Abductions, Torture, & Concentration Camps
We are that country now. Everything we purport to despise. Us.
Fabian Schmidt was stripped naked, pushed into a cold shower, fed little water and food, withheld sleep and his anxiety and depression medication, and “violently interrogated”. He was hospitalized after collapsing.
Plainclothes men who identified themselves as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrested Mandonna “Donna” Kashanian a, 64-year-old Iranian mother, wife, PTA member, and community volunteer. Officers informed her she was being shipped to a detention center in Mississippi. She was eventually transferred to one in Louisiana.
75-year-old Cuban national Isidro Perez died in ICE custody—the twelfth person to do so—from an apparent heart attack.
Serious medical incidents are increasing at many of the nation's largest immigration detention centers, according to a WIRED investigation into 911 calls from 10 sites responsible for 400 emergencies, fifty of which were cardiac episodes, 26 seizures, 17 head injuries. Seven were suicide or self-harm attempts, including overdoses and hangings; six allege sexual assault, one “staff on detainee.”
Kilmar Ábrego García’s lawyers report in court filing that while being held at the so-called “Terrorism Confinement Center” (Cecot) in El Salvador, García and 20 other men “were forced to kneel from approximately 9:00 PM to 6:00 AM”.
According to the filing, Garcia was denied bathroom privileges leading to soiling himself, and “Detainees were held in an overcrowded cell with no windows, and bright lights on 24 hours a day. They were confined to metal bunk beds with no mattresses.”
These are just a few recent horrors published about what victims of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s ruthless, psychopathic agenda have faced, and the normalization of it occurring in our daily lives.
And, of course, our illustrious black-robed monarchs with lifetime appointments on the United States Supreme Court last week granted the Grifter-in-Chief permission to resume disappearing migrants to countries other than their own.
We are that country now. Everything we purport to despise we’ve become.
It was only April when White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed the convicted felon illegitimately occupying the Oval Office is exploring “legal” pathways to abduct and disappear U.S. citizens to foreign concentration camps, like Cecot prison in El Salvador where Kilmar Abrego Garcia was unlawfully detained.
Two months before, I published, “Oh, yes, they WILL deport Americans”.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise considering during the regime’s first go-round we learned about refugee children in U.S. custody being injected with psychotropic drugs, and mostly Spanish-speaking women subjected to forced hysterectomies.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise considering during the first administration at least half a dozen ICE detainees engaged in hunger strikes for which they were nasally force-fed.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise considering the first administration refused to inoculate detained migrant families from deadly diseases.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise considering the first administration engaged in DNA testing to identify migrants posing as families.
This shouldn’t come as a surprise considering the first administration tore children away from more than 5,000 families and kept no records. (By mid-August 2022, the Biden administration had successfully reunited almost 400 of those children but never finished locating all of them when the clock ran out this January).
Remember when the former host of Celebrity Apprentice suggested surrounding his racist border wall with a snake- or alligator-infested moat after suggesting CBP shoot migrants in the legs?
We shouldn’t be surprised, then, about the media’s ho-hum attitude about the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz”, the concentration camp constructed in eight days on a former airstrip in the Florida Everglades.
Contrary to some social media posts, it is not the alligator-infested moat dreamed about four years ago. However, that did not keep the red-hatted slumlord with daddy issues from saying, “We have a lot of bodyguards and a lot of cops that are in the form of alligators. It’ll keep people where they’re supposed to be.”
We were operating concentration camps four years ago, and we’re operating them today.
The inimitable Prof. Timothy Snyder explained in a recent piece “Concentration Camp Labor”:
With the passage of Trump's death bill, we face the prospect of many great harms, including an archipelago of concentration camps across the United States.
We know this and have no excuse not to act.
Six years ago, Thomas Knapp wrote in Counter Punch:
If you’re rounding up large numbers of people and concentrating them in camps, you’re operating concentration camps. Period.
They’re concentration camps whether the involuntary residents are Cherokee, Boers, Jews, or immigrants.
They’re concentration camps whether the policy leading to their use is good policy, or bad policy, or even wholly wicked policy.
They’re concentration camps if you support their use, and they’re concentration camps if you oppose their use.
Remember, Anne Frank was not gassed or incinerated in a Nazi death camp; she died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
The inclination to assume what’s happening isn’t happening because we’re the United States is naive and ignorant.
History is going to judge us by how we respond.
Right now, it’s not looking good.