The Cost of Cruelty

Paranoid Island Part Six: economic impacts of ICE in Key West

By Zack Ford

“Like, if you were in a drunk argument in a bar and had to wow someone with a statistic or two,” I clarified. I was speaking with Giovanni Peri, the C. Bryan Cameron Distinguished Professor in International Economics at the University of California, Davis. His research has been referenced in

The New York Times,

The Washington Post, and

The Wall Street Journal, and I wanted to talk with someone smart, because the drunken, xenophobic jeers of “America First!” and “We love ICE!” were still ringing in my ears after the anti-ICE protest I covered in

Part Fiveof this series.

Peri told me perhaps the most impactful statistic to joust a blotto Trumpite would be that undocumented workers contribute yearly up to $1,500,000,000,000 to the national GDP through their economic activity. If you’re stumbling over the zeros, we’re speaking in trillions.

Sure, UC Davis is a reputable school, and perhaps Peri’s input was more factual than the slurred opinions of angry white men sloshed on Iguana Bait Kölsch and staggering down Duval Street, many of whose chagrinned wives tried to stop them from yelling insults like “Get a job!” at the teenagers protesting the unconstitutional deportations of their friends. But I thought I’d up the ante by hearing what economists teaching at Ivy League universities had to say about whether there was merit to the anti-immigrant furor Trump has been stoking since his rally cries of “Build the Wall” back in 2016.

I started with Harvard. Jeffrey Miron, senior lecturer and director of Undergraduate Studies in Economics, told me via Zoom:

Economists do not deny and certainly should not deny that immigration and competition much more broadly will have losers as well as winners. . . . We shouldn’t claim that immigration, like competition more broadly, is unambiguously good for everybody in all circumstances. Now that said, the standard economic perspective is that the total impact [of immigration] is going to be beneficial. Immigration seems to be associated with improved innovation [and] productivity growth that helps everybody.

Mushfiq Mobarak, Jerome Kasoff ’54 Professor of Management and Economics at Yale, seconded this notion. He told me via email:

The typical Nobel Prize winner is someone affiliated with a U.S. university but not born in the United States. Talent is everywhere and the countries that have been most successful are ones that can attract talent born elsewhere to their country. The most damaging aspect of the current immigration policy is that the U.S. is successfully making itself feel unwelcome to talent born elsewhere. This will have long run economic consequences, as future innovations will occur in the countries that are successful in attracting that talent away from the United States.

Still, Trump had declared all sorts of unsavory things about immigrants, calling them “illegal monsters” who were “poisoning our country” and “taking” people’s jobs. During his 2024 campaign, the president even claimed that immigrants went around eating people’s pets. So, surely, those Trump supporters who’d assaulted and groped the teens who’d participated in Connor Freeman’s anti-ICE march had solid reasons for their antagonism, right?

Mushfiq Mobarak lecturing at the Yale School of Management in 2022. Photograph courtesy Mushfiq Mobarak

Treb Allen teaching at Dartmouth in 2019. Photograph courtesy Treb Allen

But out of more than a dozen Ivy League professors I spoke with, along with a few from other top universities, not one of them suggested Trump’s ironfisted clampdown on immigrants and immigration is doing America any good.

Melanie Morten, associate professor in the Economics Department of Stanford, pointed me to a six-hundred-page report produced by the Academy of Sciences, which found that immigrants lowered prices for US-born workers, specifically citing sectors such as childcare, food preparation, house cleaning and repair, and construction. And Gene Grossman, professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton, told me that, since the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, immigration has contributed eight percent to American innovation as measured by the rate of patenting. He added, “Immigrants do not substitute closely for domestic labor, which is one of the reasons that the ICE deportations had a negative effect on the economy in 2025.”

Treb Allen, distinguished professor of Economics at Dartmouth, said, “Immigrants are a boon, not a drain. They increase GDP both on the production side and the consumption side. I think there is no question that the mass deportations are doing more harm than good to the economy.”

So why do some Americans seem to think immigrants are a threat to American greatness? Louis Putterman, professor emeritus of Economics at Brown University, summed it up: “The real reason for [Trump’s immigration] policies is to score political points with those receptive to the administration’s brand of xenophobia and racism, not to help U.S. workers and certainly not to help U.S. companies.”

The concept of racism kept coming up. Diego Comin, professor of Economics at Dartmouth, said, “Bad Bunny spoke in Spanish at the Super Bowl and only for that they would have deported him, if they could.”

A conversation with Alex Poterack, Steven Rattner Associate Teaching Professor in Economics at Brown, confirmed to me that economic data is no match for American racism. “Immigrants tend to pay in more to the government than they take out,” he said. “Right now, our biggest overall economic problem is that we have high interest rates to fight inflation. The only way we’ll be able to cut interest rates without triggering more inflation is by reducing the deficit. Even if running ICE were free, removing workers who pay in more than they take out only makes the deficit worse.” (Of course, running ICE isn’t free. Under the Trump administration, ICE has become the highest-funded US law enforcement agency, with a budget of [$85 billion.)]

