Not a day goes by without new evidence that ICE is an agency running amok. Whether it’s elected officials getting arrested, a US citizen and Army veteran detailing how he was wrongfully arrested and held illegally, a peacefully protesting pastor being shot in the head with a pepper ball, a teenage girl being dragged out of a car and wrestled to the ground, or agents hitting a random car and abducting the driver at gunpoint.

All of these incidents are on tape, and they all happened in the past few days.

Of course, there are also ICE agents doing their best to escalate the situation in Chicago and Portland to justify a military occupation of these cities.

But what if we told you that none of these is the most troubling ICE-related story of the last week?

Sure, they all show that jack-booted government thugs are acting like the secret police forces of current and past authoritarian regimes.

They also illustrate that there is no accountability for anything these agents do, no matter how unconstitutional it is or how much disproportionate violence they use.

And that gets closer to the real, overarching problem here.

These agents aren’t bad apples. Instead, their behavior reflects Donald Trump’s immigration and deportation policies, which are designed to be blunt, cruel, and lawless.

If that weren’t the case, then the administration would discipline these agents and stop lying about the incidents they are involved in or the alleged threats they face.

Most importantly, it would not conduct its mass deportation plan like a pogrom and more like a targeted law enforcement operation.

Which brings us to the ICE-related story that we found disconcerting on a level that goes deeper than even what the masked goons are doing.

It is the story of Subramanyam “Subu” Vedam, who was arrested earlier this month and is held in a processing center.

Vedam’s case is unlike any other.

The 64-year-old has spent more than four decades behind bars for a murder he did not commit. While locked up, he was a model prisoner, earned a master’s degree, led literacy programs for other inmates, and helped hundreds of them get their high school diplomas.

Granted, as a teenager, he pleaded guilty to intending to distribute LSD, but it would be wrong to say that he “turned his life around” in prison because he wasn’t a criminal, just a guy who was railroaded in the early 1980s by a district attorney who withheld exculpatory evidence.

To the Trump administration, however, he is a “career criminal with a rap sheet dating back to 1980” who will be “held in ICE custody while the agency arranges for his removal in accordance with all applicable laws and due-process requirements.”

That’s an insane description of someone who was wrongfully convicted.

Vedam, who came to the US from India as an infant, never even got to spend a day in freedom with his family.

That’s inhumane.

It’s also a testament to the unyielding nature of a deportation program that is intended to punish any “illegal,” no matter what their circumstances are.

What is being done to Vedam is unbecoming of the United States of America… or, to be more precise, it is unbecoming of what the United States of America was before Trump took office.