The Contradiction at Krome: Notes on America’s Fractured Soul
By Earl Cotten for The Earl Angle Newsletter
I. The Numbers, Like Dust
The numbers arrive first, as they always do, promising order, promising meaning. Seventy-nine percent of Americans now believe immigration benefits the country. The highest figure in a quarter-century. A statistic that hangs in the air like the scent of ozone before a storm, heavy with implication. Sixty-four percent of Republicans concur. This represents an increase of twenty-five percentage points within a single year. A seismic shift, they call it. A recalibration. A headsnap turnaround. The language itself feels inadequate, a thin veneer over a deeper, more unsettling tremor in the national psyche.
Simultaneously, another set of numbers drifts in, colder, harder. Forty-eight thousand human beings are currently detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Facilities operate at one hundred twenty-five percent capacity. Nine detainees have died in custody in the first six months of this year. Three of them in Florida. Cups of rice constitute meals. Untreated infections swell eyes shut. Stone floors serve as beds. In a Miami detention center patio, bodies arrange themselves into the universal distress signal: SOS. A sister texts NPR: “Please help me. I’m desperate.” Her brother languishes without medication. Lawyers speak of clients “starving,” fed rotten food. Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz visits Krome and witnesses men defecating openly on stone, stripped of privacy, stripped of dignity. The dissonance is profound, almost physical. A nation expressing unprecedented warmth towards the abstract concept of immigration while its machinery grinds human beings into a state of raw, abject suffering.
II. The Engine of Detention
To understand this dissonance, one must look at the engine. The $45 billion allocated for detention in the current budget dwarfs the $14 billion set aside for removals. This is not an accident of arithmetic; it is a policy choice. The system is designed to hold, not to resolve. Florida’s “model” partnership with federal authorities strains local facilities past the breaking point, transforming them into pressure cookers of human misery. Medical neglect is not an oversight; it is woven into the fabric. Eyewitness accounts pile up: feverish men denied care, pleas ignored, suffering amplified by institutional indifference.
The mechanics of removal struggle to keep pace. Even with deportation flights doubling to six or seven per day, the daily arrest rate—over three thousand—overwhelms the system’s capacity to expel. The math is cruel and simple: intake far exceeds outflow. The result is the crushing overcrowding, the bodies on the floor, the SOS formed in desperation. It is a system breaking under the weight of its own deliberate design, a testament to the prioritization of containment over solution, of spectacle over humanity.
III. The Stunning Poll: A Crack in the Façade
The Gallup poll, landing in June like a depth charge, revealed the crack. Seventy-nine percent. Not a murmur, but a declaration. The highest level of support for immigration as a "good thing" since they began asking the question twenty-five years ago. The Republican shift, that twenty-five-point leap, is the stunner. After years of “invasion” rhetoric saturating the airwaves, saturating campaign rallies, saturating the very language used to describe the movement of people across the southern border, this reversal feels less like a change of heart and more like a collective sigh of exhaustion, or perhaps, a dawning recognition. Only thirty percent now want immigration decreased – half the figure from the previous year. Beneath the headline number lies the nuance: Eighty-five percent of Republicans support citizenship for the Dreamers, those brought here as children. Fifty-nine percent of GOP voters favor citizenship pathways for undocumented adults who meet requirements. The rhetoric, it seems, has finally parted company with the reality lived in communities, in workplaces, in the quiet acknowledgment of neighbors.
David Bier of the Cato Institute frames it with characteristic precision: “The poll shows clearly the public’s reacting negative to President Trump’s immigration agenda. People wanted chaos at the border ended. They didn’t want the chaos shifted into the interior.” The chaos is now vividly, undeniably inside. It resides in the fetid overcrowding of Krome, in the untreated infections, in the text messages pleading for help. The public appetite for walls (support down eight points to 45%) and mass deportation (down nine points to 38%) diminishes as pathways to citizenship gain traction (up eight points to 78% overall). The American people, the numbers suggest, are drawing a line. They wanted order; they are being shown cruelty.
IV. The Crackdown: Policy Against the Grain
Yet, against the grain of this expressed public will, the machinery accelerates. ICE arrests now target workplaces, homes, even protests – locations deemed “fair” by 66% of Americans. But the moral boundaries are also being drawn: hospitals (61% oppose arrests), schools (63% oppose), places of worship (65% oppose). The administration’s response is not recalibration, but escalation.
The Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a relic from a time of nascent fears, is revived to deport alleged gang members without the inconvenience of court hearings.
Temporary Protected Status, a fragile shield for half a million Venezuelans and Haitians fleeing catastrophe, is revoked, exposing them to immediate removal.
The blunt instrument of the "terrorist organization" label is wielded against groups like MS-13, enabling fast-track deportations that bypass due process.
ICE touts operations like the Houston roundup – 1,361 arrests, including 32 convicted of child sex offenses. This is the narrative of cleansing, of removing the "dangerous criminal aliens." But woven into this net are people like Maria’s brother, detained over a driver’s license violation. The $75 billion enforcement bill, dubbed with characteristic grandiosity, funds more raids and envisions the conversion of military bases into vast detention sites. Deborah Fleischaker, a former ICE staffer, sees it clearly: It enables “holding more people for longer” – a reality far beyond what the public, even the 38% who support mass deportation in the abstract, likely envisions or endorses when confronted with the specifics of Krome.
V. Whiplash: The Pendulum Swings
The recent years have inflicted a profound policy whiplash. The Biden administration clung to the pandemic justification of Title 42, expelling over half a million asylum seekers by July 2021, a policy of rejection draped in public health concern. Now, the Trump restoration pushes further: "Remain in Mexico" reinstated, refugee admissions halted indefinitely, the "public charge" rule expanded to deny green cards to low-income immigrants seeking Medicaid or food stamps – a policy explicitly designed to favor the wealthy. The echoes of the "Muslim Ban" resonate in its extension to nations like Nigeria and Myanmar.
The irony is thick. The border surge that fueled the crisis rhetoric peaked under Biden in 2023, then fell sharply. Yet, the rhetoric persists, shaping policy not on current reality, but on the lingering specter of that past surge. As the University of Minnesota’s Immigration History Research Center notes, the sheer breadth of pandemic-era restrictions forced a narrow focus, while critics maintain Trump simply used the emergency to implement a pre-existing, draconian agenda. The pendulum swings violently, but the arc bends consistently towards restriction, towards enforcement, towards the cold logic of detention manifested in the suffering at Krome.
VI. The Personal Fear: Carrying Papers, Avoiding Hospitals
Beyond the statistics, beyond the policy pronouncements, lies the insidious reality of fear. Forty-two percent of Hispanic adults fear someone close to them could be deported. This is not abstract anxiety; it reshapes daily life. It manifests in small, telling choices: carrying birth certificates at all times (4%), avoiding hospitals or police contact out of status fears (2%), a constant, low-grade dread altering routines (30% of immigrants expect citizenship checks). Vivian Ortega sold everything in Venezuela to pay her son’s $7,000 bond after an ICE arrest. Released, he complied with his next check-in, only to be detained again. From the Glades Detention Center, his message was bleak: “They barely feed us here... I asked to be deported.” The system, in its grinding inefficiency and deliberate harshness, achieves a perverse goal: convincing people that deportation, even to places they fled, is preferable to the limbo and privation of detention.
Even legal immigrants feel the chill. Thirty percent worry about being stopped. The approval rating for Trump’s immigration handling among Hispanics stands at a stark 21%, half the national average of 35%. When arrests encroach on schools and churches – sanctuaries in the broadest sense – they violate a shared, if unspoken, understanding of societal boundaries. Austin Kocher, a Syracuse professor observing this machinery, suggests the chaos inside – the food shortages, the medical neglect – may be less accident than design, a strategy to “wear people down” into surrendering, into self-deporting. It is a cruelty that operates on the psyche as much as the body.
VII. The Citizenship Chasm: What the People Want vs. What the Machine Does
Here lies the starkest contradiction. While the government invests billions in detention and accelerates removals, the public sentiment surges towards inclusion. Seventy-eight percent of all Americans, including 59% of Republicans, support citizenship pathways for undocumented immigrants who meet requirements. For the Dreamers, support soars to 85% overall, 91% among Democrats. The will of the people, as measured by the pollsters, is clear, consistent, and moving towards integration.