An unidentified teenager is pinned down by ICE agent Bruno Cabral. Screenshot from a video posted to Instagram by the Key West Immigrant Support Network

Reuben Martinez working as a bartender on a Royal Caribbean Cruise in 2011. Photograph courtesy Reuben Martinez

Speaking with these professors, I began to understand why the Trump administration had also been cracking down on higher education: the factual analyses of well-educated people fly in the face of the administration’s anti-immigrant agenda. As I was nerding out with these eggheads, Key West Immigrant Support Network shared a video via social media of an unidentified teenager in Key West having his head smashed into the pavement by an ICE agent. I did not recognize the agent at first, because he’d grown a beard, but it was Bruno, The Big Bald One. He was back.

In the video, Bruno, identified by Mandy Miles, a reporter for the Keys Weekly, as Bruno Cabral, can be seen straddling the teenager on the pavement, pinning him down. “Stop, you’re gonna get tazed,” Bruno threatens, as the kid, who is reportedly just nineteen years old, cries out in pain and distress. “I go to work,” the teen protests, “I need to go!” An off-camera witness can be heard saying, “Sir, that’s a kid, he’s not resisting, you threw him off his bike!” Another bystander exclaims, “Piece of shit fascist,” as Bruno yanks the kid up by his handcuffed arms. Bruno retorts, “You’re a piece of shit,” then stuffs the kid into his unmarked maroon SUV. Bruno slams the door and, pointing his finger at the witnesses, says, “Get out of here or you’re going to get arrested as well.” An onlooker asks, “Are you telling us to back up twenty-five feet away?” referencing Florida’s Halo Law, which stipulates a twenty-five-foot buffer around law enforcement officers and emergency responders actively performing their duties. One of the witnesses protests, “You threw him off his bike for no reason!” Bruno points to his bodycam and says, “You know I got a camera, right?” And a woman offscreen says, “We have you on security cameras, he wasn’t resisting.”

On the morning of February 21, I got a text from a man named Reuben Martinez. He sent me photos of another man who’d been attacked by ICE agents that morning and had suffered a large gash in his arm from the assault. Later, at his home in the New Town district of Key West, Reuben told me he’s had five close friends taken by ICE, even though they all had legal documents permitting them to live and work in the United States: two from Venezuela, two from Nicaragua, and one from Serbia.

Reuben works as a cook at a Key West diner, where he’s been employed for the last ten years. He also has a second job as a mechanic. Although it’s a risk for him to speak up, his resolve to be vocal about ICE was galvanized by the deportation of his son.

His son was residing in North Carolina, had a work permit, and was in process for asylum; but he was detained in February of 2025 when he showed up for a court date resulting from a minor car accident. Reuben said his son was incarcerated in ICE’s Stewart Detention Center, in Georgia, for seven months before being deported to Nicaragua, where he was born and where he lived before joining Reuben in the United States in 2022. He was twenty-four and working as a sales representative at the time of his detainment. When I asked Reuben what his son is doing now in Nicaragua, Reuben said, “He’s trying to rebuild his life.”

Reuben was also born in Nicaragua. When he was a toddler, his parents moved to Costa Rica, which is where he grew up. As a young man, he joined Royal Caribbean Cruises as a bartender. He enjoyed the richness of diversity in the passengers he met. “It was like a United Nations on the boat,” he said. “I learned to have empathy for everybody.” He first stepped foot on Key West through a Royal Caribbean port. He’s been here for thirteen years and has never before felt the fear he feels now as a person of color living under the threat of ICE. He showed me a WhatsApp text chain the local Latino community uses to communicate about the ongoing crisis. The chain has nearly 1,000 members.

“Let me see if I get this straight,” I said. “The reality of what the people on the text chain are going through: they wake up, they get ready for work, and then they look at the text chain. Almost like a video game, they see where ICE is, and then they take little detours just to try to get to work. Then they work. Then, before they leave or get back on their bikes or in their cars, they look at the text chain, see the latest of the placements [of ICE vehicles and/or agents], and then they take detours to get back home safely.”

“Yeah,” Reuben said. He told me that ICE agents also run vehicle plates to gather information on people, including where they live.

He said the ICE raids were “emptying out” Key West. When he went out on New Year’s Eve, he found many local haunts dead—places that had been packed in previous years. These were businesses on Duval Street, the busiest street in Key West, that the Latino community used to frequent. “They were absolutely empty,” he said. If vacant restaurants and bars in Key West aren’t clear indicators of the negative impact of ICE arrests on the local economy, consider Part Five of this series, in which I reported that Keys Coffee Co. was forced to close its doors for the day after an employee was taken into ICE custody. Or consider the first installment of this series, in which I wrote about the statement co-signed and released by more than a hundred local business leaders warning that ICE crackdowns were decimating Key West’s workforce. In one case that earned national media coverage, six men employed by a local roofing company were detained on their way to a job, wiping out a third of the business’s employees.

