By any means, necessary or not: that’s how this administration gets its bigoted version of immigration enforcement done. The surges targeting cities and states that Trump doesn’t feel are loyal enough are a double-edged sword. They punish states run by Democratic party members simply for being run by Democratic party members. And they flood courts with more cases than they can possibly handle, allowing the government to deny rights/deport people at scale.
The government doesn’t always get away with it. But given the scale, the government generally doesn’t get reined in until long after massive amounts of damage has been done.
That’s the case here in Maryland, where a lawsuit, that was initiated shortly after Trump began sending Venezuelans to El Salvador’s hellhole prison for purely punitive reasons, continues to play out. It involves a Venezuelan asylum seeker who was ejected from the country via Trump’s non-wartime invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to excuse the government’s refusal to respect due process rights.
As is the case with many federal judges dealing with Trump’s war on migrants, Maryland federal judge Stephanie Gallagher no longer takes the government at its word. That’s why she has been ordering immigration officials to testify in court, where they can be cross-examined and/or questioned by the judge herself.
And that’s the last thing this government wants, because it can’t even survive the minimal judicial scrutiny of its filed motions, which are usually crafted by teams of lawyers and not by the front-line employees and supervisors judges are ordering to testify.
David Kurtz of Talking Points Memo attended a recent hearing hosted by Judge Gallagher in this long-running case. Gallagher and the plaintiff’s attorney wanted to know why the government seemed to be violating an existing court order when it wrongfully removed two other asylum seekers in February.
What they heard instead was the perhaps inadvertent admission by the government that the three known (and potentially illegal removals) being discussed were pretty much just a rounding error:
Before today, the number of wrongfully deported asylum seekers in the case was thought to be less than a dozen. But under persistent questioning from plaintiff’s counsel, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services asylum officer Kimberly Sicard testified that in the past three to four weeks it had come to her attention that more than 100 asylum seekers covered by the settlement agreement have been removed. She put the number in the “low 100s.”
That’s insane. Those are the actions of a government that truly does not care what illegal acts it engages in so long as they contribute to the end goal of subtracting non-white people from this nation.
And it’s obviously intentional. That much was made clear in Sicard’s testimony.
Asked how the additional removals had come to her attention, Sicard said she wasn’t sure of the exact process but that officials had “queried systems.” As part of the process of notifying ICE of the wrongful removals, the matter went to the office of chief counsel at USCIS three to four weeks ago, Sicard said.
That means the government can query its detention databases in order to prevent possibly illegal removals. It also means the government can find out how many illegal removals it might have engaged in. The “three or four weeks” just means the USCIS chief counsel spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to legally justify illegal removals that now total in the “low hundreds.” And it means all of these things are either rarely used (or, more likely, deliberately ignored) by government agencies that have all been tasked with respecting rights first and carrying out their missions second.
Speaking of ignoring things, this revelation may never have occurred if the government had even attempted to comply with the judge’s previous court order:
The revelation was the pinnacle of a day of frustration for Gallagher. She had listed in her order calling the hearing five topics on which she expected the Trump administration to produce witnesses “with personal knowledge” to testify. The government failed to produce such witnesses.
“Failed” just means “refused” under Trump and his bigoted sidekicks. Because this administration felt this was just another court order it could ignore, someone without “personal knowledge” of the topics under discussion was sent to court to take the heat. And because she wasn’t expected to offer anything but shrugs, the USCIS lawyer responded honestly to questions that apparently weren’t covered by whatever minimal guidance DHS offered before she was put on the stand.
It’s this sort of sloppy arrogance that’s going to continue to derail some of the worst things this administration wants to do. And we’re safe to assume the arrogance and sloppiness will continue, because Trump has made absolutely no effort to rid himself of loyalists, no matter how sloppy, stupid, and undeservedly arrogant they are.
This was extremely wild shit to be happening anywhere, much less in the land of the First Amendment. No sooner had Donald Trump decided it was time to rename the Department of Defense to the Department of War than the head of DoD operations decided it would be sorting news agencies by level of subservience.
Pretending this was all about national security, the Defense Department basically kicked everyone out of the Pentagon’s press office and stated that only those that chose to play by the new rules would be allowed back inside.
Booted: NBC News, the New York Times, NPR. Welcomed back into the fold: OAN, Newsmax, Breitbart. The Pentagon wanted a state-run press, but without having to do all the heavy lifting that comes with instituting a state-run press in the Land of the Free.
Somewhat surprisingly, some of those explicitly invited to partake of the new Defense Department media wing refused to participate. Fox and Newsmax decided to stay out, rather than promise they’d never publish leaked documents. Those choosing to bend the knee were those who never needed this sort of coercion in the first place: One America News (OAN), The Federalist, and far-right weirdos, the Epoch Times. In other words, MAGA-heavy breathers that have never been known for their independence, much less their journalism.
That didn’t stop Hegseth and the department he’s mismanaging from attempting to take a victory lap. And it certainly didn’t stop news agencies like the New York Times from suing over this blatant violation of the First Amendment.
