At the very beginning of Donald Trump’s second term, this magazine warned that his mass deportation plan wouldn’t just affect immigrants, but that it was a direct threat to the safety and civil liberties of all Americans. As cases piled up in the months that followed of US citizens being arrested, questioned, detained, and even deported from the country, we warned again that the operation was menacing law-abiding Americans and trampling their constitutional rights.

It’s now been nearly nine months, and it could not be clearer that the administration’s aggressive and indiscriminate approach to deportations, coupled with the impunity granted to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agents to carry it out, is a profound danger to every US citizen.

The most recent incident took place last week in Chicago, where federal agents rappelled (needlessly) from helicopters into a residential building in the city’s lower-income South Shore neighborhood, indiscriminately broke down apartment doors, threw flash-bang grenades, and zip-tied and dragged out residents while ransacking their property. That includes several US citizens, children among them, who were detained for hours without access to a lawyer.

Yet there seems to be remarkably little urgency around this issue from the political class.

The Chicago raid is being bitterly criticized by officials in Illinois but not much beyond the state. The national attention it has drawn is mostly because of news reporting, and even that has not exactly placed it center stage. It’s an issue that, like the Kilmar Ábrego Garcia case, could become a throbbing political weak spot for the administration on what is meant to be its signature issue — if only someone would champion it.

The Chicago incident is not even remotely the first time this has happened. The New York Times recently counted, based on public records, at least fifteen US citizens who have been arrested and detained by ICE, a common pattern being that they were racially profiled, often physically assaulted, and that their protestations and even proof that they were citizens were simply ignored by agents. Capital & Main put together a tally of at least nine US citizens who faced similar profiling and physical assault while trying to go about their day in peace. CNN found that more than one hundred US citizen kids have effectively been made orphans through their parents’ deportation.

One man, a US Army veteran with two young kids, was arrested at his work and held for three days without access to a phone or a lawyer. In Alabama, a man of Mexican descent — who was repeatedly detained by ICE at construction sites he worked on after it entered without a warrant and dismissed his REAL ID — has filed a class-action lawsuit against the administration on behalf of others like him. In another instance, ICE agents repeatedly assaulted and then detained, for twelve hours, a seventy-nine-year-old US citizen whose car wash they were raiding — all for the crime of trying to show them the work authorization papers for his employees.

Last weekend in Chicago, Border Patrol agents shot a US citizen woman seven times for following them in her car. The judge in the case remarked that it “is a miracle to me that no one was more seriously injured.”

Miracles don’t tend to come in spades. It is only a matter of time before something even more, possibly irreversibly terrible happens to an American citizen.

Even under Barack Obama, there were numerous cases where US citizens were wrongly detained, unable to prove their citizenship, and ended up behind bars or even banished from their own country in years-long, Kafkaesque ordeals. The Trump administration’s refusal to release data about US citizens it has swept up doesn’t suggest things are better now.

Meanwhile, ICE agents’ lack of professionalism under Trump 2.0 only raises the risk of some kind of deadly clash or disastrous bureaucratic error. Agents are often masked and consistently refuse to show warrants or even identify themselves, making it impossible to tell the difference between an immigration enforcement operation and a kidnapping by common criminals. They have shown an alarming tendency to use unnecessary physical force against unarmed and often defenseless people, whether assaulting women much smaller than themselves, firing gleefully at priests, attacking journalists, and, at one point, taking a five-year-old, autistic girl who is a US citizen effectively hostage to try and lure her father out to be arrested. It is not clear whether ICE’s hires get adequate training for the job they’re tasked with, with several cases of panicking agents recklessly brandishing or wildly firing their guns after fumbling an arrest.

Needless to say, this is not what people voted for. Polls have shown again and again that when voters heard “mass deportation,” they more pictured the removal of violent criminals without documentation, and they still favored a path to legal residency for people who had been here for years and had no criminal record. At minimum, even accounting for the most hawkish of immigration hawks, no one’s definition of “mass deportation” involved US citizens having masked government agents kicking down their doors, destroying their property, and physically assaulting or abducting them, before they are potentially disappeared God knows where.

