When a Nation Goes Cold
When justice freezes, empathy becomes an act of resistance. A meditation on cold laws, warm hearts, and the slow work of melting what we have built to keep love out.
“The soul is a river of compassion that freezes when we stop seeing ourselves in one another.” — Pádraig Ó Tuama
I. Just (ICE)
The glass is half full. The glass is half empty.
Most days, I’m not sure there is a glass on the table.
Lately life feels frosted over.
No warmth.
No welcome.
Just the hollow clink of ice on whatever vessel this is we’re calling a nation.
How did we get so cold?
Cold policies. Cold language.
Cold rooms where a mother signs a paper she cannot read
while her child learns the word detained before beloved.
Somewhere along the way we stopped offering water to the stranger
and started building freezers for their bodies.
And we told ourselves it was law.
We told ourselves it was safety.
We told ourselves it was necessary.
We said it was just. as in, fair.
We said it was ICE. as in, the rules.
We said it was just ICE. As in, not my problem.
Worst of all we said it was Justice.
as if that word hadn’t frozen on our tongue long before we spoke it.
II. The Freezer Door
This cold front didn’t slip in by accident. It was built. It was manufactured.
Sheet by sheet.
Policy by Policy.
Until the temperature dropped below human dignity.
below the threshold where skin goes numb and stories go quiet.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement system is the largest immigration detention network in the world, confining nearly 300,000 people each year (Harvard Law Review, 2025).
At any given moment tens of thousands are held in hundreds of facilities. One national study found more than 630 sites used by ICE in a single year, many privately operated and many far from any family support (American Immigration Council, 2025).
A 2025 JAMA Network Open study found:
49 percent reported poor or fair health.
37 percent had a diagnosed mental illness.
59 percent showed symptoms of PTSD (Saadi et al., 2025).
Statistics can only measure what people have already endured. But they cannot count the quiet tremor in a child’s chest when a door slams down the hall.
And the cold spreads outward.
In a study my colleague and I conducted, fear of deportation was linked with heightened distress, anxiety, depression, and substance use. Maybe this isn’t surprising, but let’s take note that the fear doesn’t stop at the border or the jail gate; it seeps into kitchens and classrooms. Families living in the shadow of deportation report strained parent-child communication, role reversals, and conflict born of constant vigilance. The impact is felt not only by undocumented individuals but also by U.S. citizens in mixed-status families, children who carry their parents’ fear like a second skin.
In fact, even people who supposedly have “nothing to worry about”—U.S. citizens, long-time residents, folks with every document in order—are lying awake at night, wondering if they might be mistaken for someone else. Profiled. Misread. Pulled into a system that doesn’t always bother to check the name it’s holding. Mistaken identity and wrongful detention are not rare. Investigations estimate that between 1 and 4 percent of detainees are U.S. citizens or lawful residents wrongly processed (Duke Law, 2022).
Stories from the Ice
In Alabama a U.S. citizen construction worker was wrongfully detained twice in workplace raids. He is now suing immigration authorities (PBS NewsHour, 2025).
More than 170 U.S. citizens have been held by immigration agents, many reporting being kicked, dragged, or jailed for days despite showing proof of citizenship (ProPublica via OPB, 2025).
Pregnant and postpartum women in ICE custody have been denied prenatal care, shackled during transport, and given inadequate food and medical attention despite official directives against such detention (ACLU, 2025).
These are not outliers. They are part of the architecture of frost.
We tell ourselves it is law. It is safety. It is justice.
But the record shows confusion, harm, and quiet devastation.
Justice delayed. Rights blurred. Lives frozen.
III. My Name, My Place, My Turn to Care
Let’s name the obvious: my last name is Gutierrez. I am a Latino. And like our Super Bowl halftime star Bad Bunny, I am Puerto Rican.
Being Puerto Rican means coming from the island that gave you Jennifer Lopez, parades so loud they shake loose your cynicism, and after Hurricane María, the unforgettable moment when we all learned FEMA apparently thinks “disaster relief” means throwing paper towels into the crowd like we’re at a junior high pep rally.
For those who do not know, Puerto Rico is part of the United States. It is also, depending on who you ask, still a colony. That longer conversation will come another day. The point is: I’m a Latino U.S. citizen. And yet, because of racial profiling and stereotyping, this story hits close to home. I get nervous. My body remembers things the law says I shouldn’t have to fear.
But why should that matter?
If we’re all waiting for harm to reach our own doorstep before we feel outraged, then we’ve already lost the plot.
If I wait for the knock, I’ve already failed.
The door is already iced over.
We must move past the cold.
So, how do we stop shrugging and saying, “It’s just politics”?
