Cars and trucks pass by. Some slow down and hastily take a quick photo or video of local law enforcement and ICE agents making the arrest. The scene disappears in their rearview mirror as they drive on. The arrests are fast. Within minutes, the person operating the vehicle is no longer there, snatched and torn away from one life and forcibly transported into another that will never be the same. And, within minutes, the nameless and often faceless agents in the unmarked SUV’s and trucks apprehending them on highways and roads across Oklahoma disappear as well.
A white Ford Transit work van sits abandoned on the side of a street in the north suburbs of Oklahoma City. Work tools remain in the storage area in the back. A work order lies on the passenger seat. Take-out food rests on the dashboard. On the south side of the city, a maroon Ford Fusion is left stranded in the grass off Interstate 44. Construction gloves, a camouflage jacket, yellow safety vest, a cooler and a thermos with an Arkansas Razorbacks logo remain inside the car.
In a state where all seventy-seven counties voted to support Trump and his anti-immigrant policies in 2024, state and local law enforcement have signed on as important allies in the Trump administration’s immigration raids. Over thirty state and local law enforcement agencies in Oklahoma now have 287(g) agreements with ICE, which effectively deputize them to ICE. This includes the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, with over 700 state troopers who are now empowered to make immigration arrests. Recently released data shows that more than 1,300 people were arrested by ICE in Oklahoma in the first two and a half months of 2026.
“Just because we don’t see the things that we’re seeing out of Minneapolis, doesn’t mean people aren’t being detained,” an Oklahoma City-based immigration lawyer said to me. “It doesn’t mean that people aren’t being taken and disappeared…because that is happening in Oklahoma.”
Years of criminal justice reform have left the state, several counties and towns, as well as the profit-driven private prison industry hungry to fill empty bed spaces or to explore new sources of revenue. Incarcerating and exploiting immigrants for ICE has proven to be an opportunistic and lucrative alternative. Jails in Kay, Logan, Grady, Blaine and Tulsa counties now detain immigrants for ICE. Cimarron Correctional Facility outside the town of Cushing operated by the private prison company CoreCivic, currently detains 600 immigrants per day.
And in late 2025, CoreCivic, DHS/ICE and the Oklahoma Department of Corrections cut a deal to repurpose and reopen Diamondback Correctional Facility, in Watonga, as an ICE detention center. The 2,000-bed prison in rural northern Oklahoma sat empty for ten years. Reopening Diamondback is expected to generate combined annual revenues of over $100 million for CoreCivic, the state, the county, and the city of Watonga, population some 2,500.
“We’re losing really, really wonderful people to this craziness.”
Attorneys, activists, churches, and community groups and organizers are responding with new strategies to serve and protect their communities. High school students—many from immigrant families—courageously walked out of class in protest of ICE activity and the racism and intolerance driving immigration policy.
Yet here in Oklahoma, ICE’s public elusiveness is also a menacing reminder of its presence everywhere. For individuals, mixed-status households and communities in Oklahoma City, Tulsa and smaller towns, the fear and anxiety of knowing but not seeing is often paralyzing.
The front doors at the ICE office on Sovereign Row in Oklahoma City close behind a Venezuelan man as he dutifully enters and presents himself for his scheduled check in with ICE. His friends sit in the car and cry when he never returns.
A Honda Civic sits in the parking lot of an apartment complex. The driver’s side window is shattered. A white plastic laundry basket remains in the front seat filled with clean clothes. Cars and trucks continue to pass by the white Ford Transit and the maroon Ford Focus. The day continues. Time moves on, yet inside that abandoned car or truck or van, time stands still. A worker doesn’t show up to the worksite or the office. A seat in a classroom is suddenly empty. A husband or wife, mother or father, brother or sister doesn’t return to their home in Oklahoma ever again. A life is violently suspended and replaced with absence and grief.
Detention
Grady County Jail, in Chickasha, Oklahoma is one of more than thirty counties, local law enforcement agencies and state agencies in Oklahoma with agreements to detain immigrants or perform immigration enforcement duties for ICE through an agreement with the US Marshals Service. In 2019, a 13,000-square-foot addition to the jail was completed, adding some 200 beds.
Diamondback Correctional Facility, in Watonga is operated by the private prison company CoreCivic, formerly CCA (Corrections Corporation of America); it opened in 1998 and held federal prisoners until it was closed in 2010, sitting empty for almost fifteen years.
