After two weeks on vacation, blissfully ignoring the news, I’ve spent the day catching up on the latest Trump 2 horror stories. As many of you already know, there are too many to detail here.
One thing struck me: the escalating violence of ICE, which is happening mostly out of the public eye. In fact, invisibility was the only promise Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin made upon confirmation. Asked by CNBC about the reasonable reforms the Democrats were demanding, such as required bodycams and judicial warrants to enter people’s homes, he went on at length about how the demands were nothing more than political theater. His own goal, he said, was that “in six months . . . we’re not in the lead story every single day.” He added that he wanted “people to understand we’re out there, we’re protecting them, and we’re working with them.”
That was almost exactly five months ago. In the meantime, his agents have protected the homeland by fatally shooting two innocent immigrant men, one in Maine and one in Texas. And ICE is deploying other tactics that can only be described as torture and attempted murder. Some of the tactics that have been in use for months and as far back as Trump 1, are only now being exposed.
According to an eviscerating investigation by the Guardian, ICE detention facilities, most of them privately owned, are subjecting inmates to force feeding and involuntary medical procedures. The victims are on hunger strike against the already life-threatening conditions of their detention—including, ironically, inedible food and the denial of necessary medical treatment. One of them, a Kurdish filmmaker, described being held in solitary confinement, tackled brutally and shackled, and force fed twice daily for eight months.
The administration is withholding Congressionally allocated funds for the legal representation of unaccompanied migrant children, leaving 25,000 kids, some of them unable to speak English, or speak at all, to fend for themselves in court. The children face detention and deportation to god knows where without adult guardianship, where they can be expected to end up on the street, or dead. The image I couldn’t get out of my head was of Nazis tossing babies out of windows.
Homeland Security has left immigrant detainees outside in winter without adequate money or clothing. At least two — a Haitian woman dropped at a bus stop and a blind Rohingyan man from Myanmar deposited outside a closed store — have frozen to death. Authorities are calling both deaths homicide.
And last week, it was reported that ICE intends to spend $20 million to equip agents with gloves that can be activated to deliver an electric shock to anyone the agent deems insufficiently obedient. The gloves are manufactured by the lugubriously named Compliance Technologies.
Reports are coming in from immigrant defense activists that ICE activities in their cities and towns, including New York, have intensified in recent months. Indeed, in July the New York Times reported that ICE had arrested 10,000 arrests in five days, doubling its daily quota to the current 2,000. On one day agents took a record 2,400 people into custody. Said the Times:
The surge has occurred without the fanfare of highly visible operations last year, in which officials announced their intentions ahead of time to target cities, including Chicago and Los Angeles, and send officers pouring into the streets.
So Markwayne Mullin is fulfilling his goal: maximal damage, minimum coverage. Jewish Nazi Stephen Miller has not yet reached his: 3,000 immigrant arrests a day, regardless of age, medical condition, employment, family, community connections, non-criminality, duration of U.S. residence, or immigration status. The optics don’t seem to concern him.
Thank you, Judith, for your reporting on ICE and Border Patrol officers. Growing up in the 1950s, I never would imagine that the US would tolerate leaders as depraved as Trump, Hegseth, and Stephen Miller. My idealism of course began to wane in the Vietnam War era, waning even further in the era of Bush's Iraq folly. But that our gov't would put people in concentration camps; kill citizens who non-violently protest; execute a VA nurse why other BP officers held him down; try to reward Jan. 6 traitors with taxpayers'money? We have become the Fascists that my parents' generation stormed the beaches of Normandy to eradicate from the earth.
I can only hope that when this ends, everyone responsible for this travesty is made accountable and jailed. Just as Germany continues to try Nazis for their complicity in the holocaust, we should do the same from the top down to the lowest-level detention center employee. If Trump tries to provide blanket pardons, then the trials should be in state courts.
I don't want to hear any milquetoast D avoiding this in the name of "healing". It is exactly this lack of accountability that encourages the next perpetrators to try again.