Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo and Michael Messner
Posted July 2, 2026
The man wept silently, shutting his eyes and leaning against the wall as we spoke with him in the visitors’ room of a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center. He had decided to return to Ecuador, he told us, because roofing work had ground to a halt in the Minneapolis winter — and to avoid the escalating ICE round-ups. Yet as he tried to buy his air ticket, ICE nabbed him. They kicked him, tore back two of his fingernails, handcuffed him and kept him in a cold, squalid jail. Through tears of pride, he described how hard work in the U.S. had helped him to sustain his elderly parents in Ecuador, and to put his 21-year-old daughter in Minneapolis on a pathway to higher education. He held his head high, repeating, “I will always be proud of what I have accomplished here.”
We encountered the Ecuadorian man while working as legal service volunteers with the Innovation Law Lab at the Torrance County Detention Facility on the outskirts of Estancia, a sleepy town of 1,300 people an hour’s drive from Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is one of 319 men incarcerated by ICE in the facility, 297 of whom are categorized as a “non-criminal population” with no criminal convictions. We are not identifying him by name out of concern that he would face recrimination.
The Torrance jail — run by CoreCivic, the largest private prison operator in the United States, reaping record high profits in 2025 — is one of 246 detention centers in the U.S., together housing more than 60,000 people detained by ICE.
We know that women and children are held in U.S. detention centers, but 79% of detainees are men, about two-thirds of whom are between 18 and 40 years old — prime working age, and prime family-building age. We meet some single men at Torrance, but the most gut-wrenching stories we hear are from family men who are emotionally close with their families, and proud of being good fathers.
Stepped-up ICE raids during Trump’s second term put severe pressure on labor markets that depend on immigrant workers, with a negative impact on local economies, and job loss in particular industries. But as we talk with detained men, they emphasize a more personal story: Detention has separated them from their work, which is both a source of pride and a means of supporting their loved ones. Detention threatens their families’ well-being, as it also rips apart their daily connections with their wives and their children.
When detained men speak of their work, their chins rise with pride: One owned a cement business; one describes his job assembling water filters for industrial use; a Cuban man says he had worked 17 years as a nurse in a trauma unit. An Angolan man had worked as a caregiver for disabled people. He describes in detail his care for a 25-year-old man in New England who was legally blind and paralyzed on one side of his body. He speaks with tenderness of bathing this man, helping him to a toilet seat, waiting for him to have a bowel movement and then wiping him clean.
Some men describe being arrested at their workplaces — a store clerk during an ICE raid at Outdoor Supply Hardware, a roofer on the job in Texas, a landscaper on his way to pay his employees and spread salt on snowy suburban driveways, an Uber driver yanked from his car during an airport sting.
Contrasting with men’s prideful descriptions of their work, our queries about their families and especially their roles as fathers, often elicit a pause, downturned eyes, slightly dropping chin, and sometimes tears. A Mexican man from Los Angeles, his family’s sole breadwinner, agonizes over how his wife will fare with their two young daughters: “those young kids need their dad, don’t you think?” A Colombian father from Minnesota spoke of the support his wife and young children receive from members of their church and from neighbors who deliver food to the house and escort the kids to school. The Angolan man says he and his wife have told their 5-year old child that their dad is away working, not in prison. Squeezing his eyes shut, he mimicks his son’s questions on the phone, “Daddy when are you coming home? I miss you.” A Guatemalan man states softly, “Every day, I pray to God for my kids.”
Men of color have long labored in the U.S. under conditions that imposed both temporary and permanent separations from their families. This was true for enslaved Black men, for Chinese, Filipino and Japanese men who were recruited in the 19th and early 20th centuries to labor in an expanding West, and for Mexican men who worked as Braceros between 1942-1964.
This pattern of U.S. immigration enforcement accelerated in the 21st century — especially following 9/11 and the Great Recession of 2007-2009 — with working-class Latino men racially profiled as criminals, scapegoated for white men’s difficulties in finding decent-paying jobs and targeted for deportation. What scholars a decade ago labelled a “gendered racial removal program” resulted, as it still does today, in wrenching immigrant men away from their workplaces, while also separating them from families who frequently depend on them for their survival. This deportation regime creates “involuntary transnational fathers” who can no longer work and support their families, rendering them “forced out of fatherhood.”
Immigrants — some with and some without legal documents — do low-paid labor that keeps U.S. families, businesses and communities running. There is a gender division of labor in these immigrant jobs. While some immigrant women work in public-facing jobs, many work in our homes, cleaning and caring for our children and elderly. Immigrant men, especially Latino immigrant men, concentrate in outdoor jobs that make them visible and vulnerable targets for ICE raids: commercial and home construction, roofers, street repair, drivers, landscapers, day laborers, agricultural workers.
This forced incarceration of fathers renders thousands of children without their father’s care every day, not just on Father’s Day. Detained men’s grief, due to forced separation from their work and from their families, is amplified by the maddening uncertainty of not knowing when or if they will be released. Given the stories we hear at Torrance, it does not surprise us to learn that of the 46 people who have died in ICE detention centers since January, 2025, 10 have been suicides, all of them men. ICE detainees are now organizing hunger strikes to protest subhuman conditions. Meanwhile, organizations that work most closely with people detained by ICE argue that these inhumane detention centers should have no place in a democratic society. More and more Americans are coming to agree.
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo is professor emerita of sociology at the University of Southern California. Michael A. Messner is professor emeritus of sociology and gender studies at the University of Southern California. This commentary is republished from Source New Mexico under a Creative Commons license.
