Don't Forget About Trump's War At Home!

Sure are a lot of ICE custody deaths.

Photo by Eyasu Etsub on Unsplash

With Trump’s wars abroad, and those Epstein files, did you forget about his war at home? Kristi Noem may have left on her sex plane, and Greg Bovino has officially retired, but still somewhere around 70,000 people are languishing in Trump’s filthy, overcrowded, Geneva Conventions-violating ICE detention centers. As (acting) ICE director Todd Lyons put it, they have made an Amazon “Prime for human beings,” an assembly line that violently grabs and disappears people with no due process — 75 percent of them with no criminal records, and plenty of them here legally in the first place — then warehouses them indefinitely in dangerous and disgusting conditions.

Now another person has died in Department of Homeland Security custody under unclear circumstances, a previously known-to-be-healthy 41-year-old father of six and asylum seeker from Afghanistan, Mohommad Nazeer Paktyawal. On the morning of March 13 he left to go drop his children off at school in Richardson, Texas, and agents swarmed their car and dragged him away in front of his traumatized children. Within 24 hours, Paktyawal was dead. ICE said in a statement that he’d complained of chest pains and shortness of breath, and was taken to the hospital. And then ICE immediately set about trying to smear Paktyawal as a criminal, though he has never been charged or convicted of any crime. He even fought alongside US special forces in the Paktika province in Afghanistan! The moral bankruptcy, the depravity, knows no bounds. Whatever kind of Christianity a certain Supreme Court Six is practicing, the Jesus of welcoming the stranger and protecting the least of one’s brothers appears to have been secretly replaced with a deeply cruel asshole. Sounds like the sort of trick the devil might pull, TBH.

And Trump also suspended the refugee admissions program, stranding thousands of refugees and their family members; stripped 200,000 such Afghan refugees of protections; ended the Afghan special immigrant visa program; and in March added a travel ban from Afghanistan and 11 other countries too. And now he’s been sending back refugees, their protections stripped out from under them, who helped the US, so that the Taliban can kill them. There went forever one of the US’s most valuable tools for winning hearts and minds to help do regime change abroad! Along with all the other diplomacy.

At what point does it get fair to call them death camps? Deaths in ICE detention have soared under Trump, with a record-setting 41 deaths in custody so far, surpassing the rate of state and local deaths in custody. And while the private companies running these hellholes maybe don’t intend to kill people, when humans are forced-concentrated in overcrowded spaces with no medical screening, some of them with life-threatening conditions, with limited access to health care, everybody sleeping on the floor and sharing an overflowing toilet, women with no pads or tampons, it’s the ideal environment for any communicable disease. The US does not even subject violent murderers on death row to that!

And state governments generally can’t keep the feds from buying or leasing property in their state and generally doing with it what they please, at least until a judge comes along and demands that whatever they’ve got going on meets basic safety standards.

But DHS is also meeting resistance! Though it’s a game of Whack-a-Mole.

DHS has spent nearly $700 million trying to secretly buy and lease warehouse properties for humans, with the goal of 34 of such across the country in what it calls a “detention reengineering initiative,” without notifying local governments and bypassing any oversight, and then burrowing in and resisting any oversight or consequences. And DHS has still got a budget of $45 billion from the Big Boots for Bigots bill to expand between now and 2029.

Judges have been demanding cleanups and basic standards for detainees too, which DHS could readily afford. It could put all the detainees up at a White Lotus! But instead they’re being the most petty assholes possible. Like, following US District Judge Julie Rubin in Baltimore ordering that the ICE detention rooms in the George Fallon Federal Building adhere to basic standards, lawmakers showed up to find the detainees had been instead relocated to parts unknown, plus a lingering case of Legionella. Or at the Broadview ICE facility in Illinois, a judge ordered clergy be allowed to visit for Ash Wednesday, but when they did, the place was empty. Assholes.

But, all over the country, citizens, states, reps. and local governments — see latest examples Michigan, Maryland, Oregon, Utah, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Virginia — have been fighting the construction of ICE facilities and/or demanding they be held to at least the basic hygiene and safety standards US prisoners are entitled to get; sometimes winning. Sometimes not.

And private companies are taking a stand, too. Architecture firm DLR Group is now refusing to take any detention-center jobs after employees became outraged. A Canadian company refused to sell its Virginia warehouse to DHS. And even in El Paso, Texas, community pressure led to Majestic Realty refusing to sell a warehouse to DHS there.

Community pressure and shame work! And DHS knows it, too, which is why they’re being so fucking shady, while rolling around on piles of everybody’s tax money.

The End.

[Al Jazeera / Austin Kocher Substack / Mother Jones / FT archive link]