Let’s stop sanitizing state violence with the language of “mistakes.” What happened to the Salvadoran man from Frederick, Maryland—a man who was legally protected from deportation, who showed ICE agents his documentation, who begged them not to send him back—is not a clerical error. It’s not a bureaucratic oversight. It is a willful act of cruelty. It is an act of dehumanization so casual, so normalized, that the system didn’t even flinch when it tore this man’s life apart.
ICE knew. They knew. He gave them proof. He pleaded for his rights. They looked at him, at the evidence, and made a decision that his humanity was inconvenient. That his legal protections were irrelevant. That their power to disappear him outweighed his right to exist safely. That should make every single one of us sick.
To call this a “mistake” is an insult to everyone who has fought, bled, and sacrificed for basic legal protections in this country. This was no accident. This is institutional rot—deliberate, coordinated, and upheld by the unchecked machinery of white nationalism in uniform.
This happened here, in Maryland. My home. My community. And it is a brutal reminder that no amount of legal protection means anything if the people with the power to enforce—or ignore—it see you as disposable. What is the point of due process if the state can just ignore it at will? What safety exists when a government agency can simply override someone’s status, erase their rights, and ship them back to a place they barely survived fleeing?
This is not an isolated event. This is policy in action. This is the consequence of letting cruelty wear a badge and call itself order.
And if you think it stops at immigrants, you haven’t been paying attention.
As a queer, autistic, disabled activist—I know exactly how the slope tilts. Today it’s this man. Tomorrow it’s trans people. It’s neurodivergent people. It’s disabled folks. It’s poor people. The state never stops at one target; it tests how far it can go, how silent we’ll stay, and when we don’t scream loudly enough, it gets bolder.
This is a test. And we are failing it.
Where is the outrage? Where is the action? Where is the accountability?
If you can read this and shrug—if you can rationalize this as “just how things are” or brush it off as an unfortunate oversight—you are complicit in the erosion of human rights. This is a moral crisis, not just a procedural one. This is what happens when fascism dresses itself in bureaucracy and banks on our exhaustion.
We cannot look away. We cannot afford to normalize this.
This man deserved safety. He deserved protection. He deserved to be believed when he showed them his papers and said, “I belong here.” Instead, the state chose to disappear him. And the silence surrounding it is deafening.
If this doesn’t gut you—if it doesn’t spark fury, grief, and the desperate need to act—then you’re not seeing clearly. This is not just a deportation. It is a rupture in the fabric of justice, and it demands our collective voice, our resistance, and our refusal to let anyone fall quietly into the void.
We don’t need thoughts and prayers. We need rage. We need reform. We need to fight like hell. Now.
Gemma Ortwerth 
Leave a comment