Just DHS Meme-ing Its Way To Biggest Lawless Gulag System World Has Ever Seen

ICE times, not nice times.

John Gast, “American Progress,” 1872

All of MAGA has one through-line: an utter lack of any human empathy. Hungry children, pregnant women, hardworking tradespeople, seniors who need diabetes medication, they don’t give one rat turd about their pain, or anybody else’s, unless it somehow affects them personally. Some turn a blind eye to cruelty, but a whole lot, maybe even most of them, embrace and savor it.

Trump faithful like Nancy Mace may disagree with him about stuff like the Epstein Files, but she and all of them will get over it if they aren’t already, because he gives MAGA what they want: permission to indulge in their lust for cruelty like a pint of Brownie Batter ice cream. If Project 2025 could be summarized in one concept, it’s “kill em all, and let God sort em out.”

Behold Nancy Mace, fresh from Ulta Beauty with a more natural makeup look than usual, rhapsodizing about how she enjoys watching immigrants getting dragged out of court hearings the same way normal people unwind by watching videos of children being gifted puppies.

Somebody who’s showing up to a court hearing is following the law, of course, and the Catch-22 is the cruel point: Show up and get arrested, or don’t show up and get arrested. Even if you did everything legally it doesn’t matter, you’ll be on a plane, possibly before your lawyer can even find you, and once you’re gone, no backsies.

It’s never been about the law, it’s all about the time-tested authoritarian playbook and one of its vital first steps, focusing on an enemy within to demonize, one from whom only a ruthless strongman can save the good people.

Not following the law: directors of ICE facilities, who continue to not let in congressional delegations to do their job of oversight of the facilities in their own districts, including yesterday at ICE’s field office in the George H. Fallon Federal Building in downtown Baltimore, an office building that was not designed to be a jail. Democratic Senators Angela Alsobrooks and Chris Van Hollen and Representatives Kweisi Mfume, Glenn Ivey, Sarah Elfreth, and Johnny Olszewski Jr. showed up and were not allowed to see where detainees are being held.

There’s no law that says Congresspeople or local authorities have to make appointments to make sure a facility is following the law, just like a building, health or fire inspector doesn’t have to make an appointment before checking if a nursing home has smoke detectors, a restaurant’s stove has roaches mating in the exhaust hood, or Carmela Soprano’s spec house is not about to fall over. You’ll be shocked to learn the law in fact says the opposite: Congress has a statutory right to inspect ICE facilities.

Van Hollen and Alsobrooks had already entered the facility back in April, when they found detainees being kept longer than legally allowed, sleeping on inflatable beds because there were no actual beds, not allowed to see doctors, and had no regular food service; instead ICE agents were feeding the detainees by making sandwiches or bringing them food from McDonald’s. It sure as shit could be worse, like at the Florida concentration camp they think is funny to call “Alligator Alcatraz,” where feces fester on every surface and men are drinking out of toilets, but still underscores what an unprofessional, disorganized, and “fuck the law” kind of operation they’re running. Any other facility in the city or state run like that would be shut down immediately, for zoning-violation reasons alone.

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ICE Has Entered Its 'Abu Ghraib' Era

Here's Some ICE Horrors To Warm Your Heart To (Because You Are On Fire Because We're In Hell)

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The people of Maryland did not vote for this, don’t want it, and are furious that their neighbors are being dragged away. DHS claimed (on X, of course) that the people there are criminals and monsters, but provided no names or any proof of that claim.

And about 70 percent of ICE detainees do not have criminal records of any kind. Also for those who truly are criminals, victims deserve to see their perpetrators face justice, be assured that the correct person was arrested and not still out there somewhere, and for the perpetrators to serve their sentence in state or federal custody, instead of being disappeared to some country that could easily just release them when they land and let them go right back to offending, for all anybody knows.

And when Congresspeople do make appointments to oversee facilities, and get in, and see deadly conditions that violate international law and would be considered animal cruelty by the SPCA, Republicans control all of the branches, nothing happens.

It’s all painful to anybody with human feelings, but DHS is on X, with lies, memes and white-supremacy propaganda to help the base scroll their way to peak un-woke-ness.

Your reminder that Kristi Noem didn’t shoot that puppy and goat because she had to. She could’ve sold either of them on Craigslist! She did it because she enjoyed it, and was so proud of herself she wrote about it in her own book.

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Kristi Noem Clarifies: That Dog Was Just The Hired Help, And Then I Killed It With A Gun

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Then Trump made her the Tsarina of Cruelty to Immigrants, a role model for all the little boys and girls, posing for glamour photo shoots in front of torture prisons. She’s flying first class, up in the sky, with lettuce to support her shoe fetish. Libs, OWNED!

Her Homeland Security account’s got lies, of course, like how assaults on poor ICE agents are up 500, 700, 850 percent! Ahem.

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TODAY!

Would You Believe A Bunch Of Immigration Agents Lied About Protestors Assaulting Them?

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The account credits ICE for the decrease in homicides, which began in ‘22 under Biden.

She’s got dank memes, like Wojak.

Christian-Bale-era-Batman-looking videos with Bible verses in them.

And there’s the fucking nugget above, which you might remember from your American history textbook, depicting Manifest Destiny, which was the belief that God had ordained the white people to kill all the natives and buffalo and take the land, and the proof was that the white people were succeeding at doing that. “A Heritage to be proud of.” White makes right!

Not white-supremacist enough for you? Last month DHS circulated a meme of Uncle Sam nailing a “Help your country… and yourself” sign, and the message “REPORT ALL FOREIGN INVADERS” that was copied directly from the far-right accounts where the taxpayer-funded memelords of DHS are obviously getting get their material.

Meanwhile, Attorney General Pam fucking Bondi has filed a judicial complaint against Judge James Boasberg, who tried to stop the administration from illegally disappearing people, for making “improper public comments” (which the DOJ did not include in their filing) because he said at a CLOSED DOOR Judicial Conference “that he believed the Trump administration would ‘disregard rulings of federal courts’ and trigger ‘a constitutional crisis.’” Two things that were true in every way. Truth is the first casualty in war, somebody said.

But for real, ICE is poised to become the biggest, most lawless imprisoning systems that the world has ever known, and one of the world’s largest tragedies is already underway. And it seems nothing is going to force DHS to be held to any kind of account, because a certain six Supreme Court justices are un-empathetic “let the President do ‘foreign policy’ and let God sort ‘em out” types themselves.

It’s grim fucking times, man. What else can you say? What else can we do? All non-ban-hammerable suggestions accepted!

[Baltimore Banner archive link: “Baltimore families ripped apart by ICE detentions, deportations” / Baltimore Banner archive link: “Maryland members of Congress denied tour of Baltimore ICE detention site” / LA Times archive link / NYT gift link]

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