In Short – Issue 5 (Spring 2026)

May 31, 2026

Image credit: Untitled by Taylor N. Myers

Ice Season

By Erin Ruble

It’s been years since Vermont’s seen a February this cold. Each morning I wake to temperatures below zero, hoarfrost on the trees, ICE on my computer screen. A friend writes from Minneapolis. She’s been a U.S. citizen for years, is a professor and a founder of nonprofits, but she’s afraid to spend much time out of the house. They’re picking up anyone with an accent, and she can’t afford that, not with her son to care for, her father terminally ill.

It’s warmed to one above. As the fire roars in the woodbox and the cat purrs in the sun beside me, I tell the judge how one client suffered something like a stroke in the immigration detention center when they gave him the wrong medication. He, too, is caring for a chronically sick family member. He has no criminal history, cooperates with the government. After five months of legal wrangling, a judge orders his release. The next day, the government sends him to a private company that locks him into an ankle bracelet, searches his home, threatens to call him in the middle of the night, restricts where he can go and what he can do. The administration just signed another billion-dollar contract for this extra-legal surveillance. I’m guessing the company will make more off the data they skim, which they keep for years. The user agreement they force noncitizens to sign, as if there were a right to refuse, says they can share this information, says state privacy laws cannot touch them.

Another night dipping to 10 below. I wonder where those sleeping in their cars have gone, if they are still alive. I wonder if ICE detainees have heat, as storms rip through the country, stripping power and burying cities and roads and fields. Even in normal weather, the detention centers are known for unliveable temperatures, for grotesque overcrowding, inadequate or rotten food, poor or no medical care, physical and sexual abuse. More than three dozen people have died in ICE custody over the past year. Many more will die in the months to come.

As outrage mounts over the shooting of an armed white man, Trump walks back his stance on enforcement, then walks back the walkback. Judges order noncitizens released, and ICE arrests more. There are quotas that must be met, big-money contracts that must be fulfilled.

I give a talk on the new detention policies to a gathering of Quakers. My anguish must show, because one woman—a lifelong activist—finds me afterward.

“People like us can’t afford the luxury of despair,” she tells me, and she’s right. There is always more to be done.

I pause drafting another brief to drive to Burlington, where thousands are rallying in support of the people of Minneapolis. There are some of the usual crowd—men in keffiyehs and women with uterus-themed signs—but it’s more focused than most anti-Trump marches. Obscenity-laden anti-ICE chants jumble together as the crowd plows through the snow, a snake of people a street wide, blocks long, students who marched out of classes, professionals still in work clothes. People watch from shop windows, from each tier of a parking garage. Alex Pretti’s face is everywhere. Liam Conejo Ramos’s blue bunny hat shows up on a few signs.

The next day, a Texas judge orders the 5-year-old’s release in a scathing opinion. A week later, the ultra-conservative judges of the Fifth Circuit say that holding people like this child in detention centers—essentially prisons, often in fact in prisons—for the months or years their immigration proceedings take is not just fine, but mandatory.

I tell my husband that I no longer know how to live in this world. He says it’s always been this way. There has always been misery, whether or not it’s on our doorstep. But there is this, too: the birds, puffed round against the cold, flocking to the seed we give them. Thousands of people marching through frigid streets to support a city most of them will never see. And the people of Minneapolis organizing grocery trips to bring food to those afraid to step outside, shuttling neighbors’ kids to school, filming the brutality of men with guns despite knowing they could be killed for it.

I step into the yard and look up into the hazy blue sky. This morning dawned so cold that ice crystals squeezed from the air itself, fell through the golden morning like confetti. But the sunlight that touches my cheek now is warm.

It’s the season of cold, yes. But seasons change.

Erin Ruble (she/her) is an immigration attorney and writer. Her essays and short fiction have appeared or are forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, Fourth Genre, Boulevard, River Teeth, and elsewhere. She lives in Vermont with her family and the occasional flock of chickens. You can find her at erinruble.wordpress.com.