It’s so obvious it only took the NYT four months to secure a win in a federal court (DC) that is positively swamped with litigation generated by Trump’s swamp. (h/t Adam Klasfield)
The decision [PDF] makes it clear in the opening paragraph how this is going to go for the administration and its extremely selective “respect” of enshrined rights and freedoms.
A primary purpose of the First Amendment is to enable the press to publish what it will and the public to read what it chooses, free of any official proscription. Those who drafted the First Amendment believed that the nation’s security requires a free press and an informed people and that such security is endangered by governmental suppression of political speech. That principle has preserved the nation’s security for almost 250 years. It must not be abandoned now.
Amen.
The court notes that in the past, there has been some friction between national security concerns and reporting by journalists. In some cases, the friction has been little more than the government chafing a bit when something has been published that it would rather have kept a secret. In other cases, leaks involving sensitive information have provoked reform efforts on both sides of the equation, seeking to balance these concerns with serving the public interest.
Up until now, any efforts to expel reporters have been limited to backroom bitching. What’s happening now, however, is unprecedented.
Historically, though, even when Department leaders disliked a journalist’s reporting, they did not consider suspending, revoking, or not renewing the journalist’s press credentials in response to that reporting. Julian Barnes, Pete Williams, and Robert Burns—reporters who have spent decades covering the Pentagon—as well as former Pentagon officials, are not aware of the Department ever suspending, revoking, or not renewing a journalist’s credentials due to concern over the safety or security of Department personnel or property or based on the content of their reporting.
This may be new, but the court isn’t willing to make it the “new normal.” It’s the decades of precedent that truly matter, not the vindictive whims of the overgrown toddlers currently holding office.
The Pentagon claims that demanding journalists agree not to “solicit,” much less print data or information not explicitly approved for release by the Defense Department doesn’t reach any further than existing laws governing the handling of classified documents. The court disagrees, noting that the new policy allows the government to conflate the illegal solicitation of classified material with the sort of soliciting — i.e., requests for information, etc. — journalists do every day in hopes of securing something newsworthy.
On top of allowing the government to punish people for things that weren’t previously considered unlawful, the demand for obeisance wasn’t created in a vacuum. Instead, it flowed directly from this entire administration’s constant attacks on the press by the president and pretty much every one in his Cabinet.
The plaintiffs are correct: “The record is replete with undisputed evidence that the Policy is viewpoint discriminatory.” That evidence tells the story of a Department whose leadership has been and continues to be openly hostile to the “mainstream media” whose reporting it views as unfavorable, but receptive to outlets that have expressed “support for the Trump administration in the past.”
The story begins prior to the adoption of the Policy, when—following extensive reporting on Secretary Hegseth’s background and qualifications during his confirmation process—Secretary Hegseth and Department officials “openly complained about reporting they perceive[d] as unfavorable to them and the Department.” Then, in the weeks and months leading up to the issuance of the Policy, Department officials repeatedly condemned certain news organizations—including The Times—for their coverage of the Department. For example, in response to reporting by The Times on Secretary Hegseth’s alleged misuse of the messaging platform Signal, Mr. Parnell posted on X to call out The Times “and all other Fake News that repeat their garbage.” Mr. Parnell decried these news organizations as “Trump-hating media” who “continue[] to be obsessed with destroying anyone committed to President Trump’s agenda.” In other social media posts leading up to the issuance of the Policy, Department officials referred to journalists from The Washington Post as “scum” and called for their “severe punishment” in response to reporting on Secretary Hegseth’s security detail.
It was never about keeping loose lips from sinking ships. It was always about cutting off access to news agencies the administration didn’t like. And once you’ve gotten rid of the critics, you’re left with the functional equivalent of a state-run media, but without the nastiness of having to disappear people into concentration camps or usher them out of their cubicles at gunpoint.
The court won’t let this stand. The new policy violates both the First Amendment and Fifth Amendment (due to the vagueness of its ban on “soliciting” sensitive information). That’s never been acceptable before in this nation. Just because there’s an aspiring tyrant leaning heavily on the Resolute Desk these days doesn’t make it any more permissible.
The Court recognizes that national security must be protected, the security of our troops must be protected, and war plans must be protected. But especially in light of the country’s recent incursion into Venezuela and its ongoing war with Iran, it is more important than ever that the public have access to information from a variety of perspectives about what its government is doing—so that the public can support government policies, if it wants to support them; protest, if it wants to protest; and decide based on full, complete, and open information who they are going to vote for in the next election. As Justice Brandeis correctly observed, “sunlight is the most powerful of all disinfectants.”
The administration will definitely appeal this decision. And it almost definitely will try to bypass the DC Appeals Court and go straight to the Supreme Court by claiming not being able to expel reporters it doesn’t like is some sort of national emergency. It will probably even claim that the fight it picked in Iran justifies the actions it took months before it decided to involve us in the nation’s latest Afghanistan/Vietnam.
But it definitely shouldn’t win. This isn’t some obscure permutation of First Amendment law. This is the government crafting a policy that allows it to decide what gets to be printed and who gets to print it. That’s never been acceptable here. And it never should be.
