ICE Has Entered Its 'Abu Ghraib' Era
They're making people eat like dogs, not allowing them to clean toilets covered in feces, and that's just the beginning.
Over the last few months, we have all been horrified by the treatment of undocumented immigrants (and some documented!) at the hands of ICE and those working at the various concentration camps the Trump administration has set up to contain them. It’s been bad.
Really, really bad.
And yet, it somehow keeps getting worse. A stomach-churning report from Human Rights Watch released on Monday detailed some of the horrific abuses that US government employees and contractors have put these people through. It’s not just the overcrowding and the inhumane and unhygienic conditions — it’s also the abuse, neglect and degradation from the ICE officers and staff themselves.
The report is focused on just three severely overcrowded Florida detention centers operated by ICE — Krome North Service Processing Center (Krome), the Broward Transitional Center (BTC), and the Federal Detention Center (FDC).
How bad was it? Well, in one instance, a group of male detainees were shackled and forced to eat their food like dogs.
By then it was 5 p.m. and no one had had lunch. Some had not even had breakfast. We could see the food through the bars of our holding cell in styrofoam containers on a cart. The food was in front of us, but the guards refused to give it to us. At 7 p.m., they finally gave us lunch, but only after another guard protested on our behalf. We were chained though, so we could not reach the plates with our hands. We had to put the plates on chairs and then bend down and eat with our mouths, like dogs.
In another:
One woman described arriving at Krome–a facility that typically only holds men–late at night on January 28. Officers then confined her for days with dozens of other women without bedding or privacy, in a cell normally used only during incarceration intake procedures. “There was only one toilet, and it was covered in feces,” she said. “We begged the officers to let us clean it, but they just said sarcastically, ‘Housekeeping will come soon.’ No one ever came.”
As it was a male-only facility, the women being held there were not allowed to shower, and were only allowed clean clothes after four days of protesting.
Similarly:
The bus became disgusting. It contained a single toilet that did not really flush. It was the type of toilet in which normally people only urinate. But because we were on the bus for so long, and we were not permitted to leave it, others defecated in the toilet. Because of this, the whole bus smelled strongly of feces.
On top of way, way too many feces-related horrors, detainees have also been denied medication and denied medical care to the point that it has caused severe illness or injury — often while being mocked by ICE officers.
After two days, she started vomiting green bile. She started to lose consciousness, and we were yelling for help. It took two hours to get the officers’ attention, and then another 20 minutes before they took her to the hospital. There, doctors removed her gallbladder. They brought her back to the cell in Krome within two days.
A man with undetectable HIV was denied his medication for so long that it ultimately became detectable. Detainees with diabetes were denied insulin. A prisoner with asthma who required an inhaler was told, by a doctor, that “no one over 18 has asthma” (23 million adults in the US have asthma). After that man started coughing up blood, his treatment only got worse.
Then, Brian said, BOP officers denied him his essential medications and locked him overnight in particularly inhuman conditions—in a bloodstained medical exam room without food or water. “There was blood on the bed and around the toilet. I was sick, alone, and they left me there… I felt as if I was going to die… I just wanted my medication,” Brian said.
Maksym Chernyak, a 44-year-old Ukrainian man, died in custody after being repeatedly ignored by staff.
On February 17, Chernyak told his wife he was experiencing an irregular heartbeat and blood in his stool. Carlos, who was detained in the same cell as Chernyak, confirmed that Chernyak had been visibly ill and had repeatedly asked for medical help. In the early hours of February 18, Chernyak began vomiting, drooling, and defecated on himself, the man said. Those in the cell screamed for help, but staff reportedly took 15 to 20 minutes to respond and then accused him of drug use.
Chernyak was eventually carried out on a stretcher, Carlos said. He was later declared brain dead and died two days later, according to ICE’s Detainee Death Report.
Those who report psychological distress are sent to solitary confinement, which has been known to cause psychological distress.
These things are just a small sample of what our country is doing to people.
One of the reasons cited by Human Rights Watch as to “why the hell they are allowed to do this” is the Laken Riley Act — which, like most laws named after white women, is not exactly great for civil liberties. It means that any immigrant charged with practically any crime, including shoplifting, is subject to mandatory ICE detention. In case you were wondering, 12 Democrats voted for this: Catherine Cortez Masto, John Fetterman, Ruben Gallego, Maggie Hassan, Mark Kelly, Jon Ossoff, Gary Peters, Jacky Rosen, Jeanne Shaheen, Elissa Slotkin, Mark Warner, and Raphael Warnock.
But a large percentage — 75 percent as of June 15 — of those being held don’t even have any kind of criminal record. They’re literally just pulling people off the street and out of their homes and sending them to hell, doing things to them that if done in the context of war would get them sent to the Hague for violating the Geneva Conventions.
I probably only made it about five minutes into Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom — Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film about a group of fascist officials who round up a bunch of teenagers, including their own daughters, and subject them all to endless rape, torture, literal shit-eating, murder, and, also, being forced to act like dogs — before running away in abject horror. But as much as I never, ever, ever want to watch that movie or think about it ever again, the “moral” of the story is how deeply power can corrupt a person, by turning them into a person who would do things like that. It’s an allegory for “fascism is bad,” a lesson I have managed to learn without watching anything that will make me vomit, thank you very much.
So I just have to ask, not out of sympathy for ICE officers (it’s their own fault for staying), but out of concern for everyone else who may ever have to be around one of them: What the hell are we turning these people into? Because I’ve got to say — I think victims, in many cases (not the ones where they die from neglect), can recover from horrific treatment like this, but I don’t think doing it is something a person can come back from. There are lines you cannot cross as a human being, and moving one’s own personal Overton Window over far enough to accommodate shackling people and making them eat like dogs, or stay in a cell with a toilet covered in shit, is not something that will end well for those around you.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
OT:
Hellooo.
Your Birb is going to volunteer at the shelter, later in the afternoon.
This will be another on-and-off day today.
Thamke uu for yr understanding.
🦜🙂
OT.
"'Zero-D chess': Finance exec warns Trump's new trade deal just shafted American cars"
President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday the agreement of a new 15 percent reciprocal tariffs trade deal with Japan, which was roundly mocked by observers for being worse than the deal the U.S. had with Japan before Trump took office. But this deal does something else he may not have intended, hedge fund manager Spencer Hakimian posted to X: privilege Japanese cars over American ones.
... "Toyota is up +8% on the news of a 15% tariff. Why?" he wrote. "It's simple. Ford, GM, Tesla, and all the other American manufacturers are going to be paying 50% more for their steel, 50% more for their copper, 25% more for their Canadian production, 25% more for their Mexican production, and 55% on their Chinese production. Toyota only has to pay 15% more and they're done with all the shenanigans. Ford has to pay much more than that. A lot more in fact."
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-tariffs-japan/