Private detention companies’ contracts with ICE stipulate that they uphold a set of rigorous standards, but they of course seek to tamp down costs, which means that they may skimp on basic care for detainees. Take the CoreCivic facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey, which a group of lawyers and health professionals assembled by Human Rights First toured last year. What they discovered on their visits were reports of maggots in the showers and raw food served in the cafeteria, not to mention drinking water described as “pure bleach.” Several detainees said they avoid asking for dental care because the dentist at the facility only performs extractions, even when a filling would do. Mental-health treatment commonly includes “bibliotherapy”—the assignment of self-help books—despite the obvious fact that prolonged detention can bring stress and depression. CoreCivic maintains that Human Rights First’s report contained “numerous false and misleading allegations.” But these aren’t merely the stray observations of an activist group. In December, John V. Kelly, the acting inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, issued a comprehensive report based on a series of surprise visits to detention facilities. His findings read: “We identified problems that undermine the protection of detainees’ rights, their humane treatment, and the provision of a safe and healthy environment.”

Like many bureaucracies, ICE strains for growth. When the agency was created, it employed just over 2,700 deportation officers, roughly the same number of employees as the San Diego police department. That workforce has since doubled, and the organization’s ambitions have ballooned. Beyond its own budget and its network of private contractors, ICE has availed itself of a provision in an immigration law signed by Bill Clinton in 1996. That provision empowered the federal government to partner with state and local police. In effect, this means ICE can deputize police to enforce federal immigration laws. Not every jurisdiction has wanted to align itself with ICE—indeed, most major cities have strenuously resisted, especially in the Trump era. But plenty of local police forces, many of them in suburban counties, have gladly taken up ICE’s offer to collaborate.

Gwinnett County, in northern Georgia, once epitomized the old rural South, sparsely populated and largely white. But over the past few decades, its population has exploded in both size and racial diversity. Demographers say the county’s white majority is on track to be displaced by 2040. When Trump signed an executive order allowing ICE to detain essentially any undocumented immigrants it encounters, the Gwinnett County police responded enthusiastically. The number of undocumented immigrants transferred to ICE from local jails jumped by 248 percent during the first four months of Trump’s presidency, relative to the prior year. Gwinnett police weren’t rounding up dangerous gang members: When the Migration Policy Institute studied the new pattern of enforcement, it found that police were primarily arresting immigrants for traffic violations before handing them over to ICE.

The early Trump era has witnessed wave after wave of seismic policy making related to immigration—the Muslim ban initially undertaken in his very first week in office, the rescission of daca, the separation of families at the border. Amid the frantic attention these shifts have generated, it’s easy to lose track of the smaller changes that have been taking place. But with them, the administration has devised a scheme intended to unnerve undocumented immigrants by creating an overall tone of inhospitality and menace.

Where immigration is concerned, Trump has installed a group of committed ideologues with a deep understanding of the extensive law-enforcement machinery they now control. One especially skilled participant is L. Francis Cissna, the head of the Office of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Cissna is a longtime bureaucrat at the Department of Homeland Security who styled himself a dissident during the Obama years. In 2015, he temporarily left the department to work “on detail” for Republican Senator Chuck Grassley. An MIT graduate and the son of a Peruvian immigrant, Cissna began his career as a Foreign Service officer in Haiti and then Sweden. Over time, he became a policy savant; even his ideological opponents confess that he is more fluent in the immigration system’s intricacies than they are.

From his perch in the Trump administration, Cissna has repeatedly broadcast the agency’s new attitude toward immigration. In February, he rewrote its mission statement, erasing a phrase that described the United States as a “nation of immigrants.” He explained the change by stating that he wanted to emphasize the “commitment we have to the American people”—as if there were intellectual tension between the two sentiments. Then, in June, he announced the opening of an office that would review the files of naturalized citizens, reexamining fingerprints and hunting for hints of fraud that might enable the revocation of citizenship.

