ICE Times, Not Nice Times

Latest dispatches from the moral bottom.

Photo by Daniel Born on Unsplash

In the Senate yesterday, talks to end the Department of Homeland Security shutdown broke down again, with Democrats refusing to budge on issues like identification for federal officers and having an actual judge-signed warrant before they bust down your door. So Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-SD, said that Republicans will try to pass the money for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection “the hard way,” by bypassing Democrats altogether with a budget reconciliation bill that only requires a simple majority vote in the 53-47 Senate.

Full-body hemorrhoid said what?

Trump has already said, though, that he won’t sign anything that doesn’t include the SAVE Act, which the Senate has been stalling on and seems unlikely to pass.

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And now the DHS under proud kid-beater Markwayne Mullin (and the likes of FEMA Waffle House teleporter Gregg Philips, and nervous-breakdown-having ICE head Todd Lyons) has ordered thousands of furloughed non-essential workers to return to work and to get paid, whether said budget reconciliation passes or not. Is that a legal thing they can actually do? Guess we’ll see!

Meanwhile, most Americans want what the Democrats want. Polls have found only about 38 percent approve of how Trump is handling immigration, his onetime-signature issue, and two-thirds think DHS has gone too far.

President Donald John Trump has never made a secret that non-MAGA humans are on the level with dogs to him, and he doesn’t much care for dogs. And about 38 percent of the country approves of his shoot-em-in-the-street attitude! Under his rule, DHS has been kidnapping, beating, and killing people, regardless of their citizenship status, and holding them indefinitely under conditions that violate international law, and sometimes directly in violation of judges’ orders.

Meanwhile, DHS continues to spend more than $100 BILLION dollars a year to hold between 60,000-73,000 people in 104 facilities, in conditions the ASPCA would deem inhumane, worse than ones furnished to serial killers on death row, but at least 70 percent of them without as much criminal history as a speeding ticket, and only 5 percent with a violent crime conviction.

And though DHS could afford to give them (and the rest of us too) all Japanese bidets, Italian sheets, and Peter-Attia-style lifemaxxing vitamins for that, detainees have been subjected to sardine-crammed cages and overflowing toilets and deprived of sanitary supplies and medical attention. They are often deprived of access to their lawyers, and facilities are frequently lacking translators, or translated paperwork. In Texas, ICE has detained and is trying to deport the only licensed Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu legal interpreter in the entire state, who has lived in the US for 35 years, and has been denying her access to medical care. So far 46 detainees have died in custody.

Many are refugees who arrived here seeking asylum from countries like Venezuela, Afghanistan, and El Salvador, or on valid student visas, only to have the regime yank the rug of legal protection out from under them and have masked monsters go after them and their families, sometimes with gas and bullets.

DHS has detained children as young as newborn age, kids with cancer, the disabled, pregnant, and elderly, and dozens of US citizens, some who claim to have also been beaten and choked by agents. And some US citizens have been detained by DHS with no charges just for protesting, and their faces put into the Palantir database and been flagged as enemies of the state. Did we mention the billions for all of this is coming out of cutting everybody’s already-shitty medical care?

No wonder Trump is so angry with the Pope. It’s morally indefensible under any moral code or any other rule of law but the Church of the Poison MAGA Mind, with its moral bottom that exists somewhere in the unknowable depths of Trump’s person-man-woman-camera-TV brain.

But even the inside of DHS and ICE is not so bottomless. The New York Times interviewed 80 former and current DHS and DOJ employees who shape a narrative of even true believers being bewildered, unprepared, frustrated, and confused by the new violent and chaotic regime.

And a federal appeals court has put a halt to Judge James E. Boasberg’s contempt investigation for those deportation flights. Supreme Court justices and especially Brett Kavanaugh say it is just fine for ICE to kidnap people off the street for having a mere foreign whiff about them.

Some times are nice times, but this is ICE times. May there be justice done some day, but that day doesn’t seem to be dawning any time soon.

[ProPublica / AP / New York Times archive link]