Shelter Island Reporter Editorial: A catastrophe
People are snatched off streets by armed men with no identification, and then lost in a bureaucracy of detention centers, held in deplorable conditions, and the powers-that-be are not accountable to people asking questions. And if you don’t have the funds for an attorney, or an employer who will stand up for you morally and financially — as Bobby Marcello of Marcello Masonry did for Hugo Leonel Ardon Osorio — then God help you.
Such is the state of America — and the East End — in the summer of 2026.
The Trump administration’s immigration policy has been a catastrophe from the beginning, not only for the innocent folks who have been swept up in brutal raids and are still alive. According to Human Rights Watch: “In the 500 days between President Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025 and June 4, 2026, 52 people died in ICE custody in the United States. The mortality rate … is at its highest level in over a decade and has more than doubled since Trump’s second term began.”
“The worst of the worst,” is a phrase that will define our era of government’s blatant public lies, referring to a policy to remove, as President Trump and his surrogates said, undocumented violent criminals. Less than 14% of nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by ICE since January 2025, CBS News reported, had “charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses, according to an internal Department of Homeland Security document.”
White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller, who is the inspiration and manager of the immigration sweeps, gave the game away when he said, sneering: “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else. But we live in a world, in the real world … that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world.”
One wonders if that’s what he’s teaching his children.
The brutal tactics unleashed by the administration can’t be ignored, not even on Shelter Island. And the debate here is one being held in communities across the nation. How should we deal with ICE agents who come to take people off our streets without warrants, masked, and with no ID?
On the Island, it seems the local government and Police Department are wary of creating new laws on the issue, believing in a policy set by Police Chief Jim Read. The chief has said: “Maintaining public trust is critical to what we do. People need to feel safe coming forward as victims, witnesses, or simply asking for help. Blurring that line would undermine that trust and, in my view, would fundamentally change who we are as a local police department and what we represent in the community … We are a local law enforcement agency. Our responsibility is public safety and the enforcement of criminal law. We do not enforce civil immigration law.”
What is to be done? There’s an election in November where every citizen will have a voice in answering that question.