Cissna is part of a close-knit coterie of former Capitol Hill staffers whom Trump has placed in charge of the immigration system. Before Trump took office, the group clustered in the offices of the conservative politicians most committed to restrictive immigration policy, especially Senators Grassley and Sessions. Even in a time when GOP policy on immigration had swung far to the right, these staffers—Stephen Miller, now a White House senior adviser, is the most famous of the bunch—existed far outside the party’s mainstream. According to former colleagues, the offices of senators such as John McCain and Marco Rubio would lose patience with them because of their eagerness to detonate any viable version of immigration reform. “They are a little cabal,” one Republican staffer who dealt closely with them told me. They specialized in churning out missives to DHS that requested information about individual immigrants so detailed, they sometimes seemed intent purely on overwhelming the system. One letter signed by Grassley, Sessions, and their Senate colleague Michael Lee asked DHS to respond “in precise detail” to queries about 250,000 immigrants.

Aside from Miller, perhaps the most important architect of Trump’s immigration policy is another young Sessions acolyte, Gene Hamilton. In 2008, while he was a law student at Washington and Lee University, Hamilton took an internship at an ICE detention facility in Miami. In 2012, he scored a job as an ICE lawyer in the Atlanta field office. (Back then, Atlanta was known as one of the most aggressive cities when it came to immigration enforcement: The court there granted asylum to just 2 percent of the seekers whose cases it heard. The national average is about 50 percent.)

At the beginning of the Trump presidency, Hamilton joined DHS as a senior counselor to then-Secretary John Kelly. Last year, he left DHS to serve as a top adviser to Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The logic of the job switch was made apparent to me by one former ICE official, who described Sessions as the “de facto secretary of homeland security,” given his comprehensive influence over immigration policy. Together, Sessions and Hamilton have instituted a highly insular, fast-moving enforcement operation.

The work undertaken by Sessions, Hamilton, Miller, and their ilk is based to some degree on a theory first developed by Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state. Over the past year, Kobach has emerged as a prime bête noire of the left because of his ferocious, ultimately doomed attempts to stamp out a phantom epidemic of voter fraud. But for many years, he served as a lawyer for an offshoot of the Federation for American Immigration Reform—the loudest and most effective of the groups pressing for restrictive immigration laws. In that position, he helped write many of the most draconian pieces of state-level immigration legislation to wend their way into law, including Arizona’s S.B. 1070.

Kobach set out to remake immigration law to conform to a doctrine he called self-deportation or, more clinically, attrition through enforcement—a policy that experienced a vogue in 2012, when Mitt Romney, campaigning for president, briefly claimed the position as his own. The doctrine holds that the government doesn’t have the resources to round up and remove the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the nation, but it can create circumstances unpleasant enough to encourage them to exit on their own. As Kobach once wrote, “Illegal aliens are rational decision makers. If the risks of detention or involuntary removal go up, and the probability of being able to obtain unauthorized employment goes down, then at some point, the only rational decision is to return home.” Through deprivation and fear, the government can essentially drive undocumented immigrants out of the country.

Once you understand that self-deportation is the administration’s guiding theory, you can see why immigration hawks might take satisfaction in supposed policy defeats. Even if putative fiascoes such as the initial Muslim ban and family separations at the border fail in court or are ultimately reversed, they succeed in fomenting an atmosphere of fear and worry among immigrants. The theatrics are, in effect, the policy.

The Trump administration made explicit its policy that every undocumented immigrant is unsafe with the executive order that Trump signed during his first month as president, repealing Obama’s policy of prioritizing the deportation of immigrants who had committed serious crimes. As Thomas Homan testified before Congress last year, “If you’re in this country illegally and you committed a crime by entering this country, you should be uncomfortable … You should look over your shoulder, and you need to be worried.”

The administration has attempted to encode the spirit of that warning across the spectrum of immigration enforcement. For years, such enforcement has abided by a policy intended to give undocumented immigrants a sense of safety in “sensitive locations.” ICE has, for instance, refrained from apprehending immigrants at schools, places of worship, and hospitals. The theory is that even if an immigrant might be at risk for deportation, she shouldn’t think twice about, say, visiting a doctor. But anecdotal evidence suggests that ICE has been operating more often in the vicinity of sensitive locations: Agents arrested a father after he dropped off his daughter at school, and detained a group soon after it left a church shelter. ICE has also attempted to undermine so-called sanctuary cities, which decline to hand over undocumented immigrants whom their police happen to arrest. ICE has loudly trumpeted its escalation of raids in those cities, sending the message that any notion of sanctuary is pure illusion.

