Here's Some ICE Horrors To Warm Your Heart To (Because You Are On Fire Because We're In Hell)
Police state is fucked up and bullshit.
Since we are living these days in a full-on police state dystopia and humanitarian crisis, it’s pretty hard to keep up with every deeply disturbing thing that happens. So, as we sometimes do, I’m gonna pop a Zofran and do a round-up of all of the horrific reports about the inhumane conditions of the detention centers and incidents from, well, the past few days.
How Bad Is It At 26 Federal Plaza? New York Congressman Dan Goldman Will Tell You!
Rep. Dan Goldman, congressman of New York, has been pushing to be allowed in to see the detention center at 26 Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan but has been barred by the Department of Homeland Security from doing so. He has instead been speaking to several people who have been detained there about what they’ve seen. And it’s not good.
One person he spoke to, who had been lawfully seeking asylum and had been granted a postponement in immigration court to seek legal counsel, described what happened to him and others when ICE officers decided to ignore that ruling and rounded them up anyway:
Shackled at the waist, arms, and legs, they were taken to the 10th floor of the building and held for days in a cramped, cage-like room with no beds, limited food and water, and only one bathroom, which was only partially shielded by a hanging sheet, for the roughly 140 individuals held there. They slept on the concrete floor for three days before being shackled again and transferred to an unknown facility, where they witnessed a visibly ill detainee vomiting who was not given medical care.
“There are 100 people in cramped holding cells,” Goldman reported he was told by another immigrant who was wrongfully arrested by ICE (which admitted this fact and let him go, eventually). “Very little access to food and water, no beds, no showers. One toilet shared among the 20 or 30 or even more detainees with very little privacy. No change of clothes. It absolutely reeks inside, and nobody is being told why they are there. He said there were people who had stayed there for as many as two weeks. Two weeks in those conditions.”
Can you imagine?
Of course, the Department of Homeland Security is out here claiming that this is all a big lie.
“Any claim that there is overcrowding or subprime conditions is categorically false,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “All detainees are provided with proper meals, medical treatment and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers.”
Well, then they should probably let Goldman and others in to see how lovely the accommodations are, shouldn’t they?
What’s even stranger is that we know, for a fact, that as of June 24, ICE was holding holding 59,000 people (with Stephen Miller demanding an additional 3,000 every day), and we also know, for a fact, that they only have 40,000 beds. How would there not be overcrowding? Are shrink rays involved in some capacity? Are the detention centers bigger on the inside, like a TARDIS? Because barring some kind of technology we do not yet have access to … there’s no way anyone is shoving 59,000 people into 40,000 beds without overcrowding.
It’s Not So Great At The Florida Concentration Camp, Either
Multiple people detained at what Trump and the Right think is adorable to call Alligator Alcatraz have reported even more horrific conditions at that site. Even aside from the threat of being eaten by alligators.
Via CBS:
“I am Leamsy La Figura. We've been here at Alcatraz since Friday. There's over 400 people here. There's no water to take a bath, it's been four days since I've taken a bath,” [a Cuban reggaeton artist and detainee] said.
He claimed the food at the immigration facility is scarce and unsanitary.
“They only brought a meal once a day and it had maggots. They never take off the lights for 24 hours. The mosquitoes are as big as elephants,” La Figura said.
“They're not respecting our human rights,” one man said during the same call. “We're human beings; we're not dogs. We're like rats in an experiment.”
“I don't know their motive for doing this, if it's a form of torture. A lot of us have our residency documents and we don't understand why we're here,” he added.
The cruelty is the point.
Once again, DHS’s position on this is that it’s all lies and not happening and it’s basically the goddamned InterContinental Hotel of detention centers. But of course it’s happening. We know enough about US prisons and jails to be sure that it is happening.
Even The ICE Officials Themselves Are Miserable
While we’re not inclined to feel too bad for the ICE agents responsible for grabbing people off the street or in the Home Depot parking lot and throwing them into these horrific detention centers, it’s at least good to know that they’re not having a great time, either. And they’re not. According to a report published this week in The Atlantic, ICE agents are, by and large, not happy with going full Gestapo.