Shortly after Trump took office for a second time, his administration made it clear that it felt constitutional rightswere merely privileges it would extend only to those who fully supported whatever the hell the administration happened to be doing.
At the time, the administration was not only engaged in a full-blown, bigoted war against migrants, but throwing all of its support behind Israel’s ongoing anti-Palestinian efforts, which look a whole lot like actual genocide.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has announced it will begin screening immigrants’ social media for evidence of antisemitic activity as grounds for denying immigration benefit requests. The screenings will affect people applying for permanent residence status as well as foreigners affiliated with educational institutions. The policy will go into effect immediately.
In a statement issued Wednesday morning, the Department of Homeland Security said it will “protect the homeland from extremists and terrorist aliens, including those who support antisemitic terrorism, violent antisemitic ideologies and antisemitic terrorist organizations such as Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, or [the Houthis].”
But, in true MAGA fashion. Trump’s anti-antisemitic efforts only affected people who were more brown than white. A month later, Trump was opening the immigration door to South African “refugees,” but only the white ones. This decision was presumably based on lizard brain analysis of out-of-context clips shown on social media and/or Fox News that pretended whites in South Africa were being persecuted by the Black residents they’d persecuted for decades under apartheid.
And that included white South Africans who engaged in antisemitic speech, who were given a free pass to play their version of the race card to gain unvetted admittance to the Land of Opportunity.
Nine months later, the doors have been thrown wide open for white South Africans, with the administration yet again claiming — without facts in evidence — that these particular South Africans were more deserving of expedited asylum proceedings than anyone from any country where actual violence and persecution targets residents who are not white enough for the administration to consider worthy of naturalization.
The U.S. aims to process 4,500 refugee applications from white South Africans per month, far above President Donald Trump’s stated refugee program cap, and is installing trailers on embassy property in Pretoria to support the effort, a U.S. contracting document said.
While both versions of the Trump administration may have rendered satire mostly obsolete, it can’t eradicate irony. And here’s where it gets absolutely hilarious. White South Africans are now thinking their homeland is a better option than living here under this administration, as Reuters reports.
Andrew Veitch left South Africa after being held up at gunpoint in his car. But now he feels there are greater threats in the United States, he said, citing mass shootings in public places as well as violence by U.S. immigration officers.
“People are being shot in broad daylight. American citizens are being shot and killed,” said the 53-year-old, who moved to California in 2003. “I don’t want to live in a place like this.”
It’s a valid point — one that people who have lived here for their entire lives are making, albeit without the easily available option of just pressing CTRL-Z on their temporary protected status. Veitch isn’t the only one wanting to return to the allegedly-hyper-violent country of South Africa, rather than continue to live in the Land of Opportunity that is daily being rebranded as the Land of Impending Martial Law.
Other South African (white) “refugees” are heading back home because the financial climate is preferable, even if they choose to ignore the threat Trump poses to every freedom Americans hold dear. After 20 years of US residence, it’s the Trump administration that’s encouraging South African (white) migrant Naomi Saphire to return to her homeland.
[Saphire] had been settled in the United States for two decades when she came back for a holiday and realized how much she missed home.
Last year, she left North Carolina for a seaside town in South Africa’s Western Cape, where she said her three children spend more time outdoors, health insurance is affordable and she prefers the schools.
“My heart is just full of gratefulness to be here,” the 46-year-old said from her home in Plettenberg Bay. “The U.S. has been really good to me (but) I just felt like I was depriving my kids of this life.”
As for the supposed violence targeting white South Africans Trump is now pretending to “save” from their misery with his “let’s get a bunch more whites in here” immigration policies, it’s as mythical as divorced from reality as Trump’s self-perception as the smartest, savviest businessman/politician to ever grace the Earth with his presence:
Crime and joblessness are major issues in South Africa, but the unemployment rate is 35% for Black people compared with 8% for whites, according to the latest figures from the national statistics agency Stats SA.
Police statistics released last year showed that even farm murders, which Trump has focused on, killed more Black people than whites. Reuters has found that photos and videos Trump has presented on the matter were taken out of context or misrepresented.
While this might seem like the most useless of anecdotal evidence, there’s reason to believe white South Africans will either ignore the Trump’s invitation to further whiten the US, or head back home where things are still pretty fucking good for whites, but without having to deal with a megalomaniac chaos agent who seems to believe World War III will finally allow Truth Social to turn a profit.
White South Africans have been rejecting the United States since 2022, when a law allowed them to regain their citizenship after it was stripped by a post-apartheid law passed in 1995. 15,000 white South Africans took advantage of that to return to their homeland. Now that Trump’s back in office, even more whites are exiting than entering the United States, despite the administration’s warm welcome of white migrants into its white Christian nationalism plans.
Home Affairs Minister Leon Schreiber said 1,000 people had reclaimed their citizenship, a number he expected to grow significantly as the programme takes off.