To date, there is little evidence that self-deportation is occurring in any meaningful numbers. Ample data, however, show that increased fear has caused immigrant families to alter their life routines. One study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that undocumented immigrants tried to limit their driving in order to lower the chance of an inadvertent interaction with the police. Many immigrant parents now keep their kids indoors as much as they can. One woman told Kaiser she noticed that once-vibrant playgrounds in her neighborhood were suddenly vacant.

Likewise, police departments around the country have noted a sharp decrease among Latinos reporting domestic violence and abuse. (In Los Angeles, for instance, reports by Latinos of sexual assault dropped by 25 percent in the first four months of 2017 compared with the same period in 2016.) Women would apparently rather tolerate battery than expose their partner to the risk of deportation—or risk deportation themselves. According to the Houston Chronicle, waiting rooms at many health clinics serving undocumented immigrants in South Texas are half as full now as they were before Trump took office. And schools in suburban Atlanta report that immigrant parents are reluctant to sign their kids up for reduced-price lunch programs.

Researchers from UCLA interviewed teachers and counselors at schools across 12 states to gauge the impact of zero-tolerance immigration policies in the classroom. They found that children of undocumented immigrants consistently expressed fear at the prospect of returning home from school only to find their parents and siblings gone. An art teacher reported that “many students drew and colored images of their parents and themselves being separated, or about people stalking/hunting their family.”

Fears of ICE can be exaggerated by word of mouth or compounded by hyperbolic news reports, especially in the Spanish-language media. But the activists who interact most frequently with ICE, who pay daily visits to detention centers and immigration courts, share immigrants’ sense of trepidation. This spring, an immigration lawyer from Santa Fe named Allegra Love went to Mexico to visit a caravan of Central Americans headed to the California border. By the time she arrived, the procession, organized by the activist group Pueblo Sin Fronteras, or “People Without Borders,” had swollen to hundreds of asylum seekers and attracted the attention of the media, especially Fox News. President Trump described the caravan as a “disgrace.” Although Love has made a career of advocating on behalf of immigrants, she had come to Mexico with an explicit message of discouragement. “I wanted to keep these people safe and needed to explain to them how willing our government is to make them suffer,” she told me. She conducted a workshop in a makeshift refugee camp in the city of Puebla. As hundreds of migrants gathered, she addressed them with a microphone: “The system has become so appalling. You need to be afraid. You need to take that into account.” For the first time in her life, she was actively attempting to deter people from seeking refuge in the United States. This is the terrible irony of Trump’s policy: It turns even devoted activists into unwitting servants of its goals.

Donald Trump talks a lot about the crisis at the border. But over the past generation, the U.S. has spent tens of billions of dollars sealing the frontier with Mexico. It has invested vast sums in surveillance, fencing, drones, agents. A generation ago, politicians bemoaned the influx of Mexicans into the country. Ten years ago, Mark Krikorian, one of the most prominent conservative theorists on the subject, wrote a highly touted book warning about Mexican plans for a reconquista: Through mass migration, he argued, Mexico would attempt to erode American sovereignty and exert influence over the United States. Yet just as he promulgated that argument, the problem he diagnosed was disappearing. The nation’s rigid security has made casually traversing the border much harder. In recent years, there has often been more migration to Mexico than from Mexico. The Pew Research Center has estimated that there were 1.3 million fewer undocumented Mexican immigrants in the United States in 2016 than in 2007. Even with the recent surge of Central Americans fleeing violence in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, illegal border crossings are a fraction of what they were in the 1980s and ’90s. In 2000, the U.S. apprehended 1.7 million people crossing the southwest border; last year, it nabbed just over 300,000. Contrary to widespread belief—and the president’s frequent complaints—very few borders have the dense, protective security layers present on America’s border with Mexico.

But even as the nation solves one problem, politicians and bureaucracies concoct new ones. Border Patrol has started aggressively taking advantage of an old regulation, long ignored, that permits an expansive definition of border, encompassing all terrain within 100 miles of the physical frontier. It has leveraged this flexible interpretation to set up checkpoints along I-95 in Maine and to board buses in Florida to ask passengers about their immigration status. Border Patrol has become a regular presence in cities such as Las Vegas and San Antonio—and its officers can be seen cruising highways in northern Ohio.

