One morning in March, as ICE was building momentum in carrying out President Donald Trump’s mass-deportation campaign, dozens of people who had recently been detained throughout Virginia were being rushed through preliminary hearings. The government was using Zoom to save time, so Judge Karen Donoso Stevens sat in a mostly empty courtroom, adjourning some proceedings in less than two minutes each.Donoso Stevens yelled at a man to “stop talking!” while his own case was being heard and became frustrated with another who got confused when she referred to him as “the man in the green jacket.” (He wasn’t wearing a green jacket.) When a father said he was scared to leave the country without his 5-year-old, she ignored the comment and asked if he had enough money to pay for his ticket home. I was in court that day hoping to see how Trump’s new deportation mandate was playing out, but the hearings were moving so quickly that I was having trouble keeping up.Some people said they needed more time to find lawyers or fill out applications. I was getting only snippets of people’s stories, as one bled into the next. But time seemed to slow around noon, when Donoso Stevens called a man from El Salvador with pale skin and short curly hair, wearing an orange jumpsuit, with his hands cuffed behind his back. “I’m very worried about my three babies,” he said in a slow, shaky voice. “The officers arrested me in front of the two littlest ones, who are 2 and 4.” He began to cry, explaining that his youngest had been sick, and that his 4-year-old’s first words to him since his arrest had been to ask if the officers who took him away had hurt him.After the hearing, I asked an attorney to try to reach the man. (Only lawyers can directly call people who are in immigration custody. Detainees have to initiate calls with anyone else.) She tried several times but never heard back. He seemed to vanish, leaving me wondering for months what had happened to him.[Read: They never thought Trump would have them deported]Since then, I’ve often thought of that man while scrolling social media, where the stories of other people arrested by ICE have gone viral, turning some into minor celebrities: There was Ming “Carol” Li Hui, a waitress and mother from Missouri whose Trump-supporting neighbors and customers wore Bring Carol home T-shirts; and Marcelo Gomes da Silva, a high-school student in Massachusetts whose friends posted signs of his face in their front yards; and Narciso Barranco, the California landscaper whose three sons, all Marines, went on national television to decry their father’s violent arrest. These stories have spread because they seem—due to the young age of the person arrested, their contributions to the country, or the fact that they have young children at home—like exceptions whose treatment was uniquely harsh.Sitting in immigration court, I saw firsthand that they represent the norm. There was at least one deportation case that most Americans would likely support—a man who had been convicted of child sodomy—but most detainees were people without a criminal history who were worried about getting back to their families and their jobs.I wondered if the crying father might have also become a household name if his story were online. Instead, like most people who are detained across the country right now, he remained unknown and unreachable.Most of Trump’s deportation campaign is inaccessible because after arrests are made, it is moving quickly, far from public view. And because it is targeting people who have spent an average of 16 years in the United States, trying, in many cases, to avoid public attention, rather than court it. That makes it difficult to fathom the full picture of what’s happening. In the age of virality, our devices offer up individual case studies, allowing us to congregate around them virtually. Although this is useful in helping us understand what happens when a person is plucked from their home, it takes our attention away from the larger story—more than half a million people deported, millions more at risk—and focuses us instead on a tiny part of it.More than 70 percent of people in immigration custody have no criminal past. Although ICE has not released data on how many of them left children behind when they were arrested, the fact that an estimated 6 million kids in the United States have at least one parent without legal status suggests that this is the case for many. And detention centers for children have been packed since Trump took office. But none of this is easy to witness.The high-profile incidents have also helped a select few who are slated for deportation raise money for lawyers, or even be released. But they risk creating the impression that sharing stories on social media might somehow keep ICE’s work at bay. It won’t: Congress recently tripled the agency’s budget, making it the highest-funded law-enforcement agency in the country, and allocated $45 billion to expand its detention centers.[Read: ICE’s mind-bogglingly massive blank check]When Marcelo Gomes da Silva, the Massachusetts high-school student, was released, he held a press conference, surrounded by supporters. He seemed most troubled not by his own arrest, which took place while he was driving himself and some of his friends to volleyball practice, but by the prevalence of experiences like his. He said that he had told the other men he was detained with, “When I’m out, if I’m the only one who was able to leave that place, I lost,” adding, “I want to do whatever I can to get them as much help as possible.”Amid the barrage of stories flooding our phones, da Silva was conveying something that’s easy to miss. For every person arrested whose name and story we’ve learned, there are thousands we haven’t heard about. Despite becoming famous for being treated harshly, da Silva is one of the lucky ones.Most people detained by ICE are being housed in sprawling complexes in rural areas, where the land is cheap and the protests are few. Akiv Dawson, a criminologist at Georgia Southern University, has been conducting research at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, which can hold up to 2,000 people at a time. She said that since Trump took office, courtrooms have been packed with immigrants whose experiences would, according to polling, trouble the average American—people who have lived in the U.S. for decades, have American-born children, and have never been convicted of a serious crime. She told me about a lawful permanent resident of 50 years whose child is a U.S. citizen and whose deceased wife was as well. The man explained in court that ICE agents had mistaken him for someone else when they arrested him. But he admitted in court to having a single criminal conviction—simple marijuana possession from 30 years ago—so the judge decided to let