On the morning of Wednesday, June 3, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers abducted a mother dropping her child off at Scarlett Middle School in Ann Arbor, Michigan. As of June 6, Kelly Pfeifer, president of the school’s parent-teacher organization, reported that nearly $5,000 had already been raised in support of the victim through direct donations. Ms. Pfeifer stated to MLive that ICE arrests had been “every day, recently.” To date, ICE has not issued any public comment on the arrest.
This is the second known arrest of a Scarlett Middle School parent. On March 10, 2026, Miguel Rosas Ruiz was arrested in Ypsilanti on his way to work. Nearly $21,000 was raised on GoFundMe for his support. He had been held at North Lake Detention Center in Baldwin, Michigan, but he was later released on bond. As of April 2026, he was in deportation proceedings.
Ann Arbor and nearby Ypsilanti have been hotbeds for ICE activity since Trump’s return to the White House, particularly near schools. On September 5, 2025, a man was abducted by ICE while dropping his child off at Lakewood Elementary in Ann Arbor. On January 26, 2026, four immigrant parents waiting to pick up their children from school were arrested by ICE in Ypsilanti. On April 14, 2026, a man was arrested by ICE near an Ann Arbor daycare.
These incidents are part of a statewide surge. According to a September 2025 report by the Detroit News, nearly two-thirds of the more than 3,100 people arrested by Detroit ICE from January to July 2025 had no criminal convictions. The vast majority of those arrested had not even been charged with a crime.
ICE arrests in Michigan were up 230 percent in 2025 compared to 2024. ICE has targeted immigrants with legal status and those with US citizen spouses and children. In March 2026, ICE detained dozens of Amazon Flex workers in southeast Michigan. In May 2025, a Detroit high school student was arrested by ICE during a school field trip and sent over 300 miles to a detention center in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.
The Trump administration’s targeting of the Detroit metro area, the historic heart of the American auto industry and home to nearly a quarter million manufacturing workers, makes it clear that ICE is not engaging in narrow immigration enforcement but a terror campaign aimed at the working class as a whole.
Washtenaw County, despite having non-cooperation policies concerning ICE, including barring federal agents from county property, has utterly failed to stop the ICE surge within its communities. The county is currently being sued by the Trump administration over these very policies.
Such bankrupt tactics are representative of the Democratic Party’s token opposition to Trump’s police state methods. In reality, the Democrats are in fundamental agreement with the assault on immigrants and the broader attack on democratic rights.
The existence of ICE, the criminalization of immigrants and the exploitation of undocumented labor are treated, de facto, as legitimate by the Democrats. Indeed, California was the target of some of the most brutal ICE occupations in 2025, regardless of its position as a “sanctuary state.”
These policies serve to create an illusion of resistance, a pressure release valve, while leaving the social and legal framework of ICE and state repression unchallenged and untouched.
Both Michigan Democratic senators, Elissa Slotkin and Gary Peters, voted for the Laken Riley Act, which dramatically expanded the power of ICE to detain individuals who have not been convicted of, or even formally charged with, any crime. Democratic Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer approved deploying the Michigan National Guard to the United States’ Southern border under both Trump and Biden, has opposed state benefits for undocumented Michigan workers, and played a central role in the reopening of the North Lake Processing Center, the largest ICE detention facility in the Midwest. Congressional Democrats paved the way for a new $70 billion infusion to ICE and Border Patrol, the largest single funding episode for these agencies in US history.
The Democratic Party promotes “sanctuary” theater, while working hand in glove with the Republican Party to sustain ICE and the deportation machine. Seeking solutions from Democrats on immigration is like believing the “good” cop in the interrogation room is really on your side.
Trump’s attack on immigrants serves three interconnected ruling class purposes. First, it divides the working class by directing the anger of workers born in the United States against immigrant workers, rather than against the corporations and billionaires responsible for decades of deindustrialization, wage stagnation and the collapse of public services.
Second, it serves as a political diversion, a spectacle of state violence to distract from the administration’s open criminality and the deepening social crisis.
Third, and most importantly, it provides the legal and political framework for expanding police state powers against the entire working class. The same justifications used today to deploy masked ICE agents into school zones and work places, to arrest workers without warrants and disappear them into detention centers hundreds of miles from their families, will be used tomorrow against striking workers, political opponents and anyone who resists the consolidation of authoritarian rule.