Two teenagers. Not criminals. Not threats. Students.
In Mississippi, brothers Israel and Max Makoka, high school students from the Republic of Congo were taken by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement while waiting for their school bus. Witnesses say they were zip-tied in front of classmates, then separated into detention facilities in different states.
Let that sit for a moment.
These were kids who played basketball, went to school, and were described by their community as respectful, hardworking, and kind. They weren’t hiding. They weren’t running. They were standing at a bus stop, doing something millions of students do every single day—when the system decided they didn’t belong.
Supporters of strict immigration enforcement will point to policy. ICE claims the brothers violated their student visas. But when policy results in teenagers being handcuffed in front of their peers and separated from each other, we have to ask a harder question: when does enforcement cross the line into cruelty?
Because this doesn’t look like safety. It looks like fear.
This moment doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s part of a broader crackdown under the administration of Donald Trump, where immigration enforcement has expanded and detention policies have tightened across the country. Communities in Mississippi and beyond have already felt the impact, families living in fear, students disappearing from classrooms, and entire neighborhoods changing their daily lives just to avoid the possibility of detention.
And now, there are plans to expand that evil system even further. A proposed ICE detention center in Byhalia, Mississippi, signals something deeper than policy—it signals hate. It suggests that instead of rethinking a system that is tearing families apart, leaders are doubling down on it.
That should concern everyone.
Once detention becomes infrastructure, it stops being temporary. It becomes normalized.
What happened to these two teens is not just a legal issue, it’s a moral one. A country should be judged not by how it treats the powerful, but by how it treats the vulnerable. And right now, this system is showing young people, students, that they can be taken, separated, and detained over paperwork complications they may not have even understood.
That is not justice. That is not compassion. And it is not something we should accept as normal.
You don’t have to agree on every detail of immigration policy to recognize this: there has to be a better way than this.
If this is what enforcement looks like, if this is what we’re willing to justify, then we have to ask ourselves what kind of country we’re becoming.
The opinions expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the views of the newspaper staff, faculty advisors, school administration, or affiliated organizations.