So again, the question is, why are there almost no elected officials turning this into a major public issue?

George W. Bush’s similarly civil-liberties-shredding “war on terror” had tremendous public backing for a while. Yet Democrats still turned its violation of Americans’ rights and assertion of despot-like powers into a major vulnerability for him. Bear in mind, neither Trump nor his deportation program has anything close to the support Bush and his “war” had.

While large majorities of Americans — anywhere between over 60 percent to as high as 95 percent — backed a slew of measures that sacrificed individual rights for safety in the early Bush years, Trump’s deportation policy is already remarkably unpopular. Trump has been underwater on his immigration policies for months now. A majority, albeit a slim one, of voters think Trump’s immigration enforcement actions have gone too far, even as they favor deporting undocumented people. Half of those polled think ICE’s tactics are “too forceful,” including most Democrats and a majority of independents. Meanwhile, polls have never shown a public appetite for deporting documented immigrants, so it’s hard to imagine there is any significant constituency that favors turning the deportation machine against US citizens.

It is hard to imagine these numbers getting better once more and more US voters come to understand that this deportation program is a direct threat to themselves and their families, let alone their core rights as Americans. Just think back to the Ábrego Garcia case, where a Maryland man was wrongly swept up in Trump’s expulsion of hundreds of supposed Venezuelan gang members to a black site in El Salvador. While centrist types like Matthew Yglesias advised timidity and cowardice on the issue, once Sen. Chris Van Hollen turned it into a public controversy, it not only proved deeply unpopular, but the administration was forced to back down and bring Ábrego Garcia back — and he isn’t even a US citizen. The fact that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has felt the need to put out a press release claiming, falsely, that “ICE does not arrest or detain US citizens” suggests the administration knows this practice would not go down well with most of the US public.

Ábrego Garcia is still fighting his deportation. But his case is a good model for what should happen again, only not just from a single US senator. The way politics and the news cycle unfortunately work is that unless an issue is taken up by a prominent official and there is an element of partisan conflict, it’s not likely to get a lot of play. Look at Trump’s friendship with the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, a major scandal that’s been around for years but only became the biggest story in politics once Democrats took it up and it turned into a series of partisan standoffs. Americans need to understand how their rights are under threat from what increasingly looks like a rogue government organization, but they never adequately will unless members of Congress take it up as a cause.

This issue doesn’t even require a politician to take a particularly courageous stance on immigration, though that would be nice. It’s perfectly possible for moderate centrist types to keep calling for a “strong border” or maintain a conservative, even restrictionist position on immigration more generally while treating ICE’s attacks on US citizens as the major scandal that it is. If more centrists took up this line of attack, it would have a positive effect for everyone, citizen and noncitizen alike, caught in ICE’s brutal dragnet.

Such politicians should talk about this issue to the press every chance they get. They could hold press conferences with some of the US citizens who have been detained or assaulted, and incessantly demand the data that DHS won’t release of how many citizens have been arrested, or even if there are any being held in detention and where. One lawmaker who visited the “Alligator Alcatraz” heard a detainee say they were a US citizen — who is this person, and what has happened to them? A parade of lawmakers should regularly physically go down there and demand to get an audience with this individual, even if DHS ultimately refuses them entry.

They could produce videos for social media of ICE’s mistreatment of US citizens, complete with interviews and shocking footage of the assaults; bring it up at hearings and aggressively question testifying US officials about the dangers US citizens are facing and what they are going to do to stop it. These are all just a few basic ideas.

It doesn’t have to just be Democrats. Libertarian Republicans who have bucked the administration on matters of war and civil liberties should also be alarmed by the fact that there’s a massive force of armed federal agents attacking US citizens, breaking into their homes, and sometimes trying to wrongfully deport them from their own country.

Forcefully standing up for the rights of US citizens is the bare minimum we should expect from even the most craven elected officials at the national level. But right now, it’s almost as if none of it is even happening. The Trump DHS’s persistent mistreatment of the Americans it’s claiming to fight for is a major scandal that would quickly turn into a wider political sore for the administration and would likely also boost the career prospects of whichever politician made it their pet issue. It just needs someone to do it.