One of the main reasons for exiting the US was “lower cost of living,” something Trump has actively worked against achieving, starting with his indiscriminate (and apparently unlawful) tariffs and continuing through his destabilization of the world economy by (1) being buddies with Russia, (2) starting yet another forever war in the Middle East, (3) refusing to engage honestly with inflation and joblessness, and (4) decreasing American productivity by forcibly ejecting hundreds of thousands of people who work harder, pay more in taxes, and commit fewer crimes than US citizens.
And now it’s clear this administration is so inept and inherently dangerous it can’t even convince white people to live here. Let that sink in for a bit.
And so it is here: someone you’d never think would oppose fascism and bigotry deciding to speak up, despite knowing he could have just kept his head down and maintained his position as Sheriff For Life in Polk County, Florida.
I’m of course talking about Grady Judd. The sheriff of Polk County is a resolutely terrible person — someone who has routinely used the misery he inflicts on people not just in his own county, but across the nation, to elevate himself. He’s a guy who loves to hear himself talk. He loves being the center of attention, even if the attention is negative. And he’ll never turn down an opportunity to get in front of news cameras and get his id on.
Judd likes to send sex workers to jail (while pretending he’s saving them from sex traffickers), has used natural disasters to bump up arrest numbers, waged a misguided, illegal war on alleged pedophiles located well outside of his jurisdiction, and threatened to arrest Apple CEO Tim Cook for refusing to decrypt iPhones on demand.
So, it comes as a genuine surprise that Sheriff Grady Judd would say the things he’s saying about Trump’s anti-migrant actions. After all, he’s overseen directly and indirectly by a political party that’s more than willing to indulge and protect him, no matter what godawful thing he might choose to do. It’s certainly worked for him so far, given his abhorrent track record.
Florida’s Republican sheriffs want President Donald Trump to end mass deportations of undocumented immigrants who haven’t committed crimes, a striking shift from law enforcement in the nation’s most aggressive anti-undocumented immigration state.
“While Congress sits on their hands and does nothing about this, we are on the ground floor with this day in and day out — looking in the eyes of these folks that, yes, came here inappropriately. But some came here inappropriately only to do better for themselves and their family,” Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd said Monday during a State Immigration Enforcement Council meeting.
Judd is simply saying what non-bigots have been pointing out for years: immigrants pay more taxes, work more hours, commit fewer crimes, and are a net benefit not just for governments’ bottom lines, but for America itself.
This is coming from one of the Florida GOP’s handpicked members of its recently formed “immigration enforcement council.” Judd was no doubt chosen because the GOP expected wholehearted support of whatever it chose to do. But here’s the thing: the GOP-picked panel is seeing plenty of dissent, with Judd simply being the most-recognizable critic of Trump’s anti-immigration efforts.
At least six of the eight council members echoed Judd during Monday’s Microsoft Teams meeting — a seventh, Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters, was not present for the call. One said the state has cast “too wide of a net;” another urged Judd to write to Congress, and a third offered harsh criticisms of ICE tactics.
“I wholeheartedly agree that Congress, they need to get off their butts and they need to fix it,” Charlotte County Sheriff Bill Prummell agreed. “We’re not out … just raiding business and homes, but, unfortunately, when ICE gets involved, you have the collaterals.”
While some of the other board members might just be in the “stopped clock is right twice a day” category, Judd isn’t. He’s on another level completely when it comes to being a sheriff. He’s a clock that adamantly refuses to tell time at all, and is now perhaps as surprised as anyone else that he might have (however momentarily) told time correctly.
And while that’s disappointing, it must be noted that the walkback does not include every bit of his criticism. Judd still wants immigration enforcement limited to criminals, while expressing his support to paths to citizenship for migrants who may have come here illegally, but have done nothing but contribute to their communities since their arrival.
Judd’s in a safe space. He can level this criticism and know he can’t simply be fired for going against the GOP grain, ranging from the state governor to the Commander in Chief. He’s in an elected position, which means he’d need to be voted out. And that hasn’t happened yet, despite Judd’s casual disregard for constitutional rights and jurisdictional limits. I don’t think this is the sort of thing that’s going to end his law enforcement career — not just because most voters tend to vote for incumbents, but because even some people on the far right are recognizing Trump’s anti-migrant efforts are not only bad for polls/public perception of the party, but bad for America itself.
The boat strike program the Trump administration is engaged in isn’t actually supported by law. Even his own in-house counsel can’t seem to agree on what justification to use. Shortly after being threatened with a little congressional oversight, the Office of Legal Counsel shrugged together a legal memo that basically said that the less of a direct threat boats allegedly carrying drugs to the US posed to US national security, the more easily the people in the boats could be killed.
And it’s not like the strikes are discriminate. They’re based on hunches and the administration’s desire to eradicate any boat it thinks has departed from countries it wants to control, like Venezuela. On top of the lack of legal rationale for initial strikes, there’s evidence the Defense Department engages in double- or triple-tap attacks meant to kill the survivors of the original strike — something that’s extremely handy because it also kills potential litigants.
Those extra strikes are illegal under even the United State’s own rules of engagement. And yet they continue. These strikes may have fallen off the radar due to the deluge of unbelievably horrific shit this administration generates daily, but they’re still happening even if the focus has shifted elsewhere.