the deportation case against him proceed. The man told the judge that his belongings would soon be thrown into the street if he wasn’t released; he needed to go back to work and pay rent. “He began to panic,” Dawson told me. “He said, ‘My people don’t even know that I’m here. They came and took me from my bed.’” Dawson said the man asked the judge why this was happening after he had spent so many decades in the United States. She replied, “Sir, this is happening across the country.”Dawson also told me about a young mother from Ecuador who had followed the legal process for requesting asylum and pleaded to be released on bail so that she could be reunited with her 2-year-old son, whom she had left with a neighbor. “She begged,” Dawson said, and recalled the woman saying, “Please, give me an opportunity so that I can do the process the right way.” The woman said she wouldn’t be able to continue with her asylum case if she was going to have to do it from inside a detention center. “I have a child. I can’t be here too long without him,” she said. With that, the judge said the woman had waived her right to relief, and continued processing her for removal from the country.“Are you going to deport me with my son?” the woman asked. “I don’t have anyone to keep him here.”“You would need to talk to your deportation officer,” the judge replied, according to Dawson. “I’m only handling your case.”Dawson pointed out that neither of these people—like the significant majority of those who are being held in ICE custody—had an attorney to defend them, making them five and a half times more likely to lose their case and be deported. Unlike criminal defendants, immigrants who cannot afford an attorney are not legally entitled to a public defender—and even those who can afford to hire representation are hard-pressed to find it in the remote areas where they are being detained. There is one immigration lawyer based in Lumpkin full-time; for more than a decade after the facility opened, there was none. Some lawyers represent clients there virtually, but presenting a compelling case via a computer screen can be difficult, especially with temperamental technology and glitchy internet connections. More than nine in 10 people detained there lose their immigration case and are deported.ICE is supposed to track when it arrests people who have minor children, and to ensure that their wishes for where children end up are carried out in the case of a deportation. But immigrant advocates say they worry, given how quickly new officers are being trained, that the agency may not be keeping adequate records, as was the case with families who were separated at the southwestern border the first time Trump was president. (Tricia McLaughlin, an ICE spokesperson, said the agency was in full compliance with requirements.) In the absence of clarity, it’s become common to underestimate the scale of what is happening. In August, for example, a public outcry followed the arrest in a New York City courthouse of a 6-year-old, who was initially reported to be the first child detained in the city during Trump’s second term. Soon after, however, journalists found that in the two months prior to that incident, 48 children had been arrested in the jurisdiction that includes the city. Data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act showed that 32 of those children had already been deported. Their stories were simply missed.Chance has long played an outsize role in immigration courts. There are no juries, and a person’s likelihood of winning can depend more on the judge they are assigned than the facts of their case. Social media has only exacerbated this phenomenon. Marcelo Gomes da Silva’s lawyer, Robin Nice, told me that as the community rallied around her client, the chief ICE prosecutor called her directly to discuss the situation—a first in her 13-year career—and his bond hearing was scheduled faster than she had seen in any previous case. Although the administration appears more intent on deporting Kilmar Abrego Garcia, even after it erroneously sent him to a Salvadoran megaprison and had to bring him back under court order, because of the public attention to his case, his family has been showered with donations. And Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, personally inquired about a mother and three children from Sackets Harbor, New York, whose detention had prompted a publicity campaign led by local teachers. Homan grew up nearby and said the case was unfortunate because it brought undue attention to the town where he would like to retire. The family was quickly released.But most unauthorized immigrants are likely to be uncomfortable broadcasting their deportation case—especially when the administration has shown that no location, age, illness, or disability guarantees a humanitarian reprieve.Months after I sat in the Virginia immigration court, I managed to track down the father whose story had stayed with me. His experience was full of the kinds of details that have led most Americans to believe that Trump has taken his deportation mandate too far. But he asked not to be named in my story, for fear that drawing attention to his family could further harm them.The man’s lawyer, Vishrut Shelat, explained that his client has lived in the United States since 2018 and has no criminal record. The man landed in ICE custody after being arrested in January when a neighbor called the police and accused him of breaking into a car and of having a domestic dispute. Both charges were dropped when he and his wife denied having a fight and proved that the car he was trying to get into was their own.Despite this, he wasn’t eligible for bail, because he was arrested days after Congress passed the Laken Riley Act. The bill is named after a young woman who was raped and murdered by a man who was previously released from criminal custody on bail. It makes people who have been accused, but not convicted, of relatively minor infractions such as theft ineligible for pretrial release. Judge Donoso Stevens had explained that under the new law, her hands were tied. Even after the police acknowledged that he hadn’t attempted to steal anything, the accusation alone meant that he would have to spend months in jail.Shelat told me that his client’s landlord has already begun eviction proceedings against his wife, who can no longer pay the rent. She and their three children have been buying food with donations from relatives and their church, but they are not sure how long those will last. Without any hope of release, the man agreed to be returned to El Salvador, leaving his wife and children behind. He hopes to file a petition when he arrives to return to his family as soon as possible. His application will land in a pile of many from people whose stories we’ll never hear.