There have been 404 cases in the last three years. In 2018, ICE took custody of and deported 125 Italians; this figure increased to 139 in 2019 and 140 the following year. There are no official figures for the most recent period, but two names have emerged: Fernando Eduardo Artese and Gaetano Cateno Mirabella Costa.
They were arrested by ICE-ERO in 2025 and taken to Alligator Alcatraz, a deportation centre surrounded by crocodiles and created by Trump in Florida. Artese had simply allowed his driving licence to expire. Most of the offences charged by ICE concern traffic violations.
“I don’t know anything about it, but if the President of the United States is guaranteeing the security of the US, then he is doing his job. So I am surprised by the surprise,” said Salvini when asked about the Italians in detention.
Managing anti-migrant propaganda from the other side of the fence is not easy. Like many good citizens, the comment by the League politician is linked to the concept of illegal immigrants. According to the ideology of the League and the extreme right, every state would have the right to deport them.
But who are these people? According to the official ICE report, approximately 40,000 people were initially detained for traffic violations, such as drink-driving and other traffic offences, in 2020. This is by far the largest group. Only 369 were arrested for murder.
By January 2026, over 40% of detainees had no criminal convictions or ongoing legal proceedings (compared to 6% in January 2025).
The vast majority of those deported have not committed any crimes, only traffic violations.
In other words, most people end up in appalling detention centres such as Alligator Alcatraz without having committed a crime, or having committed only a minor offence — often a traffic violation. They are then immediately tried and detained. If any irregularities are found in their documentation, they are deported. This reality is very different from that of the ‘criminal aliens’ Trump talks about.
La migra
For Latinos, it’s the ‘Migra’. The 2009 film Machete, a Tarantino-style splatter film, already addressed the issue. It was all there: There was the gratuitous violence of border guards who shoot a pregnant woman and say, ‘Welcome to America’. There’s also the corrupt senator who wants to profit from fear of immigration to win votes and hide his trafficking activities. There are also border patrol agents who admit that the law and what is right are not necessarily the same thing.
People living on the borders of Texas and California have long experienced the brutality of the Migra. In the US, it is known as ICE and has become notorious since Donald Trump strengthened it. In fact, the number of people detained increased by 65% in 2025. But even at its inception, it was deporting thousands of Latin Americans.
Established in the aftermath of 9/11, the federal agency has become one of the most controversial symbols of American politics. March 2003 saw the birth of one of the many creations of the war on terror. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) opened its doors as part of the largest government reorganisation since the 1940s, mandated by the Homeland Security Act signed by George W. Bush. The goal was clear: to protect America from transnational threats by combining the investigative functions of the United States Customs Service and the enforcement powers of the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS) under one umbrella.
With over 20,000 employees and an annual budget of around £8 billion, ICE presented itself as the most sophisticated weapon in the Department of Homeland Security’s arsenal. Its dual structure — Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) for transnational crimes and Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) for detentions and deportations — gave ICE unprecedented power, providing it with a unique combination of civil and criminal authority to target anyone threatening national security.
Deporter in chief
However, history took a different turn. During the Obama administration, the agency achieved a record number of deportations — over 400,000 in 2012 — earning the president the ironic label of ‘deporter-in-chief’. Critics denounced the separation of families, the deportation of ‘Dreamers’, and a bureaucratic machine that seemed more interested in statistics than justice.
Currently, the Obama administration holds the record for deportations
Then Trump came along. His rhetoric about ‘the worst of the worst’ turned ICE into a political entity. Internal DHS data obtained by CBS News reveals an uncomfortable truth: fewer than 14% of the almost 400,000 arrests made during Trump’s second year in office were for violent crimes. According to the Cato Institute, 73% of ICE detainees have no criminal convictions and only 5% have been convicted of violent crimes. These figures contradict the official narrative.
Today, ICE detains more than 70,000 people, the majority of whom are held in private and lucrative facilities in Texas. Tactics such as workplace raids, night-time deportations and the use of masks and unmarked cars — reminiscent of the secret police rather than law enforcement — have sparked nationwide protests calling for the agency’s abolition.