Fighting a war on drugs doesn’t actually mean you’re engaged in a literal war — you know, the sort of thing Congress used to get angry about if presidents decided they’d rather not deal with any resistance from the legislative branch when getting their war on. This country engages on “wars” on everything from literacy and hunger (but not this administration) to abstract concepts like “woke” and “transgender everywhere.”
That doesn’t mean the administration can drone strike entities still clinging to DEI initiative. Nor can it blow up shipments of cell phones designed for children’s hands just because it believes these “distractions” are leading to lower reading comprehension scores.
The same goes for the War on Drugs. While there’s value in intercepting shipments and arresting those involved, a military program that kills people just because they might be trafficking drugs (much of which appears to headed to other destinations than the United States) is not only illegal, it’s immoral.
Experts in international and U.S. domestic law told an inter-American human rights organization on Friday that the Pentagon’s campaign of blowing up boats it suspected of smuggling drugs in the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean was illegal.
[…]
Ben Saul, the U.N. special rapporteur for protecting fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, accused the United States of “responding with lawless violence that flagrantly violates human rights, in its phony war on so-called narco-terrorism.”
“Drug trafficking is a crime, not war,” said Mr. Saul, a professor of international law. He also said a portrayal of the suspected drug traffickers as being responsible for “speculative drug overdoses” did not constitute a “permissible law enforcement action in personal self-defense or the defense of others.”
Perhaps you’re as cynical as I am. Maybe you see this and wonder what is even the point: some dude said some stuff to the United Nations, which doesn’t mean much now that the Trump administration has decided no other nation or international association of nations has the power to stop it from doing what it wants to do.
Sure, there’s limited utility in statements made to entities the US government is just going to ignore. But don’t let that bury the lede: the Trump administration is engaged in an unprecedented murder program predicated solely on its legally unsupported position that trafficking drugs (to anywhere!) is exactly identical to engaging in terrorist attacks against US citizens.
This is an under-count. There’s no reason to believe the government has released information on every strike, especially since it delayed release of footage showing the military engaging in multiple strikes to murder survivors of its initial boat strike. We may never know the full body count of this extrajudicial killing program. But it’s harrowing to note (as the Times does in its report) that only two rescues of boat strike victims occurred during the last six months, even though the military is obligated — by US law and international law — to attempt to rescue survivors of military attacks it engages in.
The White House is War Crime Central. And now it’s adding to its rap sheet by bombing Iranian schools on top of killing people in international waters. The administration’s response, of course, refused to engage with the allegations made during this conference, choosing instead to claim (1) the Intra-American Human Rights Court (IAHCR) should mind its own business and (2) that it should look at some other cases that don’t involve the Trump administration’s casual human rights violations. You know, the usual stuff: “you’re not the boss of me” + whataboutism.
It’s the State Department pretending you can make a Venn diagram out of humanitarian aid mandates and international human rights laws:
The IACHR lacks the competence to review the matters at issue, which concern the interpretation and application of international humanitarian law, not human rights law, and should not be a pawn in a domestic litigation strategy of the ACLU or any other party.
A normal person would see these concepts as nearly completely overlapping. This administration is not normal. It’s a collective of inhumane people with an inordinate amount of power. And from what’s seen here, it’s clear the body count in international waters will only continue to rise.
Roughly a year ago — as Trump was trying to turn anti-genocide protests into deportable antisemitism — his administration made it clear it was only willing to support white people with antisemitic views. The administration threw some anti-Israel filters into the mix for DHS vetting of incoming migrants, blending them with the anti-Trump filters that equated opposing Trump and his open bigotry with hating America.
One of the white Afrikaners brought into the US as refugees by the Trump administration this week has a history of antisemitic social media posts, despite the White House using alleged antisemitism as a rationale for deporting pro-Palestinian protesters.
Charl Kleinhaus posted on X in 2023 that “Jews are untrustworthy and a dangerous group.” In another post last fall, he shared a rightwing, nationalist YouTube video that was later removed, titled: “‘We’ll shoot ILLEGAL Immigrants!’ – Poland’s Illegal Islamic immigrant solution,” with clapping emojis.
Trump apparently believes white South Africans are so extremely persecuted (after decades of subjugating Black South Africans), they deserve to avail themselves of everything offered by the Land of the Free. Trump wants incoming whites so badly he’s willing to rewrite the rules to flood the zone with new bigots.
The U.S. aims to process 4,500 refugee applications from white South Africans per month, far above President Donald Trump’s stated refugee program cap, and is installing trailers on embassy property in Pretoria to support the effort, a U.S. contracting document said.
The new target, contained in a previously unreported document from the U.S. State Department dated January 27, signals a push to ramp up admissions from South Africa, while refugee applications from other areas have been severely curtailed.
Notably, this isn’t a free pass for any South African. The document apparently extends this to whites only, which is a hell of a thing to do in this day and age. I have to imagine even the most racist of Afrikaners might balk a bit at boarding a plane where non-whites are being ejected over whatever country the plane flies over on its way to Land of Opportunity.
