How ICE Detention and Forced Institutionalization Are the Same Fight

by Bruce Darling, CEO Center for Disability Rights and Regional Center for Independent Living

They came for me without warning.

I was in the middle of my life. I was the watching the light come through the window and thinking about what the day might hold. And then they were there. People with authority I didn’t ask for. People who decided, without knowing me, that I didn’t belong where I was.

They didn’t ask what I wanted. They didn’t ask if I was safe, or happy, or loved. They looked at paperwork. They looked at categories. They decided I was a problem to be managed, and they put me somewhere I didn’t choose.

The place they took me had rules I didn’t make. Fluorescent lights that never turned off. Food I didn’t pick. People telling me when to sleep, when to eat, when I was allowed to talk to the people I love. I lost control of my own body. I lost control of my own days. I was alive, but I wasn’t free.

Who am I?

Am I a Disabled person — forced into a nursing home because my state won’t fund the services I need to live at home? A young man with an intellectual disability warehoused in an institution because the waiting list for community supports is years long?

Am I a Disabled immigrant — a grandmother with dementia locked in a detention facility in the Arizona desert? A seven-year-old autistic girl taken from her stepfather’s car at a checkpoint in Texas?

Or am I a non-disabled immigrant — a father and business owner who went to a routine check-in appointment and never came home? A man who spent twenty years building a life in his community, only to be handcuffed for doing exactly what he was told to do?

The answer is: I could be any of them. Because the experience is the same. And if you care about justice for any one of these people, you must care about justice for all of them.

Three Groups, One System of Confinement
Right now, the United States is running interlocking systems of confinement that target overlapping groups of people. Disability justice demands that we fight for all three without reservation.

The first group is Disabled and elderly individuals forced into nursing facilities and other institutions. More than 1.2 million Americans live in nursing homes and institutional settings — not because they need or want to be there, but because the community-based services that would let them live at home don’t exist, aren’t funded, or have waiting lists stretching years into the future or because a judge ordered them into institutions against their wishes. Children with disabilities are placed in residential facilities because school districts or state agencies find it cheaper or simpler than supporting them in their homes.

The second group is Disabled immigrants taken into ICE custody. A 79-year-old Cuban woman named Julia Benitez, who had early-stage dementia, was detained by ICE and held for nine months at a facility in Eloy, Arizona. Her dementia progressed to the point that she could no longer remember where she was. Her diabetes became uncontrolled. A seven-year-old Canadian girl with autism named Ayla Lucas was taken into custody at a border checkpoint in Texas alongside her mother, despite having valid documentation. Her family described the devastating impact on her routine and the meltdowns caused by sensory overload in a facility designed for adults, as well as the lasting trauma it inflicted. A nine-year-old boy with autism was detained with his family at the Dilley facility in Texas. These are Disabled people whose disabilities make detention particularly cruel — and whose stories should be immediately recognizable to anyone in the disability rights movement.

The third group is non-disabled immigrants swept into ICE detention — people whose confinement may not involve disability, but whose experience of being caged, stripped of autonomy, and separated from their communities mirrors everything the disability rights movement has fought against for decades. Here in Rochester, Omar Ramos Jimenez — a father, business owner, and beloved community member who co-founded La Casa restaurant in the South Wedge — went to a routine ICE check-in appointment in December 2025 after twelve years of compliance. He was handcuffed and taken into custody. He remains detained in Batavia, denied a bond hearing, separated from his children and the community that called him “Papa Omar.” Dolores Bustamante was also taken into custody after living in the United States for more than two decades. Dolores – an advocate for farmworkers – was detained during an ICE check-in in Buffalo and immediately transferred to a facility in Louisiana.

All three groups are subjected to the same fundamental violation: the loss of self-determination by a system that has decided their freedom is negotiable. Advocates for disability justice need to be concerned about all three — not as a matter of charity, but as a matter of principle. The logic that confines a Disabled person in a nursing home is the same logic that cages an immigrant family in a detention center. If we oppose that logic in one context, we must oppose it in every context.

Professional Violence: When Systems Become Traps
These systems weaponize the very institutions people are supposed to trust. Consider how they work in practice.

An immigrant family attends a routine ICE check-in — the appointment they were told they must keep to remain in compliance with the law — and they are detained on the spot. Omar Ramos Jimenez was contacted by ICE and told he needed to come in to have a new phone app installed for his check-ins. He went. He was handcuffed. His attorney called it a detention under false pretenses — a betrayal of trust built over more than a decade. A mother and her two children show up for a scheduled appointment and are shipped to a family detention facility thousands of miles from their home. This is not enforcement. This is entrapment dressed in the language of process.

