Listen, America: We, the Immigrant Population, Have Paid Our Dues. (The ICE Factor)
I am but a voice in the wind. I’m not even sure more than a handful of people read these notes I leave behind, but I write them anyway—because silence is the easier lie. I am a Caribbean-born American citizen, arrived here in 1973. I have been the government worker and the government contractor. I have paid the taxes, done the overtime, watched the flags rise and the budgets fall. I am also the family of immigrants who helped build this economy with our hands and our hope.
In my own bloodline runs the proof of what America claims to be. My sister and her husband once faced the Virginia laws that barred their son from a private school because he was Black—because literally, Blacks were not allowed to integrate. Their story—told here in this short film—is not just family history; it is a measure of the struggle that forced open the classroom doors of the 1970s.
And so, I cannot reconcile the politics that now pass for patriotism—the sound of a nation arguing over who deserves air while the house itself burns. The shutdown isn’t just a headline; it’s a ledger. Federal workers count down to rent due, prescriptions to refill, kids to feed, while Congress debates which programs deserve the first oxygen mask. Somehow, detention gets it.
“Enforcement is nonnegotiable. Care is conditional.”— Grace Notes
The Money That Never Stops
When the cameras pan to the Capitol, the story is told in votes and sound bites. But somewhere off-screen, the money still moves. Two names—The GEO Group and CoreCivic—don’t trend on social media, but they keep the lights on when everything else stops. They are the private corporations that own and run many of America’s immigration detention centers. Every new policy that expands enforcement, every budget that funds “border security,” runs through their balance sheets.
Their business model is brutally simple: beds. Each bed represents a contract—often with a guaranteed minimum payment. That means they get paid whether the bunks are full or empty. Millions of public dollars flow for unused space, a quiet subsidy buried in federal ledgers. The scaffold for this system was set by the 1996 immigration laws, later reinforced by Congress’s so-called “bed mandate” that ties funding to daily capacity.
The Architecture of Detention
ICE signs “intergovernmental agreements” with local counties or cities—agreements that can bypass the slow, transparent bidding expected of other federal contracts. A small town or sheriff’s department signs the paperwork, then a private operator runs the facility. The county collects a fee; the company collects the rest. Under those same agreements, ICE guarantees a set number of beds—paying even if no one sleeps there. Investors call it “stable revenue.” The rest of us might call it injustice with a spreadsheet.
When a shutdown comes, this machinery keeps running. ICE and the Department of Homeland Security are deemed “essential.” Detention centers stay staffed. Removal flights still depart. The people cleaning those facilities, guarding those fences, transporting those souls—all still report to work, because the contracts demand continuity. Meanwhile, clerks, engineers, scientists, and maintenance crews across government are sent home without pay. The imbalance is stark: the system that detains remains funded, while the systems that heal, feed, and educate are paused.
Who Gets Saved First
This moment reveals what America chooses to protect. Congress races to carve out stopgap funds for the Pentagon and ICE, while health care subsidies and child nutrition wait at the back of the line. We’re told the border cannot wait. But insulin can. Rent can. Paychecks can.
- Enforcement is nonnegotiable.
- Care is conditional.
The Cost We Pretend Not to See
For immigrant families—many from the Caribbean, Central America, and Africa—the price is not just political; it’s human. Detention doesn’t only cage the body; it fractures the family. It interrupts education, erases savings, and leaves children staring at doors that never open again. Meanwhile, corporations report “strong federal partnerships,” stockholders get reassurance, and workers get IOUs.
We’re told this is about safety. But safety for whom? For the contractors who never miss a payment? For the lawmakers who can fund walls faster than they fund meals? For a system that counts detainees as “occupancy rates” and employees as “furloughs”?
The Reckoning We Owe Ourselves
I look at this nation—still rich in resources, ingenuity, and moral vocabulary—and I wonder how we became so fluent in punishment, yet so forgetful of compassion. We have normalized shutdowns the way we have normalized detention: as if they are weather patterns and not human choices. Programs that once lifted families from hunger or homelessness are now bargaining chips. The same leaders who say “we can’t afford” health care find billions to expand detention contracts.
Count people first, not beds.
A Closing Reflection
My sister—who worked as a maid, around 1967, under a labor exchange program between the US and Caribbean Islands, though the more coiffed term was HomeCare Provider—served an Army General and helped start our family’s Caribbean American journey. In the video on school desegregation, you see how law was finally forced to bend toward justice, and how she and her husband became the very backs upon which our family legacy was built.
Now, in their eighties and nineties, if their health care or long-term support could be stripped away by government defunding, we cannot turn a blind eye. This administration has poked the bear for many families of immigrant roots—like the South African caregiver and her twelve-year-old child who simply vanished, possibly now inside a detention facility, awaiting due process under the same banner of enforcement.
While daily news feeds dramatize ICE raids for clicks and spectacle, the real stories unfold quietly—among those on government payrolls, in families juggling mortgages and medicine, in the emotional and mental shutdown that comes from feeling unseen.
It may just be a voice—mine—but even the silent ones are begging loudly for the Real America to show up, and stand down.
Watch the related short film
Prefer a direct link? Watch on YouTube: https://youtu.be/XTxCTmNKPx0?si=RZ-HepV_UZmCwUkT
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