When Deportation Needs a Villain

By LONNIE KING

I’m not a deep individual. It’s usually the shiny objects that catch my eye.  So, while I wish I could say I noticed the problem immediately because I have been paying close attention to every immigration case unfolding across the country, I didn’t.

I noticed this one because the name of a former NFL player appeared in the headline.

Daniel Adongo was never an NFL star. He appeared in only five regular-season games for the Indianapolis Colts before his football career ended in 2015. But he was the first Kenyan to play in the NFL, and his unusual journey from professional rugby to American football made his name familiar enough to catch my attention.

That familiarity made me stop and read.

What I found was a story about immigration, criminal justice, mental illness, and government power. But what Immigration and Customs Enforcement presented to the public was much simpler.

ICE removed a dangerous criminal, and America was now safer. And that is the part I cannot accept without asking more questions.

The Question Is Not Whether ICE Had the Authority

Daniel Adongo came to the United States in 2013 after being recruited by the Colts. According to ICE, his visa expired in 2016 and he remained in the country after that.

An immigration judge ordered his removal in March 2026, and ICE deported him to Kenya on June 20.

I have not seen credible evidence that Adongo was an American citizen, a permanent resident, or otherwise legally protected from removal. Based on what has been reported, the federal government appears to have had the legal authority to deport him.

That matters.

I do not want my concerns about ICE to become so automatic that I disregard inconvenient facts. If Adongo no longer had legal permission to remain in the United States and received an immigration hearing, then there was a legitimate legal basis for removing him.

But that answers only one question.

It does not establish that Adongo was a continuing threat to public safety. It does not prove that Americans were endangered by his presence. And it does not explain why ICE felt compelled to portray his deportation as something resembling the capture of a violent fugitive.

Legal authority and moral justification are not always the same thing.

A Criminal Record Is Not a Single Category

ICE described Adongo as a “criminal illegal alien” and a “dangerous individual.” It referenced arrests for felony intimidation, battery, disorderly conduct, and other offenses.

Those allegations should not simply be dismissed. Repeated encounters with law enforcement can indicate genuinely concerning behavior, even when they do not result in convictions. But arrests are not convictions and charges are not findings of guilt.

And the phrase “criminal record” encompasses an enormous range of conduct.

The conviction consistently identified in the reporting is a 2020 misdemeanor for criminal mischief involving property damage. Adongo was sentenced to 364 days in jail. That was a real crime, and mental illness does not make property damage harmless. But a misdemeanor property-damage conviction is not equivalent to murder, rape, child abuse, gang violence, or terrorism.

ICE knows that.

Nevertheless, its announcement about Adongo repeated the administration’s broader claim that immigration enforcement is targeting “murderers, rapists, child sex abusers, gang members, and terrorists.”

ICE did not explicitly say Adongo committed any of those crimes. It did not have to. By placing that list in the same announcement, the agency encouraged the public to associate him with the most dangerous people imaginable.

By the time readers reach the end of the release, Adongo has been rhetorically placed among violent predators even though ICE never establishes that his history is comparable to theirs.

That may be effective messaging. It is not honest context.

When Mental Illness Becomes Evidence of Menace

There is another part of Adongo’s history that received far less attention in ICE’s presentation.

He reportedly suffered a severe psychological deterioration after his athletic career ended. A court found him incompetent to stand trial during one of his previous cases. A physician reportedly described him as acutely psychotic. He spent time in a psychiatric facility, and his family and advocates say he was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Some people who worked with him also suspected that he may have suffered from traumatic brain injury or chronic traumatic encephalopathy after years of playing professional rugby and football. CTE cannot be definitively diagnosed in a living person, so that possibility should not be presented as established fact.

His documented psychosis and competency problems, however, cannot simply be treated as incidental details.

Serious mental illness does not mean a person can never be dangerous. It does not erase responsibility for harmful behavior, and it does not mean government officials should ignore legitimate threats. But it should change the questions we ask.

• Was Adongo considered a current danger by a court or qualified mental-health professional?
• Was he receiving appropriate psychiatric care?
• Was he competent to participate meaningfully in his immigration proceeding?
• Could supervised treatment have reduced whatever danger he may have presented?
• What arrangements were made for his treatment after he was returned to Kenya?

ICE’s announcement does not answer those questions. Instead, the symptoms and consequences of a profoundly troubled life appear to have been assembled as evidence that the label “dangerous” belonged to him.

There is an enormous moral difference between saying a person’s mental illness may help explain destructive behavior and saying that mental illness excuses everything he has done. There is also an enormous difference between protecting the public from an identified threat and removing a vulnerable person whose untreated illness makes him easier to portray as frightening.

ICE Did Not Simply Remove Him…It Sold Us a Story

ICE could have announced that Daniel Adongo had overstayed his visa, received a removal order, and been returned to his country of citizenship. That would have been a straightforward account of immigration enforcement.

Instead, an ICE official declared: “This dangerous individual was clearly a threat to the community, which is now safer since he’s been removed.”

That is not merely a legal conclusion. It is an empirical claim about danger and public safety.

If ICE determined that Adongo presented a current threat, the agency should be able to explain the basis for that conclusion. An old misdemeanor, a collection of arrests, and a history of severe mental illness do not automatically prove that someone is a continuing menace to society.

