed a line to protect the men with guns.

It turned out those men were ICE agents. The woman was a U.S. citizen.

This incident wasn't isolated. In recent months, LAPD has received numerous emergency calls reporting what citizens believed were abductions — later revealed to be ICE raids. The scenes follow a disturbing pattern: unmarked vehicles, masked agents, chaos in broad daylight. And when local police show up, they don't intervene to stop what looks like a crime; they create a perimeter to protect the operation from concerned citizens.

In another case, a young woman named Andrea Guadalupe Velez was arrested while trying to shield someone from being taken. She was thrown to the ground, handcuffed, and detained in a facility with no license plates or visible signage. She was later released on bail. Her crime? Standing between federal agents and another human being. Exercising the most basic human impulse — to protect someone in danger.

These aren't the hardened criminals the administration claims to be targeting. These are community members, family members, street vendors, parents on their way to work. People with deep roots and everyday lives. U.S. citizens and longtime residents alike.

And this isn't law enforcement. It's theater — carefully choreographed to terrorize not just those taken, but everyone who witnesses it. Every raid is a message: this could be you.

III. The Architecture of Disappearance

What we're witnessing is the rapid expansion of a system designed not just to deport, but to disappear people. Legally, physically, narratively.

ICE is no longer operating with even a pretense of transparency. Agents don't announce themselves. Vehicles go unmarked. Faces are covered. Locations are chosen for maximum psychological impact — outside schools during pickup, near hospitals, in grocery store parking lots. The places we go when we're most vulnerable, when our guard is down, when we're thinking about our children or our health, not our documentation status. And the goal isn't simply removal. It's the manufacture of perpetual fear.

Think about what this does to a community. When every van could be ICE, when every knock could be agents, when every public space becomes a potential trap — people stop living full lives. They stop going to the doctor. Their kids miss school. They avoid calling police when they're victims of crimes. They work for whatever wage they're offered because complaint means exposure. The machinery of fear serves an economic function: it creates a permanent underclass too terrified to demand basic dignity. Employers love workers who can't complain. Landlords love tenants who can't call inspectors. The system creates profit from precarity.

And the infrastructure to make this fear permanent is being built at breakneck speed. New detention facilities are appearing across the country, some constructed in a matter of weeks. These aren't temporary structures. They're built to last, designed to hold hundreds of thousands indefinitely. They're placed in remote locations, far from lawyers, far from media attention, far from the public eye.

We've reached a point where even opponents feel compelled to add disclaimers when describing what's happening. "It's not exactly like historical examples," they say, as if that makes it acceptable. But when you're parsing degrees of mass detention, when you're debating which kind of camp you're building, you've already lost the moral argument. The infrastructure of dehumanization always follows the same blueprint, regardless of the flag flying above it.

IV. The Language War: What We Call It Matters

The administration insists these aren't kidnappings. These aren't raids. These aren't disappearances. They're "operations." They're "enforcement actions." They're "removals."

But what else do you call masked men dragging people into unmarked vans?

Language is one of the most powerful tools of authoritarian control. Euphemism becomes a shield against moral clarity. "Detention" sounds cleaner than caging. "Processing" sounds more orderly than family separation. "Removal" sounds less violent than forced deportation. When we accept their language, we accept their framing. And when we accept their framing, we've already half-surrendered the fight.

The LAPD says it cannot interfere with federal operations. But even that phrase — "federal operation" — masks the visceral reality of what communities are experiencing. When people call 911, they don't do so after checking jurisdiction charts. They do so because something that looks and feels like a violent crime is happening in front of them. Because armed men are dragging their neighbors away. Because children are screaming for their parents.

And here's the truth we need to keep saying: it is a crime. The fact that it's state-sanctioned doesn't make it moral. History is littered with atrocities that were perfectly legal at the time. Slavery was legal. Jim Crow was legal. Japanese internment was legal. The law is not a moral compass — it's a tool, and like any tool, it can be used to build or to destroy.

V. The Budget That Makes It Possible

Follow the money, and you'll find the machinery that makes mass disappearance possible. Earlier this summer, Congress passed what some are calling the “Big Beautiful Bill” — a name that trivializes what is, in fact, a historic shift in federal power and priority. The bill allocates a staggering $150 billion toward immigration enforcement and border security.

