John M. | Red Phoenix correspondent | Colorado–

In the heart of American fascist tyranny, where the ruling class clings to power through border walls, deportation squads, and endless wars abroad, another family has been shattered by the terroristic machinery of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Wael Tarabishi, a 30-year-old U.S. citizen battling the rare genetic disorder Pompe disease, died on Jan. 23, 2026, after months of enforced separation from his father, Maher Tarabishi—his sole caregiver. Maher, a 62-year-old Jordanian immigrant who had lived in the U.S. since the 1990s and complied with annual ICE check-ins, was detained on October 28, 2025, during a routine appointment in Dallas. 

This wasn’t just an administrative glitch; it was a calculated act of class warfare, ripping apart innocent lives to enforce the imperialist agenda of control and terror.

Wael’s death wasn’t from his illness alone—it was accelerated by the psychological torment of isolation, a direct result of ICE’s refusal to release Maher, even as his son’s health spiraled. 

Family members watched helplessly as Wael, confined to the ICU at Methodist Mansfield Medical Center for over a month and unconscious for his final eight days, withered away without the man who had fed, bathed, and cared for him 24/7. And in a final spit in the face of human dignity, ICE denied Maher’s pleas to attend his son’s funeral on Jan. 29, 2026, leaving the grieving father caged in a detention center while his family buried Wael in Arlington, Texas. “ICE is responsible for the death of Wael,” declared a family member. “They may not kill him with a bullet, but they killed him inside.” This is no isolated tragedy; it’s the logical endpoint of a system built on exploiting the vulnerable to maintain bourgeois dominance.

The Tarabishi family’s ordeal is but one thread in the blood-soaked tapestry of ICE’s atrocities. Since its inception in 2003 as part of the post-9/11 security state, ICE has embodied the fusion of imperialism and domestic repression. Rooted in the history of colonialism and the systemic enforcement of chattel slavery, it now polices the borders of empire, ensuring the flow of cheap labor while quelling any threat to capital’s dominance. Borders under capitalism are not neutral; they are instruments to divide the international proletariat, ensuring a reserve army of undocumented workers who can be super-exploited, deported at whim, and used to depress wages for all. 

Maher Tarabishi, like millions of migrants, was drawn to the U.S. by the economic dislocations wrought by imperialism—U.S.-backed interventions in the Middle East, including support for reactionary regimes in Jordan, which perpetuate poverty and force workers to seek survival abroad. Yet once here, they are criminalized, their families shattered to instill fear and compliance. Wael’s death exemplifies how the capitalist state commodifies human life, prioritizing “enforcement” over the well-being of the working class, especially its most vulnerable members.

Incidents like these are a part of a systemic pattern of fascist barbarism by ICE, where children and dependents are routinely weaponized as “bait” to ensnare families, abuse the innocent, and perpetuate cycles of trauma. Here we must consider the chilling case of five-year-old Liam Ramos in Minnesota, detained by ICE in January 2026 alongside his father. Witnesses and school officials reported that agents used the child to lure out his own family members, instructing him to knock on his home’s door to pressure and coerce relatives into compliance before whisking him over a thousand miles to a detention center in Dilley, Texas. ICE, of course, denied this, claiming the father “abandoned” the boy—a transparent lie to cover their predatory tactics. 

Such maneuvers exploit the most primal human instincts: parental love and protection, turning them into traps for deportation.

This pattern of cruelty extends to institutional mechanisms like the information-sharing agreement between the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Under this policy, data on unaccompanied minors in ORR custody is funneled to ICE, enabling raids on potential sponsors—often parents or relatives—who are then targeted for enforcement. As advocates have documented, this has trapped thousands of children in prolonged detention, using them as “bait” to apprehend undocumented family members. The result? Families face impossible choices: risk deportation by sponsoring a child or leave them in limbo, fostering further separation and abuse. Surveys reveal ICE’s enforcement actions against parents of ORR children, leading to scenarios where minors are released to shelters or the streets, vulnerable to exploitation.

Abuse within ICE’s grip is rampant and deliberate. Immigrant children in detention endure insults, threats, physical assaults, and neglect, compounding the trauma of separation. Under the Trump administration’s renewed crackdowns, family separations have evolved from border spectacles to insidious raids that leave children to “parent themselves”—caring for siblings, and facing heightened risks of academic failure, delinquency, substance abuse, anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation. Cases like that of 21-year-old Beverly Juarez, thrust into guardianship of her siblings after her parents’ deportation, or six-year-old Gabriela Pineda, stranded with a near-stranger post her mother’s detention, illustrate how ICE’s actions dismantle working-class families, pushing survivors into precarity and reinforcing further seclusion.

This is far from anything new. These horrific actions are the evolution of U.S. capitalism’s racist underbelly. From chattel slavery’s family-shattering auctions to the boarding schools that stole Indigenous children to “kill the Indian, save the man,” the bourgeoisie in the United States has always used family separation to crush resistance. Today, ICE’s raids near schools, detentions of kids with cancer, and nightmarish Chicago apartment sweeps—where agents zip-tie toddlers and separate them from parents—echo the tactics of past fascist regimes but are homegrown in America’s white supremacist soil. 

These fascist goons, emboldened by bipartisan complicity, operate with impunity because –  they serve the interests of capital. The U.S. empire, built on stolen land and enslaved labor, requires such violence to sustain its global hegemony. Migration is not a “crisis” but a symptom of imperialism’s plunder: wars, sanctions, and neoliberal policies that devastate homelands like Jordan for the sake of outsourcing cheap labor, forcing workers into the imperial core only to be discarded when convenient.

Wael Tarabishi’s blood is on ICE’s hands, and the torment of his family demands not just outrage, but organized resistance against the imperialist beast. 

ICE cannot be reformed; it must be completely dismantled. 

Borders are barriers created by the ruling class to divide the international proletariat and it is our duty to raze them to the ground. We mourn Wael not with tears alone, but with rage that ignites resistance. 

Every denied funeral, every innocent child used as bait, every family shattered is fuel for the fires that will engulf this dying empire, and from the ashes a new world where all families can live in peace and dignity, and the sounds of laughter replace the memories of unspeakable grief.

Categories: Immigration, U.S. News