Following the latest shooting of an unarmed civilian by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers — this time with a child in the target’s car — protests erupted on the streets of New York.
Similar incidents have elicited widespread resistance in major cities across the country during President Donald Trump’s second term, but one B.C.-based photojournalist sensed that much more was going under-the-radar outside of city limits.
Dual citizen Greg Constantine was awarded a fellowship to investigate just that. He spent months in small towns in Republican strongholds like Indiana and Missouri, documenting how Trump’s immigration policies were playing out in the places where they are approved of.
“I think that, economically, it’s affecting people, but I think from my perspective, it’s really just this destruction, total destruction, of families,” Constantine said.
“That kind of violence that’s taking place may take on a different form, but it’s impacting communities just as much.”
Constantine’s work, published as a series of multimedia essays in Mother Jones, often captures absence: a family photo without a father, a car without a driver.
“What was left behind is this vaporized person, with a life still suspended.”
That’s the consequence of the quiet campaign of apprehension that’s happening in these rural Republican areas, where trusted local law enforcement has been contracted by ICE to whisk people away, most of whom have no criminal record, as they go about their daily lives.
“Routine traffic stops, profiling of people after they come out of a gas station,” are examples, Constantine said.
He also revealed the insidious economics of Trump’s deportation regime. Federal money pours into rural areas, funding sheriff’s offices and employing thousands of people at detention centres, becoming a lynchpin of municipal budgets.
“It’s much more of a mass-detention project than anything else, because of the money that is being made off of all this,” he said.
“And really, the raw materials of that profit are human beings. You know, human men, women, fathers, mothers, grandparents, aunts, uncles, brothers, and sisters. And that’s something that I think every American should be ashamed of.”
Add CityNews Toronto as a trusted source on Google to see more local stories from us.
