Credit: Design and illustrations by Etta O’Donnell-King/Street Roots
On a drizzly October morning, Sara Matsuzaki, a Portland-area mother of three, was still recovering from giving birth three weeks ago. Her partner was leaving for work when federal agents showed up in the couple’s front yard and arrested him.
“The boys saw the whole thing,” Matsuzaki said, referring to her two- and four-year-old sons, who followed her out into the rain when she went to talk to one of the agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The agent barely looked her in the eye, she said. He gave her very little information, only that agents were taking Abayomi Daramola, father of her three children, to the Portland ICE facility.
“My oldest started crying (during the arrest) and he’s still referencing it,” Matsuzaki said.
The four-year-old has continued to ask questions on the phone with his dad ever since, she added.
“Why did the police take you?” he asks. And, “Why did you have those things (handcuffs) on your hands?”
Until Oct. 26, Daramola was the family’s main breadwinner. A field tech who Matsuzaki said is like a jack of all trades, Daramola is trained in aircraft maintenance. He has been in the U.S. from Nigeria for a decade on a green card. Matsuzaki, a U.S. citizen, is a graphic designer who also does marketing, and said she lost her job earlier this year when the manufacturing company she worked for laid off several workers as tariffs announced by President Donald Trump went into effect.
Abayomi Daramola and Sara Matsuzaki with their two sons in 2025 (above). The family wasn't able to get a portrait with both Daramola and the new baby before ICE detained him.
Now, Matsuzaki is left to care for two toddlers and a newborn on her own, while trying to avoid eviction, look for work and coordinate with immigration lawyers. After the arrest, Matsuzaki’s doulas set up a GoFundMe to help her make ends meet. On the day of our interview, Matsuzaki said she had been able to speak to Daramola hours earlier, from El Valle Detention Center in Raymondville, Texas, where he is now detained.
Matsuzaki is also deeply worried for Daramola’s health and safety, and says he has a health condition that has been ignored and exacerbated by conditions at the detention center. The harsh living conditions Daramola has described are consistent with other recent accounts. Last year was ICE’s deadliest in two decades, according to an analysis from The Guardian that noted 32 people died in ICE custody in 2025.
Not the first fatality
Since immigration raids in Los Angeles, Chicago and beyond, and the subsequent community response of impassioned protests, federal agents continue to traumatize and stoke fear in immigrant communities and communities of color. This uptick in public displays of cruelty includes violent, seemingly indiscriminate arrests (often without warrants), and now, a pattern of lethal ICE activity. It also includes making a spectacle of continued family separations, something federal officials used to downplay or try to hide.
Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old legal observer and mother of three shot to death by ICE agent Jonathan Ross, was not the first person killed by ICE since the beginning of Trump’s second term. Immigration agents have shot at least six people since July, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
Three were fatal. In addition to Good, ICE agents shot and killed 38-year-old Silverio Villegas González in September. A father and the primary caretaker for his two children, Villegas González had just dropped off one of his kids at school in a suburb west of Chicago when ICE agents attempted to stop his car. Agents claim Villegas González evaded arrest and dragged an officer with his vehicle. One agent fired his gun at close range.
DHS said the officer feared for his life, opened fire in self defense and was hospitalized for “serious injuries.” But body camera footage from local police showed the agent who killed Villegas González walking around afterward and shrugging off his own injuries as “nothing major.” Originally from Mexico, Villegas González had no serious criminal record, only minor traffic offenses. According to DHS, his death remains under investigation.
And on New Year’s Eve, around 11 p.m. in Los Angeles, an off-duty ICE agent fatally shot Keith Porter, a 43-year-old father of two, who was allegedly shooting gunfire into the air in celebration of the holiday.
‘Kafka’s bureaucracy’
Created in 2003, ICE was launched as part of the reorganization of federal agencies following the 9/11 attacks. Before that, immigration and some customs enforcement functions were handled by other agencies, primarily the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the U.S. Customs Service. The agency operates as part of the Department of Homeland Security, itself created in 2002.
During Trump’s first term, America got a taste of the cruelty his administration was interested in using to enforce his policies, including with family separations at the border. Presented as a “zero tolerance” approach, federal agents implemented the strategy in 2017, explicitly aiming to deter illegal immigration by separating migrant children from their parents or guardians. A 2021 Oxford academic paper, “Kafka’s Bureaucracy: Immigration Administrative Burdens in the Trump Era” looked at immigration policy, processes, and enforcement during Trump’s first term. In the study, researchers essentially said Trump had turned the legal immigration process into a racialized, bureaucratic administrative burden akin to sabotage of public services.
