Welcome to the inevitable endgame of the American experiment, where we’ve finally succeeded in creating a bureaucracy so magnificent in its stupidity that it can no longer distinguish between its 'protected' cattle and the 'invading' wolves. The recent news of a U.S. citizen being ensnared in the grinding gears of ICE—Immigration and Customs Enforcement, for those who prefer their authoritarianism spelled out—is not a tragedy. It is the logical conclusion of a society that traded its soul for a sense of security and received neither. For years, the comfortable American middle class has cheered on, or at least ignored, the construction of a panopticon designed to keep 'the other' at bay. They sat by as the border became a conceptual nightmare that could manifest anywhere, from a bus station in Maine to a traffic stop in Arizona. Now, they act shocked when the machine, lacking the basic cognitive function to read a birth certificate, decides to sample the local harvest.

Let’s look at the agency in question. ICE is a charming post-9/11 relic born from the collective fever dream of a terrified nation. It is an organization with the IQ of a wet brick and the empathy of an industrial wood chipper. Its mission is to uphold the sanctity of imaginary lines using the precision of a sledgehammer. To ICE, a human being is merely a data point that occasionally makes annoying noises about 'rights' or 'due process.' When a U.S. citizen shares their experience of detainment, they are essentially describing what it’s like to be a glitch in a legacy software program. The database says you don't exist, therefore you don't. No amount of flag-waving or reciting the Pledge of Allegiance will convince a federal agent who has been trained to view every person as a potential deportation quota. The citizen’s shock is the most amusing part of the story. They genuinely believed that their blue passport was a magical talisman, a divine shield that would protect them from the very leviathan they helped fund with their taxes. It’s a special kind of hubris to build a cage and then be surprised when you find yourself on the inside of the bars.

The political response to such incidents is, as always, a masterclass in performative idiocy. On the Right, we see a frantic scramble to defend the 'sanctity of the agency' while simultaneously decrying 'government overreach.' They worship the boot until it’s pressing down on a neck that looks like theirs, at which point they pivot to incoherent rants about 'deep state' incompetence. They want the wall, they want the raids, and they want the fear—but they want it applied with surgical precision only to the people they dislike. When the 'wrong' person gets detained, it’s a clerical error; when the 'right' person gets detained, it’s justice. Their hypocrisy is only matched by their intellectual laziness. They have created a monster and are now offended that it doesn't recognize its masters.

Then we have the Left, whose reaction is equally nauseating. They will use this story as a fundraising hook, a chance to tweet out hashtags like #ProtectCitizens or #ReformICE while doing absolutely nothing to dismantle the structures that allow this to happen. For the performative progressive, a detained citizen is a gift—a clear-cut case of 'injustice' that doesn't require the messy nuance of defending actual immigrants. They will weep on camera, write scathing op-eds about the 'erosion of American values,' and then vote to approve the next massive spending bill that keeps the ICE engines humming. They don't want to fix the system; they want to be seen feeling bad about the system. Their outrage is a luxury good, polished and displayed whenever the news cycle needs a jolt of moral superiority.

Ultimately, this is a story about the death of the individual in the face of the state. We are all just meat for the grinder. The U.S. citizen in this scenario is a reminder that the 'security' we’ve built is actually just a complex series of traps. We’ve spent decades handing over our privacy, our dignity, and our common sense to agencies that couldn't find their own backsides with both hands and a GPS. We have allowed the concept of 'citizenship' to be reduced to a line in a database that can be deleted by a bored intern or a corrupted file. There is no moral to this story, no lesson to be learned, because learning would require a level of self-reflection that the American public is fundamentally incapable of achieving. We will continue to fund the Golem, we will continue to ignore its appetite, and we will continue to act surprised when it eventually comes for us. It’s not a bug in the system; it’s the primary feature. Sit back, relax, and keep your papers in order. Not that it will help.