No one ever said this administration is clever. But it’s not accurate to call it stupid. It’s something else entirely: a collection of shitbirds who are so contemptuous of everyone else in the nation that it will stroke itself off publicly and shrug off complaints with non-sequiturs liberally peppered with phrases like “leftist media” or “activist judges.”
This administration will not only piss down your leg and tell you it’s raining, but swing by later to bitch about people “illegally” benefiting from the uninvited precipitation. It’s shit stacked on shit stacked on shit topped off by wedding cake figurines standing on the necks of fallen lawn jockeys.
If you want this to be your nation, please get the fuck out. Get your Fourth Reich on elsewhere, you absolute mooks. And I dare you explain how THIS isn’t pure racism, especially when you’ve gone all in on the “get the foreigners out” purge this government has been engaged in since Trump returned to the Oval Office.
Images from the missile strike in southern Iran were more horrifying than any of the case studies Air Force combat veteran Wes J. Bryant had pored over in his mission to overhaul how the U.S. military safeguards civilian life.
Parents wept over their children’s bodies. Crushed desks and blood-stained backpacks poked through the rubble. The death toll from the attack on an elementary school in Minab climbed past 165, most of them under age 12, with nearly 100 others wounded, according to Iranian health officials. Photos of small coffins and rows of fresh graves went viral, a devastating emblem of Day 1 in the open-ended U.S.-Israeli war in Iran.
Bryant, a former special operations targeting specialist, said he couldn’t help but think of what-ifs as he monitored fallout from the Feb. 28 attack.
Just over a year ago, he had been a senior adviser in an ambitious new Defense Department program aimed at reducing civilian harm during operations. Finally, Bryant said, the military was getting serious about reforms. He worked out of a newly opened Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, where his supervisor was a veteran strike-team targeter who had served as a United Nations war crimes investigator.
Today, that momentum is gone. Bryant was forced out of government in cuts last spring. The civilian protection mission was dissolved as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made “lethality” a top priority. And the world has witnessed a tragedy in Minab that, if U.S. responsibility is confirmed, would be the most civilians killed by the military in a single attack in decades.
Dismantling the fledgling harm-reduction effort, defense analysts say, is among several ways the Trump administration has reorganized national security around two principles: more aggression, less accountability.
Trump and his aides lowered the authorization level for lethal force, broadened target categories, inflated threat assessments and fired inspectors general, according to more than a dozen current and former national security personnel. Nearly all spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
“We’re departing from the rules and norms that we’ve tried to establish as a global community since at least World War II,” Bryant said. “There’s zero accountability.”
Citing open-source intelligence and government officials, several news outlets have concluded that the strike in Minab most likely was carried out by the United States. President Donald Trump, without providing evidence, told reporters March 7 that it was “done by Iran.” Hegseth, standing next to the president aboard Air Force One, said the matter was under investigation.
The next day, the open-source research outfit Bellingcat said it had authenticated a video showing a Tomahawk missile strike next to the school in Minab. Iranian state media later showed fragments of a U.S.-made Tomahawk, as identified by Bellingcat and others, at the site. The United States is the only party to the conflict known to possess Tomahawks. U.N. human rights experts have called for an investigation into whether the attack violated international law.
The Department of Defense and White House did not respond to requests for comment.
Since the post-9/11 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, successive U.S. administrations have faced controversies over civilian deaths. Defense officials eager to shed the legacy of the “forever wars” have periodically called for better protections for civilians, but there was no standardized framework until 2022, when Biden-era leaders adopted a strategy rooted in work that had begun under the first Trump presidency.
Formalized in a 2022 action plan and in a Defense Department instruction, the initiatives are known collectively as Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response, a clunky name often shortened to CHMR and pronounced “chimmer.” Around 200 personnel were assigned to the mission, including roughly 30 at the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, a coordination hub near the Pentagon.
The CHMR strategy calls for more in-depth planning before an attack, such as real-time mapping of the civilian presence in an area and in-depth analysis of the risks. After an operation, reports of harm to noncombatants would prompt an assessment or investigation to figure out what went wrong and then incorporate those lessons into training.
By the time Trump returned to power, harm-mitigation teams were embedded with regional commands and special operations leadership. During Senate confirmation hearings, several Trump nominees for top defense posts voiced support for the mission. Once in office, however, they stood by as the program was gutted, current and former national security officials said.
Around 90% of the CHMR mission is gone, former personnel said, with no more than a single adviser now at most commands. At Central Command, where a 10-person team was cut to one, “a handful” of the eliminated positions were backfilled to help with the Iran campaign. Defense officials can’t formally close the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence without congressional approval, but Bryant and others say it now exists mostly on paper.
“It has no mission or mandate or budget,” Bryant said.
Spike in Strikes
Global conflict monitors have since recorded a dramatic increase in deadly U.S. military operations. Even before the Iran campaign, the number of strikes worldwide since Trump returned to office had surpassed the total from all four years of Joe Biden’s presidency.
Had the Defense Department’s harm-reduction mission continued apace, current and former officials say, the policies almost certainly would’ve reduced the number of noncombatants harmed over the past year.
