When Immigration Enforcement Becomes Theatre

 A six-year-old asking “Where’s Papi?” should not be a political Rorschach test. Yet that is what the United States has turned it into.

The image of an ICE officer and a frightened child spread across social media within hours. The reaction was instant and predictable. Some saw cruelty. Others shrugged and reached for the law. “He broke it.” A third group moralised. “Should’ve come the right way.” What almost nobody asked was the most important question of all: why did enforcement have to look like this?

This was not a violent arrest. It was not an emergency. It was not a man whose whereabouts were unknown. This was an undocumented father whose identity, address, immigration history, and family situation were already on file. That fact alone changes the conversation.

Immigration enforcement, in itself, is not immoral. Every state enforces borders. The question is not whether law should be enforced, but how. Mature systems distinguish between authority and excess, between necessary action and unnecessary harm. Children are supposed to be shielded from the blunt edge of state power. That principle collapses the moment enforcement turns theatrical.

What happened here was not about capacity. It was about choice.

The United States did not lack information. Visa overstays are not invisible. They leave paper trails, biometric records, employment histories. The government knows who stayed and where they live. If compliance were the real objective, civil summons, scheduled check-ins, or supervised removal were available. Instead, enforcement arrived at the most destabilising moment possible, guaranteeing fear, chaos, and viral imagery.

That is not efficiency. It is signalling.

Supporters of this approach often resort to a familiar comparison: criminals get arrested too, and their children suffer. The analogy sounds firm but collapses on contact with reality. Murder is a violent crime. Being undocumented is an administrative violation. Democracies that treat paperwork violations with the optics and force of counter-terror operations quietly abandon proportionality, one of the foundations of rule-based governance.

The phrase “he should have done the right thing” carries moral weight until it meets the structure of the U.S. immigration system itself. America issues visas it knows will be overstayed. It tolerates backlogs that stretch for years or decades. It allows employers to profit from undocumented labour while rarely holding them accountable. When the consequences surface, responsibility is shifted downward to individuals the system quietly depended on.

That is not law enforcement. It is moral outsourcing.

A large undocumented population does not appear by accident. It is evidence of institutional failure—failed border management, failed visa tracking, failed employer enforcement, failed political will. Raids do not fix these failures. They merely redirect public anger away from bureaucratic neglect and toward the most vulnerable people in the chain.

Children becoming collateral damage is not an unavoidable by-product of law. It is a policy decision. States choose timing. They choose methods. They choose whether child-welfare protocols matter. Coordination, discretion, advance notice, and civil compliance mechanisms were all possible. Their absence reveals priorities more clearly than any campaign speech.

From Karachi, this scene feels disturbingly familiar.

Pakistan has lived for decades with undocumented populations—Afghans, Bengalis, internal migrants—often tolerated quietly until political pressure builds. When enforcement finally arrives, it is rarely systematic. It is symbolic. Loud. Punitive. And aimed downward. Long-standing failures in registration, border control, and labour regulation are suddenly blamed on the weakest people involved. Raids replace reform. Spectacle replaces governance.

The United States once criticised such behaviour abroad. Now it appears to be repeating it.

From the Global South, this does not look like strength. It looks like a powerful state losing confidence in its own procedures. A democracy replacing predictability with fear. A country that still speaks the language of rights while improvising its enforcement ethics.

For decades, American influence rested not only on power, but on process. The claim was simple: laws are enforced, but with restraint; authority exists, but within limits. When enforcement becomes performance, that distinction erodes. Moral authority is not lost in one dramatic moment. It leaks away through repeated choices like this.

This is not an argument for open borders. It is an argument for seriousness.

A serious state enforces law without humiliating families.

A serious state fixes systems instead of staging raids.

A serious state does not need a child’s fear to prove it is in control.

America still has the capacity to enforce its immigration laws. What it is rapidly losing is the credibility to say it does so wisely. When order becomes theatre and law becomes performance, the problem is no longer immigration.

It is governance.