ICE rolled into Santa Fe last week, conducting “a spree of immigrant arrests,” seizing hardworking fathers and mothers at a healthcare clinic and elsewhere. We do not know how many people were arrested, but we assume that they are like the incarcerated men we meet when we visit Torrance County Detention Center (TCDC) as legal service volunteers. There, the vast majority of ICE prisoners we speak with are hardworking family men who have never been convicted of a crime.  

A majority of Americans disagree with federal government’s escalating cruelty toward immigrants. But many still believe that those detained by ICE are willfully undocumented due to laziness or unwillingness to “fill out the correct papers.” In fact, millions of hardworking immigrants have filled out paperwork—often paying a pretty penny to lawyers—yet they remain without full legal status protections. 

This is because immigrants seeking asylum or a pathway to citizenship are stuck between an antiquated system long in need of systematic reform, and a federal government that has made it increasingly difficult or impossible to navigate this legal pathway. In fact, a good number of people detained by ICE are partially papered. While they are not U.S. citizens, many of them have made good faith efforts at regularizing their legal status. 

Some of them have work authorization permits that the federal government has declared invalid. Others had passed asylum interviews but were awaiting a final court decision. Fewer than 10% of asylum applicants were approved in 2026, the lowest rate ever, and of those who were admitted, most were white South Africans. Unlike federal court judges or superior court judges, immigration judges who are authorized to make the final decision on asylum claims operate under the executive branch, where they are pressured by the Trump administration to deny asylee claims, leaving many to wonder, where is the justice in this process?  

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has stripped an estimated 1.5 million Haitians, Venezuelans and others of their Temporary Protected Status that had sheltered them from deportation. We meet many ICE prisoners who were apprehended while following the rules, doing what they were told to do, reporting to court to renew their temporary permits. Now they are languishing in horrid conditions at TCDF, thousands of miles away from their jobs and families in Maine, Miami, Chicago and elsewhere. The conditions are so bad that when Congresswoman Teresa Fernandez Leger visited for an inspection last week, she reported that ICE officials blocked her from speaking with detainees.

The last time the U.S. enacted comprehensive immigration reform was in 1965, with the Immigration and Nationality Act, which ended racist national origins quotas that had been on the books since the 1920s, replacing them with a preference system focused on family reunification and professional skills. Since there is a quota system, those who qualify for family reunification visas but come from a high immigration-origin country like Mexico, the Philippines, China, or India, may find themselves waiting for twenty years.

More than 80% of people living in the U.S. today were not even alive in 1965. That year, people listened to the hit song “Wooly Bully” by Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs on transistor radios. Personal computers and cell phones were non-existent. Technologies have changed in our globalized world, but our immigration laws remain static—and are now even harder to navigate.

While we join others in calling for a halt to ICE’s daily acts of violence, we must pressure Congress to get back into the job of legislating by law. Currently, there is no immigration reform legislation proposing new pathways to legal permanent residency and U.S. citizenship. In 1986 President Reagan signed a sweeping one-time amnesty-legalization law into effect, allowing 3 million people to regularize their status and get on track for U.S. citizenship. Repeating that would be a smart first step toward real immigration reform.