A Disabled or elderly person goes to the hospital for a medical issue — a fall, a flare-up, a temporary crisis. They go seeking healthcare. And while they are in the hospital bed, the system decides they can’t go home. A so-called “expert”— someone with a clipboard, a form or tablet, and maybe even a white coat — determines that this person needs a “higher level of care.” The person is transferred to a nursing facility. Not because they chose it. Not because it is what they want. But because the hospital needs the bed, the state won’t fund home-based services, and no one with authority is asking the person what they actually need.

This is professional violence. It is the violence of systems that use the language of care, compliance, and public safety to strip people of their freedom and steal their lives. The ICE agent says, “We’re just following the law.” The hospital social worker says, “We’re just following the care plan.” In both cases, the person whose humanity is being stripped away has no meaningful say in what happens to their own body and their own life.

The parallels are not metaphorical. They are structural. In both systems, the point of contact with a trusted institution — a government office, a healthcare provider or hospital — becomes the mechanism of confinement. People are punished for doing what they were told to do.

Same Logic, Same Harm
In both systems, confinement worsens the conditions it claims to manage. Julia Benitez’s dementia progressed to the point of non-recognition after nine months in ICE detention. Her diabetes became uncontrolled because of the facility’s poor diet. The environment she was held in made her sicker.

We see the same pattern in nursing facilities every day: people enter with manageable conditions and decline because the institutional setting itself — the loss of routine, the lack of individualized attention, the severing of social connections — accelerates deterioration. The nursing facility creates the dependency it then points to as justification for continued confinement.

In both systems, children pay the highest price. ICE now detains six times more children on any given day than it did two years ago. On some days, ICE held 400 children or more. Ayla Lucas’s stepfather said it plainly: “Autistic kids need their routine. Being locked up is going to mess her whole routine up.” Families at the Dilley detention center have described children hitting themselves, wetting themselves, and sleeping endlessly — the hallmarks of psychological collapse. Meanwhile, across this country, Disabled children are placed in institutional settings — psychiatric facilities, residential treatment centers, nursing homes — because community-based supports for their families are unavailable or underfunded.

Misinformation, Dehumanization, and the Machinery of Fear
Both systems rely on misinformation and fear — not just to justify confinement, but to make the public complicit in it.

The immigration enforcement machine runs on the fiction that the people being detained are dangerous. The data tells a different story: arrests of people with no criminal record surged by 2,450% in the first year of expanded enforcement. Omar Ramos Jimenez has no criminal record. He paid taxes. He volunteered for elderly neighbors. He plowed and salted their walkways in the winter. More than 100 letters of support were filed in his case. And still the system swallowed him. The dehumanizing language of “illegals” and “aliens” does its work. It makes the public look away.

The institutionalization of Disabled and elderly people runs on a parallel fiction: that these individuals cannot care for themselves. That they are burdens. That they are better off in facilities where “professionals” can manage them. The language is softer — “placement,” “residential care,” “assisted living” — but the effect is identical. It strips Disabled and elderly people of their humanity and replaces it with a category: patient, resident, case number.

Both sets of lies reinforce the same interlocking systems of oppression. Racism drives ICE enforcement, which disproportionately targets Black and Brown immigrant communities. Ableism drives institutionalization, which disproportionately confines people whose bodies and minds don’t conform to narrow definitions of normalcy. Ageism ensures that elderly people are treated as disposable — warehoused in nursing facilities where they are out of sight and out of the public’s conscience.

Xenophobia teaches the public to fear the foreign body; ableism teaches the public to fear the Disabled body. Both fears produce the same result: cages.

The Peculiar Cruelty of “Protection”
There is something peculiarly insidious about the institutionalization of Disabled and elderly people that must be named directly: it is done in the name of protection.

ICE detention is at least nominally about enforcement — however disproportionate and unjust. But nursing facility placement? That is framed as kindness. The person is being “cared for.” They are being “protected.” The facility is there to “support” them. This framing is what makes institutionalization so difficult to fight, because the people perpetuating it — the social workers, the doctors, the family members who have been told there is no alternative — genuinely believe they are doing the right thing.

But protection that robs you of your freedom is not protection. Support that strips you of your autonomy is not support. When a system decides that the safest place for you is a facility you did not choose, with people you did not select, under rules you did not make — and does this while calling it care — it is performing a profound act of erasure. It is saying that your preferences, your relationships, your home, your daily rhythms, your identity as a self-governing human being are all less important than the system’s convenience.

Disabled people know this. We have been living under this particular cruelty for as long as any of us can remember. And we see it now mirrored in the language of immigration enforcement, where families are detained “for their own safety,” where children are held in facilities that are called “processing centers” instead of prisons, where the machinery of confinement is wrapped in euphemisms designed to make the public feel that something orderly and reasonable is happening.

Nothing orderly or reasonable is happening. People are being caged.

In Part 2, I examine why the political leadership that claims to champion immigrant rights has consistently failed to treat the institutionalization of Disabled people with the same urgency — and what both movements must do to fight together for the right to live freely in community.