This Is Where People Disappear

A visit to ICE in eastern Iowa.

This is ICE office in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It’s a 22 mile straight shot north of my house, the directions so simple I didn’t even bother with GPS. Exit 17 off I-380 takes you through a neighborhood of motels, fast food joints and gas stations to a street lined with warehouses, janitorial services, a landscaping business, some empty lots, and this nondescript brick building tucked back from the street next door to an Elks Lodge.

Protestors outside the ICE office in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Across the street is a Goodyear Tire shop. Next door is an Elks Lodge.

There’s no sign from the road. On Google Maps it shows up as “Homeland Security Investigations.” On Apple Maps the building isn’t labeled at all. According to their website, this is the St. Paul Field Office, and it covers 32 counties in eastern Iowa, about a third of the state by area.

This morning a crowd organized by the Iowa City Catholic Worker and Escucha Mi Voz gathered there to protest the deportation of a young man named Pascual Pedro Pedro. Shortly before the crowd gathered this morning, a young man went in for his ICE checkin where, we were told, he was giving a choice: get arrested now or sign these papers swearing you will self-deport in the next 30 days. He chose the latter.

Last week Pascual showed up for his checkin but was not offered that choice. He was arrested and transferred first to the Muscatine jail, then to a detention facility in Louisana, and then deported back to Guatemala.

By now stories of ICE raids and deportations flood my inbox and my social media and the news every day, probably yours, too. Often they are dramatic—footage of ICE agents, dressed like common thugs, raiding workplaces or seizing people as they walk down the street. Often these actions take place in big cities, places far away from the supposedly all-white red state I occupy in flyover country.

But we aren’t all white in Iowa: like everywhere in the U.S., we are place built by immigrants, with each successive wave bringing new skills, new foods, new cultures, new contributions. You can get German and Czech food where I live but also Vietnamese. You can meet people from Sudan and Guatemala and China. Now our government wants to deport some of those people, and we do so in the most banal of all possible ways. A routine checkin at a nondescript government building with a paper sign taped to the window. A place you enter and may never exit the same.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement St. Paul Field Office, Cedar Rapids, IA

According to ICE’s website, they have more that 400 offices around the country and the world—many of them I imagine, offices much like this one, although my admittedly cursory searches have failed to turn up much information. If you’d like to try to figure out where and how you might schedule a checkin appointment with your local ICE office via their website, I invite you to do so (particularly if you’ve never had the unique pleasure of navigating a government services website before).

People talk a lot about the banality of evil. I haven’t read Hannah Arendt, so I won’t do that, except to say that I wonder if this is part of what it means. A squat brown brick building, unmarked on some maps. A place you’d miss if you blinked on your way to your residence inn or to an electrical or plumbing supply warehouse, or perhaps to yoru job at the Area Education Agency. A place that says Homeland Security on a sign with a blank white circle, no seal. A hole in the world where you enter to face a fate you cannot know. A place where people disappear.

Bring them home.