Tracking reliable deportation numbers is tricky. The Portland Immigrant Rights Coalition estimated roughly 300 deportations in Portland during the month of October, when Daramola was detained. The organization relies on volunteer data from its hotline. However, federal immigration officials said ICE and Border Patrol agents made more than 560 arrests in Portland that month.
The Portland Tribune reported at least 1,100 immigration arrests in Oregon last year. Numbers surged last spring, after Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, and Kristi Noem, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, announced new arrest targets for ICE leaders at a strained meeting first reported by Axios and confirmed by The Guardian.
Miller went on Fox News and confirmed the Trump administration’s arbitrary increase of the national daily ICE arrest quota from 1,000 to 3,000 per day. At the same time, Cammilla Wamsley, director of the regional ICE field office overseeing Oregon, Washington and Alaska, upped the internal quota to 30 arrests per day for the region — double the daily goal the regional agency set in 2024.
Every day, new videos appear on social media, depicting emotional scenes of scared families and people victimized by humiliating detainments, violent arrests and scary interactions with hostile ICE agents. Families from California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Texas, Minnesota, Arizona and Oregon have been torn apart. Sometimes the cruelty comes in the form of a quiet, targeted arrest like Matsuzaki’s family experienced. Other times, the cruelty is a theatrical public display, like the militarized ICE raid on a Chicago apartment building in October, when federal agents terrorized an entire community, separating crying naked children from their parents in the middle of the night.
Those scenes played out here in Oregon too.
On Oct. 14, ICE detained a grandfather from Hillsboro in a widely reported case of mistaken identity. Despite his having a valid work permit and no criminal record, immigration agents held him for three weeks.
In late October, a Portland mom reunited with her family after her family says she was wrongfully detained for four months. In June, Jackie Merlos was arrested near the Canadian border, at Peace Arch Historical State Park, on suspicion of smuggling others into the country after ICE agents observed her giving her sister a hug. Days later, agents arrested her husband in Portland and deported him to Honduras. Merlos’ four children were also detained for two weeks before being released in July to friends. She reunited with her family after overwhelming public support from lawyers, advocacy groups, community members and involvement from members of Congress including U.S. Rep. Maxine Dexter, D-Oregon.
History repeating itself
There’s a throughline of fear that pervades all these stories: workers afraid to show up for their shifts, parents afraid to drop their kids at daycare, children afraid their parents might be profiled and taken away by the time they get home from school, apartment residents afraid to take their trash out.
For Matsuzaki, the cruelty is layered. It’s not the first time her family has experienced such injustice. She told her husband on a recent call that it feels like history is repeating itself.
“I told him how much this reminds me of the Japanese internment camps,” she said. “My great-aunts, great-uncles and great-grandparents were all in the camps. Taken from their homes and moved far away from their neighborhoods and everything they know.”
The parallel Matsuzaki draws is especially salient, since one of today’s largest immigration detention centers — the Fort Bliss detention facility in Texas — was one of the military bases where the U.S. government imprisoned people of Japanese ancestry during World War II. Many were U.S. citizens.
When Daramola calls Matsuzaki and the kids at home — which he tries to do at least once a day despite the cost of each call — he details poor living conditions at the detention center. In addition to having his arms and legs shackled during transit, he tells his wife that at night he sleeps with a sheet that is basically a sheet of paper, and says the food is inedible. But those aren’t his main worries.
“He spends more time worrying about how his family is doing and whether we’ll be housed and fed in the coming weeks or months he may be detained,” Matsuzaki said of her partner, who she lovingly calls Yomi. “One of the saddest parts of this whole thing is that Yomi doesn’t get to bond with our newborn. He’s devastated and worries (the baby) won’t recognize him when they meet again.”
Still in her postpartum period, Matsuzaki is left with an unimaginable load to bear, and tough questions to answer.
“Our oldest son keeps asking when Papa is coming home,” she said in mid-January. “Our middle child knows something isn’t normal but isn’t sure how to express it. It’s tough raising three under five by myself. This was never the plan.”
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