Of that, $45 billion goes toward building Trump’s border wall. Another $45 billion is for expanding detention capacity. That alone is 13 times the previous annual ICE detention budget and more than five times the budget of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

ICE is now poised to become the largest law enforcement agency in the United States.

Current estimates suggest capacity targets of well over 100,000 detention beds — nearly triple current levels. And internal reports indicate even this massive expansion won't satisfy the administration's goals. Some officials are apparently pushing for thousands of arrests per day. Not per year. Not per month. Per day. Industrial-scale human removal that would require logistics on par with military operations.

The private prison industry has taken notice. Stock prices for major detention contractors have reportedly soared. Earnings calls celebrate "growth opportunities" and "expanding market share." Industry conferences discuss "best practices for maximizing capacity." But let's be clear about what they're really trading: human misery as commodity. Each stock bump represents families destroyed. Each quarterly profit is extracted from someone's parent, someone's child, someone's neighbor locked in a cage.

This is what happens when human beings become raw material for profit. When suffering becomes a growth industry. When the means of production is the production of fear itself. The economic incentives align perfectly with cruelty — the more people detained, the more profit generated. The longer they're held, the higher the revenue. There's no market incentive for mercy.

VI. Where It All Points

Let's be clear about what we're watching: this isn't about border security. This isn't about public safety. This is about constructing an architecture of social control through terror.

The targets keep expanding. First it was people with criminal records. Then people with traffic violations. Then people who simply exist without proper documentation. Now we're seeing U.S. citizens swept up, activists arrested for bearing witness, entire communities living under siege. The definition of "deportable" expands to meet the infrastructure's appetite. Build more cages, find more bodies to fill them.

And it won't stop there. Systems of oppression never stay contained. Already, there's talk of challenging birthright citizenship, of denaturalizing political enemies, of expanding definitions of who can be "removed." The machinery being built today will find new targets tomorrow. That's not speculation — it's the consistent pattern of how authoritarian infrastructure operates. It expands to justify its own existence, finding new enemies to feed the machine.

History teaches us this lesson repeatedly: the tools of oppression are never retired after serving their initial purpose. The surveillance networks, the detention camps, the normalized violence — these things metastasize. They become the background condition of life, until what once shocked us becomes routine. Until children grow up thinking armed raids are normal. Until we stop flinching at the sight of our neighbors disappearing.

This is how democracies die — not in dramatic coups, but in the slow normalization of the unconscionable. In the gradual acceptance that some people simply don't deserve to be seen as fully human. In the quiet acquiescence to systems that profit from pain.

But here's what the architects of this system don't want us to understand: their power depends on our paralysis. On our inability to see the connections. On our willingness to accept their language, their framing, their insistence that this is all normal, necessary, inevitable.

It's not. None of this is inevitable. These are choices, made by people with names and addresses, funded by our tax dollars, carried out in our name. And what human beings have built, human beings can dismantle.

VII. Why I’m Writing This Now

This blog is an experiment. A weekly attempt to push back against the numbness that makes atrocity possible. To trace the connections between power and violence, between economic systems and human suffering, between the world as it is and as it could be.

I don't have all the answers. But I know that clarity matters. Naming things properly matters. Understanding the systems that shape our lives matters. Because you can't fight what you can't see, and you can't see what you refuse to name.

The means are clear: billions in funding, thousands of agents, a machinery of fear operating in broad daylight. But the meaning — what we make of this moment, how we respond to it, whether we allow it to define our future — that's still being written.

Every week, I'll be here, trying to make sense of the senseless. Trying to connect the dots between daily headlines and deeper structures. Trying to speak plainly about things designed to confuse us. Because in times like these, clarity is a form of resistance.

This isn't about having perfect politics or pure ideology. It's about refusing to look away. It's about remembering that every system of oppression has been defeated by people who insisted on calling it what it was. It's about believing that the world we have is not the world we're stuck with.

So this is where I start. With masked men and unmarked vans. With communities calling 911 to report kidnappings that turn out to be federal operations. With the simple insistence that what we call things matters — because it's the first step toward changing them.

The machine is moving fast. But we still have our voices. We still have each other. We still have the power to refuse their language and insist on the truth.

Let's use it.

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Until then, keep questioning, keep connecting, and keep believing that another world is possible.

~ Chris