“Morale is in the crapper,” another former investigative agent told me. “Even those that are gung ho about the mission aren’t happy with how they are asking to execute it—the quotas and the shift to the low-hanging fruit to make the numbers.”
A common theme of my conversations was dissatisfaction with the White House’s focus on achieving 1 million deportations annually, a goal that many ICE employees view as logistically unrealistic and physically exhausting. The agency has never done more than a quarter of that number in a single year. But ICE’s top officials are so scared of being fired—the White House has staged two purges already—that they don’t push back, another official told me.
More importantly, however, is that, according to several sources who spoke to The Atlantic, they are so busy rounding up law-abiding asylum seekers and American citizens they think might be undocumented immigrants, that they can’t actually deal with serious crimes like international drug trafficking, human trafficking, or child exploitation.
This makes one thing very clear: This was never about crime, it was never about public safety, it was always about purging the country of immigrants, brown immigrants in particular. At heart, this is about their weird “Great Replacement” fears and nothing else.
It’s Not Just Immigrants, Either!
Over the past few months there have been multiple reports of actual US citizens being rounded up and detained, usually for having committed the crime of being Latino in public.
Tricia McLaughlin had thoughts on this as well, telling Axios that these reports are all false as well and that “the media is shamefully peddling a false narrative.”
Except they’re not false and there is extensive documentation of this having happened across the United States.
Via Axios:
In May, ICE briefly detained Florida-born Leonardo Garcia Venegas from his job at a construction site in Foley, Alabama. Agents alleged that Garcia's Real ID was fake, according to Noticias Telemundo. He alleged agents forced him to his knees and handcuffed him.
Immigration officials held U.S. citizen and Albuquerque resident Jose Hermosillo for 10 days in Arizona's Florence Correctional Center after arresting him, and didn't believe him when he said he was a citizen, per Arizona Public Media.
Last month, ICE briefly detained U.S. citizen Elzon Lemus, an electrician from Brentwood, New York, during a traffic stop after agents told Lemus he “looked like” someone they were looking for, CBS News first reported.
And of course there are more cases at the link. Our gal Trish knows what she’s doing here. It’s not that she doesn’t believe that it’s happening, but that she knows if she says it’s not and blames “the media” for making it up, Republicans will have her back.
But Let’s Be Fair And Balanced, Shall We?
In fairness, there are some people who are truly jazzed about the way things are going. Including Trump supporter Arpineh Masihi who was detained for being an undocumented immigrant who (unlike about half of all detainees) actually does have a criminal record (for shoplifting, but still). Despite describing the detention center conditions as “very challenging,” she is perfectly fine with it all, with both her and her husband saying they supported Trump doing whatever he had to do to get rid of all those criminals who aren’t her.
“He's doing the right thing because lots of these people don't deserve to be here,” Arpineh told the BBC this week, adding, “I will support him until the day I die. He's making America great again.”
Perhaps if she’s loud enough about it, she’ll get the Mandonna Kashanian treatment. Kashanian, a 64-year-old Iranian undocumented immigrant, was released from detention this week following advocacy from Rep. Steve Scalise — likely due to her own pledges of fealty to Trump.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
My use of social media is not Presidential - it's MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL. Make America Great Again!
Mia Farrow
@MiaFarrow
Replying to @realDonaldTrump
Your tweets are neither "modern" or "presidential" - they are the rantings of a crazy old man
I went on a short business trip to Europe and returned yesterday via JFK
First time this happened but when they sorted us into US passport havers and have-nots, they directed the havers to a line where there were 3-4 camera lanes, no human agent. All we did is face the camera for a few seconds until it snapped the shot, green-light validation came in another second and off we were to collect the luggage. Nobody checked our passports.
One one hand, it was fast.
On the other hand, our nice US gov't has an entire collection of our mugshots in some AI controlled database and Grok controlls our future.
Fun times.