Beyond the moral considerations, they added, civilian casualties fuel militant recruiting and hinder intelligence-gathering. Retired Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who commanded U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, explains the risk in an equation he calls “insurgent math”: For every innocent killed, at least 10 new enemies are created.
U.S.-Israeli strikes have already killed more than 1,200 civilians in Iran, including nearly 200 children, according to Human Rights Activists News Agency, a U.S.-based group that verifies casualties through a network in Iran. The group says hundreds more deaths are under review, a difficult process given Iran’s internet blackout and dangerous conditions.
Defense analysts say the civilian toll of the Iran campaign, on top of dozens of recent noncombatant casualties in Yemen and Somalia, reopens dark chapters from the “war on terror” that had prompted reforms in the first place.
“It’s a recipe for disaster,” a senior counterterrorism official who left the government a few months ago said of the Trump administration’s yearlong bombing spree. “It’s ‘Groundhog Day’ — every day we’re just killing people and making more enemies.”
In 2015, twodozen patients and 14 staff members were killed when a heavily armed U.S. gunship fired for over an hour on a Doctors Without Borders hospital in northern Afghanistan, a disaster that has become a cautionary tale for military planners.
“Our patients burned in their beds, our medical staff were decapitated or lost limbs. Others were shot from the air while they fled the burning building,” the international aid group said in a report about the destruction of its trauma center in Kunduz.
A U.S. military investigation found that multiple human and systems errors had resulted in the strike team mistaking the building for a Taliban target. The Obama administration apologized and offered payouts of $6,000 to families of the dead.
Human rights advocates had hoped the Kunduz debacle would force the U.S. military into taking concrete steps to protect civilians during U.S. combat operations. Within a couple years, however, the issue came roaring back with high civilian casualties in U.S.-led efforts to dislodge Islamic State extremists from strongholds in Syria and Iraq.
In a single week in March 2017, U.S. operations resulted in three incidents of mass civilian casualties: A drone attack on a mosque in Syria killed around 50; a strike in another part of Syria killed 40 in a school filled with displaced families; and bombing in the Iraqi city of Mosul led to a building collapse that killed more than 100 people taking shelter inside.
In heavy U.S. fighting to break Islamic State control over the Syrian city of Raqqa, “military leaders too often lacked a complete picture of conditions on the ground; too often waved off reports of civilian casualties; and too rarely learned any lessons from strikes gone wrong,” according to an analysis by the Pentagon-adjacent Rand Corp. think tank.
Released in 2019, the review Mattis launched was seen by some advocacy groups as narrow in scope but still a step in the right direction. Yet the issue soon dropped from national discourse, overshadowed by the coronavirus pandemic and landmark racial justice protests.
During the Biden administration’s chaotic withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan in August 2021, a missile strike in Kabul killed an aid worker and nine of his relatives, including seven children. Then-Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin apologized and said the department would “endeavor to learn from this horrible mistake.”
That incident, along with a New York Times investigative series into deaths from U.S. airstrikes, spurred the adoption of the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response action plan in 2022. When they established the new Civilian Protection Center of Excellence the next year, defense officials tapped Michael McNerney — the lead author of the blunt RAND report — to be its director.
“The strike against the aid worker and his family in Kabul pushed Austin to say, ‘Do it right now,’” Bryant said.
The first harm-mitigation teams were assigned to leaders in charge of some of the military’s most sensitive counterterrorism and intelligence-gathering operations: Central Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida; the Joint Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina; and Africa Command in Stuttgart, Germany.
A former CHMR adviser who joined in 2024 after a career in international conflict work said he was reassured to find a serious campaign with a $7 million budget and deep expertise. The adviser spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.
Only a few years before, he recalled, he’d had to plead with the Pentagon to pay attention. “It was like a back-of-the-envelope thing — the cost of a Hellfire missile and the cost of hiring people to work on this.”
Bryant became the de facto liaison between the harm-mitigation team and special operations commanders. In December, he described the experience in detail in a private briefing for aides of Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., who had sought information on civilian casualty protocols involvingboat strikes in the Caribbean Sea.
Bryant’s notes from the briefing, reviewed by ProPublica, describe an embrace of the CHMR mission by Adm. Frank Bradley, who at the time was head of the Joint Special Operations Command. In October, Bradley was promoted to lead Special Operations Command.
At the end of 2024 and into early 2025, Bryant worked closely with the commander’s staff. The notes describe Bradley as “incredibly supportive” of the three-person CHMR team embedded in his command.
Bradley, Bryant wrote, directed “comprehensive lookbacks” on civilian casualties in errant strikes and used the findings to mandate changes. He also introduced training on how to integrate harm prevention and international law into operations against high-value targets. “We viewed Bradley as a model,” Bryant said.
Still, the military remained slow to offer compensation to victims and some of the new policies were difficult to independently monitor, according to a report by the Stimson Center, a foreign policy think tank. The CHMR program also faced opposition from critics who say civilian protections are already baked into laws of war and targeting protocols; the argument is that extra oversight “could have a chilling effect” on commanders’ abilities to quickly tailor operations.
