Editor's Notes: Los Desaparecidos de ICE

It is all too easy to get sucked into the numbers, the analysis of atrocity, in the hope to understand it, and to lose sight of the quality of its lived experience.

I understand, for example, the tendency to focus on the enormous number of dead produced by the Soviet Union in the period of time that saw the collectivization of its agriculture and resulting mass famine, the purges, and four years of total war. But at times I feel this emphasis leads people to forget the decades that ordinary citizens of the USSR spent living under totalitarianism. And the burden, the terrors of that life are closer to Orwell than the early years of murder at scale.

The cloud of anxiety that is perpetually settled over a community. The sense that you could be taken away at any moment or, perhaps worse, you could be walking in your neighborhood and encounter a stopped car in the middle of the road, one of its windows shattered, its driver conspicuously absent.

I am speaking now, of course, not of the Soviet Union, but Donald Trump's America. And to truly understand Trump's America and his mass deportation campaign, one need not, and perhaps should not, look primarily to the old 20th-century totalitarian regimes. So I will turn to a different example: los Desaparecidos of the Argentinian military junta.