Immigration and Customs Enforcement never seems to sleep. Armed with vast resources and an apparently bottomless capacity for cruelty, the agency continues inflicting suffering on immigrants in service of President Donald Trump’s xenophobic vision and that of senior White House adviser Stephen Miller.

Those abuses can be sweeping or brutally petty, with deadly attacks existing alongside smaller acts of deliberate cruelty. With government transparency fading, the public often learns about what happened only after detainees and their families have already endured the consequences.

That is the situation surrounding Aminata Seck, a Kentucky State University basketball player. ICE arrested Seck at Louisville Muhammad Ali International Airport on Aug. 7 while she was traveling with her team.

Since her arrest, ICE has relocated Seck at least four times. She was moved to Chicago and eventually to Texas, where she is currently being held.

Her apparent offense hardly resembles the staggering threat that the Trump administration’s rhetoric about dangerous immigrants would suggest. Seck appears to have missed a deadline to renew her student visa because she was having back surgery.

ICE has also left families scrambling to care for children after taking away their relatives. In Birmingham, Alabama, high school sophomore and standout soccer player Orlando Avalos is now being cared for by his 22 year old brother, Marvin.

Their grandparents, Roberto Avalos Magallon and Dolores Mendoza Cerda, were taken by ICE earlier this month after a family reunion in California. According to their attorneys, the grandparents entered the United States legally.

Instead of being with their grandchildren, Roberto Avalos Magallon and Dolores Mendoza Cerda are being held in two separate ICE facilities in Louisiana. The result is another family divided by an agency supposedly focused on arresting the worst criminals.

Eight Somali men have meanwhile been held at Guantanamo Bay for weeks. They were told that they were stopping in Cuba for “refueling” while traveling to Somalia.

Three of the men told Minnesota’s Sahan Journal that they had active asylum cases and valid work permits. Their accounts present yet another jarring contrast with the administration’s relentless portrayal of detainees as dangerous criminals.

One of the men, Abdullahi Adam Mohamed, was pulled over at the beginning of Operation Metro Surge. The source describes the stop as sounding suspiciously like racial profiling against a Somali driver.

The Minnesota state court database showed two misdemeanor snow emergency parking citations for Mohamed. Yet he was sent to a facility where prisoners are shackled, exposed to constant cold air, and kept under continuous surveillance.

The administration is preparing to expand this system on an enormous scale. More than $7 billion is being directed toward efforts to enlarge detention camps across five states, creating more room for an operation already detaining people over matters as minor as missed paperwork and parking citations.

At the same time, thousands of detainees with final orders of removal have disappeared from the online locator system. The source describes this as an illegal effort that prevents families and attorneys from finding people held by ICE.

When attorneys cannot locate their clients, those detainees cannot effectively challenge their final orders of removal. The disappearance of their information therefore creates another major barrier between detained immigrants and the legal help available to them.

The administration is also increasingly using deportations to third countries. Immigrants are being sent to dangerous places where they have never lived, do not speak the language, and have no resources.

Taken together, these cases show cruelty operating at both an individual and systemic level. A student recovering from back surgery, grandparents separated from their grandchildren, and men with valid work permits or minor citations have all been swallowed by the same sprawling detention machinery.

None of this resembles a narrowly focused campaign against uniquely dangerous criminals. It is a system defined by family separation, opaque transfers, expanded detention, inaccessible records, and deportations to unfamiliar countries.

The horrors may emerge slowly because transparency has collapsed, but their impact is immediate for the people trapped inside the system. The expanding detention apparatus is monstrous, unnecessary, and unforgivable.