ICE’s actions move relentlessly in the opposite direction. The revocation of Temporary Protected Status for over half a million Venezuelans and Haitians casts them into immediate peril. Deportations are fast-tracked to notorious prisons like El Salvador’s CECOT. Legislative efforts like the New Way Forward Act, offering a more humane framework for citizenship access, are resisted or ignored. Stephen Yale-Loehr of Cornell articulates the economic and demographic reality underpinning the public shift: “Americans realize immigration is good for the country and that we need immigrants to grow our economy.” William Frey of Brookings adds the crucial demographic context: even a complete halt to immigration wouldn't prevent the nation’s increasing diversity; it would only impoverish its economic and social fabric. The government fights a battle against the inevitable, against the expressed will of its citizens, and against the human tide documented in that 79% figure.
VIII. Political Reckoning: The Base Softens, the Policy Hardens
The political fallout from this chasm is palpable, if not yet fully realized. Sixty-two percent of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration; 45% disapprove strongly. Even among independents, strong disapproval hits 28%. Yet, within the Republican base, loyalty remains high: 85% approval. This is the partisan split laid bare – leadership doubling down on a hardline agenda even as its own voters exhibit a significant, measurable softening on the core issue.
The administration’s response to the Gallup poll? Dismissal. A spokesperson pointed to unnamed “other polls” showing support and credited the President with stopping “the flood of criminal illegal aliens.” It is a retreat into the familiar rhetoric, a denial of the dissonance captured by the 79% and the scenes from Krome. But the 21% Hispanic approval rating is a flashing warning light. Stories like Vivian Ortega’s – the sold home, the son begging for deportation from the squalor of Glades – have a corrosive power. As Stephen Yale-Loehr observes, “The Gallup poll results show President Trump’s mass deportation efforts are backfiring.” As the 2026 midterms approach, that overwhelming 79% pro-immigration sentiment, particularly the 59% GOP support for pathways, could become an uncomfortable weight for Republican candidates tethered to the administration’s increasingly unpopular tactics.
IX. What Comes Next: The Weight of the SOS
The path forward is bifurcated, illuminated by the harsh fluorescent lights of detention centers and the softer glow of polling data. The administration’s trajectory is set: the “One Big Beautiful Bill” pours $45 billion into expanding detention capacity and $14.4 billion into removals. ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons speaks of removing “the most dangerous criminal aliens,” a focus the public overwhelmingly supports (97% for violent offenders). Yet, the churn continues, ensnaring the Marias' brothers alongside the genuinely dangerous. Plans to use military bases as detention sites loom, a grim echo of historical internments.
Resistance stirs. States may push back. Senators like Alex Padilla argue, “our economy depends on essential contributions of immigrants.” Courts may balk at the extreme use of the Alien Enemies Act or the denial of basic due process. Whistleblowers – detainees forming SOS signals, guards troubled by conscience, lawyers documenting neglect – may yet pierce the bureaucratic veil. The numbers themselves exert a pressure: 78% want pathways, only 38% support mass deportation. Lydia Saad of Gallup offers a poignant summary: the border surge under Biden “triggered heightened concern” but Trump’s response “appears to have defused that,” resetting views to a more accepting, pre-2021 norm.
X. The Enduring Contradiction
The American contradiction endures. We are a nation built by immigrants, expressing near-record levels of acceptance for the idea of immigration, yet simultaneously operating a system that degrades and dehumanizes those very immigrants within its grasp. The warmth of the 79% exists in the same moment as the cold concrete of Krome’s floors. The 64% of Republicans seeing benefit clashes violently with the $45 billion fueling the detention machine their party champions. The pathways to citizenship desired by 78% are blocked by policies designed for exclusion and expulsion.
The bodies forming that SOS in the Miami sun are not just signaling distress to the helicopters overhead; they are signaling the distress of the American experiment itself. The question hanging over the detention centers, the polling stations, and the halls of power is whether the nation’s expressed goodwill – that startling 79% – possesses the weight, the urgency, and the political will to dismantle the machinery of suffering before the next nine deaths are recorded, before the next desperate text message goes unanswered, before the contradiction consumes what remains of the national conscience. The numbers tell a story of change, but the floors of Krome tell a story of an enduring, and perhaps defining, American failure. We hold both truths, however uneasily, however incompatibly, in our hands.
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