In late 2025, the facility reopened as an immigration detention center. CoreCivic said in October that it expects to earn $100 million annually from Diamondback once the facility is fully activated. The Oklahoma Department of Corrections receives an ‘administrative fee’ of $833,333 each month to monitor CoreCivic’s compliance and perform other administrative functions related to the facility.
Watonga
Watonga City Manager Leroy Alsup explains how revenue from Diamondback could be utilized by the town: “It could be put into an equipment fund…being a small town, we’ve got a lot of dated equipment that could stand to be updated…Most municipalities have a lot of water and sewer lines that are aged and need to be replaced. When we apply for grants to update and replace water and sewer lines, we’ll have more funding for matching funds to get that. There’s a variety of ways that additional funding can help us. It’s just too early to show that impact yet, but the potential is there.”
Watonga Senior Center plays a vital role in Watonga, offering exercise classes, inexpensive meals, social events, and serving as a meeting place for the Kiwanis Club. I spoke to four of the women working there: they’ve noticed the increased traffic at Diamondback.
“We don’t get a whole lot of information about who all is out there and how many. If you drive by there, it’s packed with vehicles, though. Big vans, which I assume are bringing in people,” one of the women says.
Jim owns a paint and body shop in Watonga. Regarding the reopening of Diamondback Correctional Facility for the detention of immigrants for ICE, Jim says it will profit CoreCivic, but is skeptical that it will do much for Watonga.
“I really don’t see much of a benefit…I don’t know where they will bring in the workers from. Out of this county or what, but you would think there would be some that live here that might work there. It might bring a few jobs.”
Impact
After ICE arrested the driver of a nondescript sedan, the car was left on the side of the road. Several sets of chopsticks and air filter cartridges for a work mask were left on the floor. Construction gloves, a camouflage jacket, a yellow safety vest and a small cooler remained on the passenger seat. A yellow work helmet and some personal belongings remained in the back seat.
Federico, 39, was born in Mexico, but Oklahoma has been his home for over twenty-two years. He is married and has two children who are US citizens. In November 2025 he traveled on a bus with other musicians to perform a concert in Midland, Texas. In the city of Anson, Texas, local law enforcement asked to see the status of everyone on the bus. He spent the next six weeks detained by ICE. Eventually he was released on bond but was required to wear a GPS ankle monitor. Federico was one of more than 42,000 people ICE had shackled with GPS ankle monitors across the country as of February 2026.
“Having this monitor on my leg is a reminder that they have a hold on me by the foot. It’s them telling you that you’re not free.”
“I live with this fear that I’m always being monitored,” he explained to me. “It’s very complicated to have this thing on your leg when you’re going to sleep or during your routine in life every day. I’m always afraid of damaging it, bumping it on the edge of the table. I don’t want them to think I’m trying to damage it or trying to be free of it. Your life can’t go back to being normal. Nothing is back to normal. Having this monitor on my leg, it is a reminder that they have a hold on me by the foot. It’s them telling you that you’re not free.”
Several hundred students walked out of classes at Santa Fe South High School in Oklahoma City on February 18, protesting against ICE and immigration enforcement threatening their community.
“We deserve to be heard. We deserve to be seen as people. We are not animals to be deported,” one student demonstrator said.
On February 22, 2026, a young man from Honduras spent the morning washing his clothes at a nearby coin laundromat. ICE arrested him when he returned home to his apartment.
“They pulled up three deep and surrounded him. They blocked him in first,” a neighbor who witnessed the arrest said. “I saw one of them pull out their gun and broke the front driver’s side window. They jacked him out and treated him like a fucking animal. It was disgusting. They pulled him out, took his phone from his hand and just threw him on the ground. Then they just threw him in the car and took off with him. They didn’t say nothing else.”
Witnesses say the ICE arrest was quick, no more than a few minutes. A bottle of Centrum multivitamins remained in the cupholder between the seats. A laundry basket filled with unfolded clothes rested on the passenger seat.
Bureaucracy
The David L. Moss Justice Center is the site of the Tulsa County Jail. According to the most recent data released by ICE, each day, the facility is jailing an average of 33 immigrants for the agency, who on average stay five days before they are moved to other detention centers in Oklahoma, Texas, or elsewhere in the country. More than three out of four people detained by ICE here have no criminal record.