A similar mission creep afflicts ICE. It’s hard to argue with the need for a bureau that can deport criminals who reside in the country illegally. But there are only so many of them. Study after study has shown that immigrants commit crimes at much lower rates than the native-born population. ICE simply doesn’t have enough criminal targets to justify its enormous budget. That’s why, when Obama provided ICE with strict priorities, its number of detentions quickly plummeted.

“Abolish ICE” is a slogan, now fashionable among Democrats, that has a radical edge. Prudent policy, however, requires not smashing the system, but returning it to a not-so-distant past. Only five years ago, the political center deemed the legalization of the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants a sensible element of a broad compromise. Only 15 years ago, before the birth of ICE, America had a bureaucracy that didn’t treat them as a policing problem. Immigration enforcement was housed in an agency devoted to both deportation and naturalization. There’s no reason to wax nostalgic for INS, which had plenty of problems of its own. But the U.S. can now borrow from its positive example and design an institutional structure that restores a sense of proportion to the limited dangers posed by the immigrants embedded in American communities.

Lacking a large number of worthy targets, ICE will train more of its attention on the likes of Jack, an undocumented immigrant from Mauritania whom I met this spring. (Jack is not his real name, but he does go by an Americanized nickname.) As Jack drove me around Columbus in his aging but meticulously maintained sedan, I came to think of him as an evangelist. With his round face, shaved pate, and impressive mustache, he exuded an optimism so cheery that it can only be described as faithful. I found myself disappearing into his homilies, as he set out to convert me to his version of the American dream.

As we meandered past Refugee Road toward his neighborhood, he wanted me to know that he had had the vision to buy a model home at a good price long before the developer had filled out his street. When we arrived at his place, he asked me to gaze out upon his little village of cookie-cutter houses and winding asphalt. The morning’s drizzle had turned to mist, and Jack closed his eyes and theatrically inhaled, an expression of self-satisfaction like one might see in a TV commercial.

He took me inside through his garage, past a shelving unit filled with four tiers of sneakers. Jack, a farmer’s son, takes huge—and very American—pleasure in abundance. Nearly every room in his house seemed to have a television set tuned to CNN. I saw pictures of his young son—born in Columbus, and a U.S. citizen—as well as an image of the former Ohio State University football coach Jim Tressel, whom Jack once met at a parade. I followed him to his basement, which he is in the early phases of transforming into a shrine to the team. The walls will be painted in the school’s colors, scarlet and gray. “It will be my man cave,” he told me.

Jack then led me up to his office, which has his favorite view in the house. It looks down on his deck and grill, across a grassy expanse of yard. Jack, who is in his mid-40s but looks older, is a professional mover. He works for a big company that specializes in long-distance relocations. At the beginning of the Trump administration, Jack even packed up the home of a soon-to-be senior Cabinet member and hauled his belongings to Washington. On the shelf opposite his desk, he keeps the awards he’s collected from his company for the excellence of his work.

“I refuse to give all this up,” he said. An officer at ICE, whom he considers especially kind, has told him that it’s only a matter of time before he is detained and deported. But Jack, ever the American optimist, believes there’s no problem that can’t be solved. “I will tell them that I know I did the wrong thing. I came here without papers. But look at me. I’ve never broken a law. Fine, deport the guys who have committed a crime. I will say, ‘Look. It’s me, Jack.’ I will joke with them and let them know I’m not a threat. When I talk to them reasonably, they will relax.” Even with the threat of deportation hanging over him, he has disciplined himself to keep on believing. A few days earlier, he had bought a truck to start his own hauling company. “I want to employ people, to give them opportunities like I had.”

As we went through his office, he became wistful. He opened his closet and showed me the suit he had worn on his flight to America as a young man, almost 20 years ago. He had me run my hands along its frayed lapel. Then he grabbed a leather-bound notebook sitting on his printer and opened it. “Here are things that my girlfriend will need to know.” He had written instructions on how to access his bank accounts, open his safe, sell his house, reach his son. As he showed this to me, he finally broke from his customarily cheery character and said nothing. He closed the book and traced the cover with his finger one last time. Then he looked at me and said, “When the day comes.”