Though Reuben acknowledged that deportations were frequent under the Obama and Biden administrations, he said what’s happening under Trump is different. There had been a marked uptick in brutality and racial profiling under the current administration, he said, referencing the video of the teen on the bike, how Bruno had thrown him around like a “puppet.” He scoffed, “Why do you make a puppet of a person?”

These days, Reuben mainly stays indoors. “To go to the store, to buy groceries, you have to look first. What is the best time to go there? Otherwise, you can expect anything. They’ve taken people from the gym . . . from the grocery store, from Publix, from Winn-Dixie. And they just went to shop, and ICE takes them,” he said, adding that he and his family go outside “only for necessities.” This reflected what the economists had told me: anti-immigrant policies are making it difficult for Reuben and his family to participate in the economy.

And yet, they have been spending. While his son was in the Georgia detention camp, Reuben sent commissary money through a website called GettingOut, a name I find ironically cruel. The site is run by Global Tel Link, which is owned by a private-equity firm and which provides telecom services to incarcerated people at criminally high prices. Likewise, on GettingOut.com, a fee of several dollars was attached to each deposit Reuben made, even if the deposits were as low as $20.

Jose, injured after an assault by ICE agent Bruno Cabral. Shared with permission from an anonymous source

A texted photograph of a man with an injured arm had brought me to Reuben’s home, and I left with that man’s name and address. Jose lives on Stock Island, the next Key east of Key West. I met him on the deck of his trailer, where he lives with his wife. Jose, from Guatemala, works as a cleaner. Outside his home, dozens of just-cleaned cleaning rags lay in the sun, drying like leaves fallen from a fabric tree. Jose pulled two rubber tires off a stack of four and thus made us two seats. “So, tell me what happened,” I said.

At about eight in the morning, he was heading out his front door to go to work. He heard sirens but thought nothing of it until he opened his front gate and a “Spanish guy” forced himself inside and onto the deck. We surmised this man might have been a local police officer aiding the ICE agent behind him—Bruno. (Last year, Key West mayor Danise “DeeDee” Henriquez voted in favor of a 287(g) agreement to create a formal partnership with ICE agents and local police officers, despite vociferous protests from hundreds of Key Westers.)

Jose said Bruno reached inside the gate and yanked him outside. He then pushed him to the ground, causing the gash on his arm. After accusing Jose of trying to assault [him], Bruno handcuffed Jose and threw him across the hood of his unmarked vehicle. Jose told me Bruno’s accusation of assault was a lie.

“He was like, crazy,” Jose said, telling me how Bruno put him in the back of the vehicle and started driving erratically around the neighborhood. “He almost killed a person,” Jose said, referring to a pedestrian, and imitated the revving sounds of Bruno’s engine.

At this point, Jose’s wife burst from the door of the trailer. She was scared, wondering if I was an ICE agent, and I was deeply moved by her willingness to inject herself into what she thought was a potentially dangerous situation to protect her husband. She was relieved when I introduced myself as a journalist with no relation to The Big Bald One. “I’m very nervous today,” she said. “I don’t know why the city does nothing,” Jose wondered, as we discussed Bruno’s savagery, which has been well documented by citizens and journalists. When I told them this article series was being read by large numbers of people, Jose’s wife said, “We need that, we need people to listen to us.”

I asked Jose how he’d been set free. He took off his sunglasses, and I noticed his nerves, his eyes narrowing and blinking, his stress. He explained that, while he was handcuffed in the backseat, Bruno took his ID and began to laugh and make “immature” comments. “I’ll do exactly what he did,” Jose said. He then offered an impression of Bruno: Haha, you go back to your country, you don’t belong in this country, we don’t want you here.

Though Bruno had Jose’s ID—proof that Jose is an American citizen—he drove Jose a few miles down North Roosevelt Avenue to an ICE operations facility adjacent to a Popeyes franchise. When Jose asked why he was being driven away, Bruno told him, “You struck me and you resisted arrest.” Once in the parking lot, Bruno called someone who Jose assumed was an operator inside the ICE facility. “The operator told [Bruno], ‘His lawyer already called,’ because as soon as he took me my wife called my lawyer, and my lawyer called them, so the operator told Bruno, ‘You have to let him go, he’s a citizen.’”

Jose said even after Bruno lied to the operator that Jose had struck him, the operator insisted that Bruno let Jose go. Thereto, Bruno left Jose handcuffed in the car for nearly an hour as he went into the building presumably to argue with the operator. Finally, Bruno re-appeared, took Jose out of the vehicle, and uncuffed him, saying, “I’m going to let you go, but we’re going to make sure you get a letter, because we’re going to take your status from you.” Jose walked a couple blocks to a friend’s house so he could get a ride home.

Reflecting on Bruno, Jose said, “I don’t know how I can describe him. He looks like he’s not human. I’m sure nobody loves him, and that’s why he acts like that. That’s what I’m thinking.” About ICE agents, he said, “They’re like animals coming after you.”

Jose has been in Key West for thirty years. He’s a naturalized citizen. “I went through all the steps,” he said.

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