Of the thirty immigration-related bills filed by state legislators, most did not progress, including a bill prohibiting NGOs from providing assistance to undocumented people and asylum seekers, another mandating all law enforcement agencies in Oklahoma to enter into 287(g) agreements with ICE, and a law denying US citizenship to children born in Oklahoma to parents who are not US citizens or legal residents.
State Sen. Michael Brooks, Democrat of Oklahoma City, sits in his office at the Oklahoma State Capitol. A lawyer by profession, he specializes in immigration law and is the author of Senate Bill 1470, which proposed access for state-level elected officials or religious leaders to enter and inspect privately owned correctional facilities, including immigration detention centers.
“There were at least three private prisons in Oklahoma that were either being used for other purposes or were vacant…If we’re going to allow these private prisons to come to the state of Oklahoma, I think it’s reasonable that state elected officials would be able to go and inspect them,” he said to me. Though it received strong support, the bill failed to advance.
Pushback
Staff of the Spero Project assist a woman who has called into a rapid response hotline about her son, who was recently pulled over by local law enforcement while on his way to work, transferred into ICE custody, and placed in detention. She calls to try and find out where he is.
After searches through several online sources and phone calls, they locate the young man at Cimarron Correctional Facility in Cushing, Oklahoma. An hour later, a different woman calls the hotline to ask how she and her partner can self-deport.
Since October 2025, in partnership with a group called Critical Response Network Oklahoma, community volunteers and staff meet two days a week at an undisclosed location to operate the phone hotline.
“Any amount of information,” a hotline volunteer says, “even it it’s bad, helps them deal with the chaos” and lack of information. “When we’re able to find someone in the system and tell them where, and kind of explain what might happen—it’s terrible, but I think, especially the wives, that helps them kind of have something to deal with.
“They may not at that moment of crisis think of the questions to ask, but I think we generally tell them, this is where he is, this is what might happen, this is probably what the timeline will be. I think, in the midst of the chaos and tragedy, that little bit of information helps.”
“For somebody who doesn’t know where the person is, it’s really hard to find out. And the uncertainty creates a lot more stress and a lot more sadness to the family members,” the volunteer says. “It’s like, ‘I don’t know where he’s at. I don’t know where he is.’”
Elsewhere in Oklahoma City, vulnerable families and individuals attend free legal clinics where volunteers and immigration lawyers assist with powers of attorney, standby guardianship, community resources, and free legal consultations.
“We’re losing really, really wonderful people to this craziness,” says a member of Latitude Legal and Community Response Network, which organizes the clinic. “We’re losing community members. And what I think people are really beginning to understand is that we are in proximity with so many people that maybe have unstable legal status, and you would never know it.
“The way things have changed in policy over the past year and two months, it is making things increasingly difficult to stay in status. This argument of ‘come the right way’—well, they did come the right way, and those pathways are narrowing on them. We’ve changed the rules on them mid-game.”
Fear of ICE forces Maria, 30, to rely on friends, family, and volunteers, for rides to work and essential shopping.
“When President Trump came into office, everything changed overnight,” she said from the passenger’s seat during one ride. “Right now, you can’t go out without having constant fear that you’re going to get pulled over, or ICE is going to grab you. You almost don’t have a life, because you have to go to work, you have to go out to get groceries, but you’re going and looking in the rearview mirror to see if anybody’s there.
“Before you leave the store, you’re looking around to see if there’s a patrol out there waiting for you. It’s just being afraid for yourself, but also everybody around you. I’ve always been an independent woman, and I do my own thing and take care of my own life. It’s really hard to depend on other people to help me do things that I could do before.”
Reverend Kara Farrow of the Fellowship Lutheran Church in Tulsa leads a prayer at a know-your-rights and rapid response training in March, held by the state’s ACLU chapter and Community Response Network Oklahoma, a community defense organization.
“Within the last two weeks, about twenty members of the congregation have received letters,” Farrow says, demanding their presence at ICE offices in Oklahoma City, Dallas, or Houston. “Last Wednesday, the man that serves as the assisting minister was detained in Cushing. And there are just appointments upon appointments upon appointments coming up. What is heartbreaking is that as much as we’ve tried, they’re taking them anyway. I just found out that another person who was detained two weeks ago is being sent back to Venezuela. And so it’s just week after week.”
Greg Constantine produced this work as part of the 2026 Bertha Challenge Fellowship.