Only five days after taking office, Donald Trump issued an executive order unleashing a nationwide crackdown on undocumented immigrants. Arrests leapt by nearly 40 percent, flooding detention centers with nonviolent offenders and tearing families apart. But the sprawling enforcement apparatus that Trump deployed was built by Barack Obama, who ramped up the border patrol and expelled a record three million immigrants, earning him the title “deporter in chief.” Like Trump, Obama began his crackdown just after his inauguration.

On a frigid January morning in 2009, 53 immigrants were frisked, handcuffed, and placed on a 737, ultimately bound for Juárez Mexico.



On a frigid January morning in his adopted hometown of Chicago, 53 immigrants bound for Juárez, Mexico, were frisked, handcuffed, and placed on a 737. “This is the life we have,” said Mario Barradas Rodriguez, a 34-year-old from Veracruz, Mexico, who was arrested for driving without a license. “Nobody here knows I’m leaving, and nobody there knows I’m coming.” The flights—known as ICE Air—deported millions who had lived and worked in the United States for years. “I remember seeing looks of fear and resignation on people’s faces,” says photographer Alex Garcia, who was at O’Hare International Airport that day. “Some had bravado, of course, but that was likely just to cope with the uncertainty of what was to come.”

Garcia was able to photograph the scene for a simple reason: The Obama administration strove to be open about deportations. “It’s our goal to be transparent,” an ICE official explained at the time. Under Trump, such scenes are rarely, if ever, photographed. The president may enjoy unleashing public tirades about Mexican “rapists,” but the work of arresting and deporting millions of immigrants now takes place largely in the shadows.