New ICE Cruelty Memo Out: More Third-Country Kidnappings To Come!
Can't sugarcoat this one.
Emboldened by the Supreme Court Six’s reprehensible decision on June 23 effectively greenlighting the Department of Homeland Security sending migrants to third foreign countries where they’ve never been, and temporarily blocking a decision by a lower court judge who said migrants must have a “meaningful opportunity” to contest their removal, ICE released a new memo on Friday stating its intentions to do exactly that, sometimes with as little as six hours’ notice. And even in some cases if the country they’re being sent to has not made any assurances that they won’t be tortured.
That’s against international law, for whatever it’s worth anymore. And it’s against the entire founding principles of this country. Eight of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were foreign-born. But all the legal legs of the American stool have now been kicked out from under the rump of human decency.
The cruelty is the point, of course. Did you think Kristi Noem was appointed head of DHS in spite of shooting her own puppy? Trump voters LOVE this cruelty. They and Dear Leader have spent years fantasizing about migrants getting eaten by alligators and bitten by snakes, or being kept in hundred-degree cages and being forced to drink out of toilets, or [insert literally any other random weird sadistic thing here], the way normal people fantasize about befriending crows or making a perfect summer pasta dish with only three ingredients.
If these humans were dogs or cats, or even beef cattle being held in the conditions of “Alligator Alcatraz,” this would be considered animal cruelty, and the SPCA would be turning out to block the road.
Our immigrant-marrying president has always lusted for more visceral cruelty. In his first term, the NYT reported that he even asked his team for a cost estimate of “a border wall with a water-filled trench, stocked with snakes or alligators” with
the wall electrified, with spikes on top that could pierce human flesh. After publicly suggesting that soldiers shoot migrants if they threw rocks, the president backed off when his staff told him that was illegal. But later in a meeting, aides recalled, he suggested that they shoot migrants in the legs to slow them down. That's not allowed either, they told him.
And now the Supreme Court conservative six seem just fine with giving him free rein to do whatever evil things he can inflict on people who came to this country seeking a better life, or anyone at all who stands up to him. Would they stop him from putting heads on pikes, or stripping Rosie O’Donnell of her citizenship? Wouldn’t bet on it!
And Congress has given Trump a more-than-triple DHS budget, more money than even the entire Marines, to build migrant torture concentration camps across the land and deport a million people a year. Kristi Noem says they’re going to build five more.
What are the people behind her thinking, one wonders.
Obligatory reminder, immigrants commit about 60 percent fewer crimes than native-born Americans. Places with more migrants have less crime. The demographic group most likely to be incarcerated is native-born American men who did not finish high school, which also happens to be Trump’s most reliably devoted base. But give them somebody to look down on, they will strap on their boots and vote GOP with all of their dark, little hearts.
Meanwhile, US cities are under violent siege from ICE, and the atrocities keep piling up, notably intensely in the Los Angeles area, which has been under federal occupation for almost 40 days now. Children as young as 14 are being hauled away in chains. Senior citizens who have been in the US for decades are being roughed up, and American citizens, and both.
They’re tasing people in the Walmart, and staking out hospitals, courthouses, schools, daycare centers and places of worship.
It is a recurring pattern in American history: welcoming immigrants as a source of cheap labor, while avoiding giving them the rights and privileges of citizenship as much as possible, often based on their skin color or language. Arresting the employers who exploit expatriate labor would be obviously the most efficient way to curb migration, but in all of these hundreds of years, it’s almost never the citizen-employers who are held to account. Because feature, not bug.
Lower courts are pushing back on ICE, for what it may ever be worth. As California comes up on the detention of nearly 3,000 people, MORE THAN 70 PERCENT WITH NO CRIMINAL RECORDS, a federal judge has issued two restraining orders preventing ICE from running its roving dragnets that target people based on their skin color, job, or language, and from depriving them of legal counsel. Will DHS respect those rulings? Probably not. Will the SCOTUS Six drag the goalposts even farther into the parking lot to keep letting the guy who makes immigrants scrub his country club toilets do whatever he wants?
All of this is awful. The nightmarish stories will keep coming and getting worse. Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but ugh, we gotta talk about it! What can we do? What should we do? Taking all non-ban-hammer-able suggestions!
[Washington Post archive link]
If there's no way to retrieve the people kidnapped and renditioned; these are death camps. So if they don't make it to wherever they're supposed to be deported to, that is their fate.
This is what a lot of Americans voted (or non-voted) for; they wanted this particular outcome to help with the ethnic cleansing. As the ethnic cleansing was on the ballot. Everything was on the ballot.
The people cheering this on also seem to feel very, very comfortable, thinking that this won't happen to them. After all it definitely wouldn't under Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, even though many Americans didn't want them or their legislation. They felt pretty confident being able to shit on them without being deported though!
And apparently many of the inmates in FLA are US citizens. If ICE gets away with incarcerating US citizens that look like migrants in concentration camps, it's one tiny step to incarcerate US citizens that do not look like migrants. This is beyond fucked up.