How do we stop pretending that anything outside our backyard isn’t our concern?
Because here’s what’s real: the mother in that detention room might be your neighbor’s sister. The man on that bus might be the one who trims your garden on weekends
.
Every face carries a story.
IV. The Revolution of Tenderness
When I think about those faces, I remember the mystics
not the ones floating in clouds,
but the ones with dirt under their nails
and a stubborn tenderness for the world.
I picture a child’s hand pressed to cold glass,
leaving a small print that softens into morning light.
I hear ice cracking off windshields outside an ICE detention center
a sound like something trying to break free.
And in that cracking, I hear Gustavo Gutiérrez,
who taught that theology begins not in heaven
but in the cry of the poor, and
that liberation is less an idea
and more a turning toward each other
until no one is left invisible.
Ernesto Cardenal called it the revolution of tenderness, where the holiness of God hides in the worn hands of a farmer or the small cell of a prisoner.
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz wrote that the search for truth is not the privilege of men or saints but of anyone who loves the world enough to listen.
Teresa of Ávila insisted that the divine has no body now but ours, no hands but ours, no eyes but ours to see the suffering.
Poet Ada Limón reminds us that joy is not the absence of pain but the muscle that keeps working anyway.
What I hear them all saying is that:
Every face in that detention center is the face of God.
Every person on that bus is God in disguise,
Every one of them carrying a fragment of liberation meant for all of us.
Liberation is not the victory of one group over another.
It is the thaw, the slow melting work that begins in our own hands.
It is justice refilled with water.
If I wait until it reaches my door I have already failed.
The call is not to be safe. The call is to be human.
V. How to Melt the Ice
Some call empathy a liability.
Power often labels compassion as weakness.
And lately we’ve had commentators talking as if tenderness were the soft spot where all the trouble leaks in.
But look around. In this particular storm, tenderness might be the least demonic thing happening.
The world does not freeze by accident. It freezes by habit, by the quiet shrug of “that’s just how it is.” So the question is not how to build stronger walls. The question is how to melt.
How do we stand with the marginalized until, as Father Greg Boyle says, “the margins disappear”?
How do we let go of the idea that cruelty is inevitable, that bureaucracy absolves the soul?
If you believe this is just the way things are,
then fine.
Let it be.
But do not look away.
Don’t you dare look away.
Look at every face.
Every person beaten, wronged, detained, dismissed.
See your mother there.
See your brother,
your child,
your lover,
your God.
Hold that image until the frost begins to tremble.
Because it is not just them.
It is not just ICE.
It is not justice.
It is you, and me, and God.
And the melting begins exactly there
where our eyes stay open,
and our palms thaw the world inch by inch.
Notes
American Civil Liberties Union. (2025, October). Pregnant and postpartum women face neglect and abuse in ICE detention. https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/pregnant-and-postpartum-women-face-neglect-and-abuse-in-ice-detention
American Immigration Council. (2025). The landscape of immigration detention in the United States. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/the_landscape_of_immigration_detention_in_the_united_states.pdf
Boyle, G. F. (2010). Tattoos on the heart: The power of boundless compassion. Free Press.
EMP Law Firm. (2025, October). Can a U.S. citizen be detained by ICE? https://emplawfirm.com/can-a-us-citizen-be-detained-by-ice/
Gutiérrez, D., & Silverio, N. (2025). Fear of deportation and Latine mental health: A rapid review of recent literature [Manuscript under review].
Gutiérrez, G. (1973). A theology of liberation: History, politics, and salvation (C. Inda & J. Eagleson, Trans.). Orbis Books. (Original work published 1971)
Harvard Law Review. (2025). The law and lawlessness of U.S. immigration detention. https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-138/the-law-and-lawlessness-of-u-s-immigration-detention
Limón, A. (2022). The hurting kind. Milkweed Editions.
OPB / ProPublica. (2025, October). More than 170 U.S. citizens held by ICE. https://www.opb.org/article/2025/10/16/immigration-ice-arrests-propublica-white-house-deportation-immigrants-sweep/
PBS NewsHour. (2025, October 1). U.S. citizen wrongfully detained twice in Alabama workplace raids sues immigration authorities. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/u-s-citizen-wrongfully-detained-twice-in-alabama-workplace-raids-sues-immigration-authorities
Saadi, A., et al. (2025). Duration in immigration detention and health harms. JAMA Network Open. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2829506
The Guardian. (2025, September). Immigrants with no criminal record now largest group in ICE detention. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/26/immigrants-criminal-record-ice-detention
Yale Law School. (2025, January 17). Students document reports of abuse at immigration detention center. https://law.yale.edu/yls-today/news/students-document-reports-abuse-immigration-detention-center