“Removable” is a legal classification. “Dangerous” is an individualized judgment. “The community is now safer” is a claim about consequences. ICE slides from one to the next as if each automatically proves the others.

It does not.

The government may have possessed the authority to deport Daniel Adongo. But if the legal case for removing him was legitimate, why did ICE also need to construct a villain?

The Label Often Arrives Before the Evidence

If Daniel Adongo’s case existed by itself, ICE’s language might be dismissed as one official’s attempt to make a routine enforcement action sound more consequential.

But it does not exist by itself.

The current Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly responded to controversial uses of force by immediately characterizing the person on the receiving end as dangerous. That characterization often arrives before an independent investigation, before all available video has been reviewed, and sometimes before the person’s family has been notified.

When ICE agent Jonathan Ross shot and killed Renée Good in Minneapolis, DHS did not ask the public to wait for the evidence. It said she had weaponized her vehicle and described her actions as “domestic terrorism.”

Video of the shooting raised serious questions about that account, including whether Ross remained in imminent danger when he fired from beside her vehicle.

When Border Patrol officers killed Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse who had been observing immigration enforcement activity, DHS officials suggested that he approached agents with a handgun and intended to “massacre law enforcement.”

Multiple videos showed Pretti holding a phone, not a gun. He possessed a firearm legally, but the available footage indicated that it remained holstered until an officer removed it during the struggle. Other officers began shooting moments later.

Possessing a legally carried firearm was transformed into evidence of murderous intent.

In Houston, ICE agents killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo after DHS said he attempted to run over an officer with his van. Two passengers who witnessed the shooting have disputed that account in sworn court filings. They say the van had stopped and that no officer was positioned in front of or behind it.

Those investigations have not all reached their final conclusions. It would be irresponsible to declare with certainty what happened in every disputed second of every encounter. But that restraint is precisely what DHS has repeatedly refused to show.

A Reuters investigation examined six violent encounters involving federal immigration agents and found that video or legal records contradicted important elements of the administration’s initial accounts in each case.

Again and again, the agency announces that its officers faced a dangerous aggressor. Again and again, the dead or injured person is assigned the role of villain before the evidence can be independently examined. When video or witnesses challenge the original account, DHS rarely displays the same enthusiasm for correcting the narrative that it showed when creating it.

This matters because the government’s first version travels farther than the eventual correction:

• “Domestic terrorist”
• “Armed threat”
• “Dangerous individual”
• “Criminal illegal alien”

The circumstances change, but the rhetorical purpose remains remarkably consistent. The label justifies the government’s action before the public has enough information to evaluate it.

In Adongo’s case, the action was deportation rather than deadly force. But the storytelling method was familiar. ICE did not simply tell us what it had done. It told us whom to fear and how to feel about his removal.

That is not public transparency. It is public relations with the power of the federal government behind it.

The Expansion of a Promise

The administration initially defended its aggressive immigration policies by promising to remove murderers, rapists, child abusers, gang members, and terrorists. Those categories created an implied bargain with the American public. Extraordinary enforcement measures were necessary, we were told, because the country faced extraordinary threats.

But the category gradually expanded.

The same vocabulary of danger is now applied to people with dramatically different histories. A violent felon, someone with an old misdemeanor, and someone arrested but never convicted can all be placed beneath the same “criminal illegal alien” label.

The original list of frightening offenders remains useful because it provides emotional justification for everything that follows. That is how governmental overreach becomes easier to accept. The government does not have to prove that every person it removes is comparable to a murderer or terrorist. It only has to repeat those words often enough that the public stops noticing the differences.

Eventually, legal removability becomes synonymous with dangerousness. Every deportation becomes a public-safety victory. Every person removed becomes retroactive evidence that the enforcement was necessary. And anyone who questions the proportionality can be accused of opposing immigration enforcement altogether.

Government Should Not Need a Villain Every Time It Exercises Authority

I am not arguing that Daniel Adongo had an unconditional right to remain in the United States. I am not claiming that every accusation against him was false. I am not suggesting that mental illness makes harmful conduct acceptable.

I am asking why the government believed it was necessary to tell us that America became safer when he was gone.

Perhaps Adongo presented a genuine and immediate danger. If so, ICE should show us the evidence supporting that conclusion. Perhaps his removal was simply the lawful consequence of remaining in the country after his visa expired. If so, the government should say that without placing him rhetorically alongside murderers, rapists, child abusers, gang members, and terrorists.

Government power should be exercised honestly and proportionally. People should be judged as individuals, not converted into political symbols after the government has already decided what story it wants their removal to tell.

I noticed Daniel Adongo because I pay attention to sports. But I kept reading because the story did not seem as simple as ICE wanted it to be.

Maybe that is how many of us begin to recognize institutional overreach. We see it first when it reaches an area we understand or touches someone whose humanity we can more easily recognize.

The important thing is what we do after we notice.

ICE gave Daniel Adongo a label and told Americans to feel safer because the person carrying that label had been removed. Similar labels have been attached to people after federal agents injured or killed them, sometimes before the evidence had been examined and sometimes in ways the evidence later disputed.

That is more than political spin. When a government repeatedly vilifies people to justify its own use of power, it becomes propaganda. And before blindly accepting it, we should insist that our government show its work.