CRUELTY WASN’T JUST the point this summer—it was the rule.

ICE made a record 50,925 arrests in August, surpassing the previous benchmark of 50,208 set only a month earlier. While right-wing pundits bray for deportations in the millions, the Trump administration has been targeting people without criminal records. The sort of people previous administrations deprioritized, such as the spouses of U.S. citizens, individuals with active asylum claims who entered the country legally, and people who formerly had status to live and work in the country (like those with Temporary Protected Status from Haiti), have been criminalized and dehumanized, sometimes to tragic effect.

On a reporting beat like immigration, human lives can often be reduced to statistics. So as this brutal summer draws to a close, I wanted to take stock and also put some names, or at least stories, to those statistics. For each person I talk about in this newsletter, there could easily be hundreds or even thousands of others. It really has been a summer of cruelty—cruelty on the macro level, from Trump down through the entire deportation apparatus—but also, as you’ll see, cruelty on the micro, everyday level, too.

The cruelty takes many forms. There’s the deliberate humiliation that comes from the top: think Trump’s dehumanization of immigrants, the illegal deportations, and the incredible funding of ICE at the expense of SNAP and Medicaid. Then there’s the casual cruelty that emanates from the entire administration, from the smirking comments by surrogates like JD Vance that immigrants are dirty pet-eaters or the violence and racial profiling perpetrated by ICE and CBP agents. Finally, there’s a bureaucratic cruelty that institutionalizes and masks the administration’s indifference to human dignity behind forms, orders, and policy decisions. All of it in service of a movement that wants to expel immigrants.

We shouldn’t look away. I’m certainly not. Here’s what I saw in my reporting throughout the summer.