they also have help from the public.

when i was 6 years old, ice’s predecessor impounded the only vehicle my family owned at the time; a 1978 ford econoline 250 family van; and held it for over a year on the suspicion that we were smuggling drugs & people across the border.

when they finally agreed to return it after multiple requests from a cheap lawyer; they made us travel six hours to collect it and it was literally in pieces and in different cities. ie: cylinder head was in one garage; brake calipers were in a another; engine block was in the garage in the next city over; transmission was also dissembled into component pieces and we had to travel to california to get it.

immigration (aka ice’s predecessor) did not have the mechanical know-how to deconstruct a large family van so they clearly sent it to mechanics across 4 border cities to deconstruct it for them all the way down to their constituent parts. there’s no conceivable way that those mechanics didn’t already know why they’re deconstructing an already older van by that time, but they did it anyways. (and they weren’t paid for it)

to make it clearer that the cruelty was the point (we were a family of 7 surviving off of minimum wage so reassembling an entire car was already not realistic) they gave us 30 minutes to collect all of those car pieces and it was a large family van so 30 minutes was not realistic either; especially since only 75% of those pieces were in arizona between 2 cities and the rest were in california.

in the end, joke was on them, though. we were lucky enough to have a large enough circle of family and friends that were willing to help across both states to collect the parts within that 30 minute window and also have enough mechanical competency among us to reconstruct the van from all of the parts and, as a result, that van ran without ANY mechanical issues for almost 20 years; we didn’t spend a penny on it after rebuilding it.