Last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers raided a home up the street from my house. A neighbor, Alisa Cullison, saw three unmarked vehicles haunting the quiet block early in the morning. Another neighbor, Emily Ingebretsen, witnessed a dozen armed men in masks emerge from the vehicles, knock on a door and come out a few minutes later with three men in handcuffs and chains.

The three men walked slowly, heads down, as Ingebretsen followed the officers and filmed with her smart phone, demanding, “Warrant, do you have a warrant? Do you have identification?”

The quiet bamboo forest and familiar walkways in the background prickled the hairs on my arm when I watched Ingebretsen’s cell phone video later that day on TV news. I recognized the way the soft street looked in the rain. ICE had walked more or less into my backyard and snatched our neighbors from their home.

This was what we had been afraid of: Trump’s new administration would escalate anti-immigrant policies already in place, stoking fear by making random raids with the stated goal of rounding people up for mass deportation. People would disappear into unmarked vans, be taken to unidentified locations, detention centers or prison camps. Days before the February 13 incident in my North Carolina neighborhood, Trump had made a pronounced display of sending around 100 undocumented men to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the notorious torture site, claiming without proof that they were the “worst criminals.”

Before Trump’s return to office, migrants who came to this country without permits or visas already lacked rights and a sense of safety. Under the new paradigm they also lack sanctuary, with the Trump administration declaring its intention to pull people out of schools and churches in addition to their workplaces and homes. The concept of sanctuary, even for refugees seeking asylum, is under practical and cultural attack.

So in some sense, all of this was anticipated, at least by people who were paying attention. We expected to see ICE unleashed in our neighborhoods. We expected intimidation and, ultimately, mass deportations.

An interesting detail emerged about the raid near my home that day: Out of hundreds of reports of ICE and border patrol raids in our region in the three weeks prior, this was the first that appeared to be legitimate.

The evening news and local papers that day reported on the raid, pasting my neighbors’ cell phone videos directly into their newscasts and on their websites. My........

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