One body, many fears: US immigration enforcement turns problem of scale into personal violence

Imagine being pulled over on the way to daycare while your child sits strapped into a car seat behind you. You are second in line for drop-off. Masked men approach the car and order you to open the door. You ask for time: “Wait for three minutes… there is a baby in the car.” Instead, a masked officer breaks the driver’s-side window. “I am getting out!” you shout. The reply comes back cold and immediate: “Well, you should have done it already.”

This is not a hypothetical scene. It is a real arrest captured on video in Oregon, where immigration agents detained a 38-year-old foreign-born chiropractor, married to a US citizen, outside Guidepost Montessori in Beaverton.

This is not a cartel takedown. It is not the arrest of a violent fugitive. The accusation, in this case and many others like it, is administrative: existing in the United States without the correct documentation.

This opening image matters because it forces a question we tend to avoid to the fore. What, exactly, is this person being accused of doing? Not what they symbolise, not what frustration they absorb, but what they themselves have done.

Strip away the rhetoric and the answer is straightforward. They crossed a border without authorisation. They overstayed a visa. They lost legal status in a system designed to be slow, punitive, and opaque. The next question should be unavoidable: does that act, by itself, justify this level of force?

If the answer is no, then something else is at work. And in the United States of America today, it is.

What we are witnessing is not punishment calibrated to individual behaviour, but violence justified by magnitude. A problem framed as tens of millions of people is enforced, one body at a time. The emotional and political weight of a national failure is placed onto whichever individual happens to be in front of federal agents that day.

That is how breaking a car window starts to feel reasonable. That is how the ambush of a delivery driver or the arrest of a parent on the way to school becomes defensible in the public imagination. The individual is no longer a person – they become a proxy for “the problem.” Once that substitution is made, proportionality disappears.

The logic becomes clearer when enforcement escalates. When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations intensified in Minnesota recently, the consequences were immediate and severe. A woman, Renee Nicole Good, was shot and killed during an ICE operation in Minneapolis. Days later, another man was shot during a confrontation tied to immigration enforcement. Protests followed. Lawsuits were filed by state and city governments. Reactions hardened on both sides.

Supporters framed these actions as necessary responses to a crisis. Critics saw them as evidence that once the machinery of the state is unleashed at scale, it does not calibrate well. Both sides, however, were responding to the same underlying move: treating individuals as stand-ins for a much larger threat.

But even this framing misses something essential. The cost of enforcement does not end with the arrest, the viral clip, or the broken glass – those images circulate because they are dramatic. What follows is quieter, longer-lasting, and far more destructive.

Children lose classmates and friends overnight. Families are split across borders. Small businesses close. Rent goes unpaid. Neighbourhoods hollow out. People who have lived in the same place for 10 or 15 years vanish from their communities.

For many children, deportation means being sent to a country they have never lived in. Sometimes they do not speak the language fluently. Sometimes they have no real family network waiting for them. The punishment radiates outward, landing on people who committed no violation at all. If this is enforcement, it is enforcement with collateral damage built in.

At this point, the rhetorical exercise becomes unavoidable. If lacking a document does not justify masked men, shattered windows, and public extraction in front of children, then what would? What crime would make that response feel proportionate? Armed robbery? Kidnapping? Violent assault?

Once you answer that question honestly, compare it again to the actual accusation being made in these cases. The gap is impossible to ignore.

Supporters of these tactics often retreat to numbers. “Millions.” Overwhelming flows. National emergencies. But numbers do not commit acts; people do. And the person whose life is being torn apart is not one of “millions” – they are one human being.

Treating that person as the embodiment of a massive systemic failure is not law enforcement. It is moral outsourcing. It allows society to displace unresolved political failures onto the most visible and least protected individuals.

This is not an argument for open borders, nor a denial that immigration policy matters. It is an argument about proportionality, responsibility, and honesty. If the problem is structural, the solution must be structural. 

Using violence against individuals to symbolically address a problem of scale does not solve that problem. It hardens the public to cruelty and trains us to confuse force with control.

So the question remains, and it should linger uncomfortably with anyone watching these scenes and nodding along: Are we responding to an individual act? Or discharging our collective failure onto the nearest available body?