To keep reforms on track, Bryant said, CHMR advisers would have to break through a culture of denial among leaders who pride themselves on precision and moral authority.
“The initial gut response of all commands,” Bryant said, “is: ‘No, we didn’t kill civilians.’”
Reforms Unraveled
As the Trump administration returned to the White House pledging deep cuts across the federal government, military and political leaders scrambled to preserve the Civilian Harm Mitigation and Response framework.
At first, CHMR advisers were heartened by Senate confirmation hearings where Trump’s nominees for senior defense posts affirmed support for civilian protections.
Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote during his confirmation that commanders “see positive impacts from the program.” Elbridge Colby, undersecretary of defense for policy, wrote that it’s in the national interest to “seek to reduce civilian harm to the degree possible.”
When questioned about cuts to the CHMR mission at a hearing last summer, U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Brad Cooper, head of Central Command, said he was committed to integrating the ideas as “part of our culture.”
Despite the top-level support, current and former officials say, the CHMR mission didn’t stand a chance under Hegseth’s signature lethality doctrine.
The former Fox News personality, who served as an Army National Guard infantry officer in Iraq and Afghanistan, disdains rules of engagement and other guardrails as constraining to the “warrior ethos.” He has defended U.S. troops accused of war crimes, including a Navy SEAL charged with stabbing an imprisoned teenage militant to death and then posing for a photo with the corpse.
A month after taking charge, Hegseth fired the military’s top judge advocate generals, known as JAGs, who provide guidance to keep operations in line with U.S. or international law. Hegseth has described the attorneys as “roadblocks” and used the term “jagoff.”
At the Civilian Protection Center of Excellence, the staff tried in vain to save the program. At one point, Bryant said, he even floated the idea of renaming it the “Center for Precision Warfare” to put the mission in terms Hegseth wouldn’t consider “woke.”
By late February 2025, the CHMR mission was imploding, say current and former defense personnel.
Shortly before his job was eliminated, Bryant openly spoke out against the cuts in The Washington Post and Boston Globe, which he said landed him in deep trouble at the Pentagon. He was placed on leave in March, his security clearance at risk of revocation.
Bryant formally resigned in September and has since become a vocal critic of the administration’s defense policies. In columns and on TV, he warns that Hegseth’s cavalier attitude toward the rule of law and civilian protections is corroding military professionalism.
Bryant said it was hard to watch Bradley, the special operations commander and enthusiastic adopter of CHMR, defending a controversial “double-tap” on an alleged drug boat in which survivors of a first strike were killed in a follow-up hit. Legal experts have said such strikes could violate laws of warfare. Bradley did not respond to a request for comment.
“Everything else starts slipping when you have this culture of higher tolerance for civilian casualties,” Bryant said.
Concerns were renewed in early 2025 with the Trump administration’s revived counterterrorism campaign against Islamist militants regrouping in parts of Africa and the Middle East.
Last April, a U.S. air strike hit a migrant detention center in northwestern Yemen, killing at least 61 African migrants and injuring dozens of others in what Amnesty International says “qualifies as an indiscriminate attack and should be investigated as a war crime.”
Operations in Somalia also have become more lethal. In 2024, Biden’s last year in office, conflict monitors recorded 21 strikes in Somalia, with a combined death toll of 189. In year one of Trump’s second term, the U.S. carried out at least 125 strikes, with reported fatalities as high as 359, according to the New America think tank, which monitors counterterrorism operations.
“It is a strategy focused primarily on killing people,” said Alexander Palmer, a terrorism researcher at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Last September, the U.S. military announced an attack in northeastern Somalia targeting a weapons dealer for the Islamist militia Al-Shabaab, a U.S.-designated terrorist group. On the ground, however, villagers said the missile strike incinerated Omar Abdullahi, a respected elder nicknamed “Omar Peacemaker” for his role as a clan mediator.
After the death, the U.S. military released no details, citing operational security.
“The U.S. killed an innocent man without proof or remorse,” Abdullahi’s brother, Ali, told Somali news outlets. “He preached peace, not war. Now his blood stains our soil.”
In Iran, former personnel say, the CHMR mission could have made a difference.
Under the scrapped harm-prevention framework, they said, plans for civilian protection would’ve begun months ago, when orders to draw up a potential Iran campaign likely came down from the White House and Pentagon.
CHMR personnel across commands would immediately begin a detailed mapping of what planners call “the civilian environment,” in this case a picture of the infrastructure and movements of ordinary Iranians. They would also check and update the “no-strike list,” which names civilian targets such as schools and hospitals that are strictly off-limits.
One key question is whether the school was on the no-strike list. It sits a few yards from a naval base for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard. The building was formerly part of the base, though it has been marked on maps as a school since at least 2013, according to visual forensics investigations.
“Whoever ‘hits the button’ on a Tomahawk — they’re part of a system,” the former adviser said. “What you want is for that person to feel really confident that when they hit that button, they’re not going to hit schoolchildren.”
If the guardrails failed and the Defense Department faced a disaster like the school strike, Bryant said, CHMR advisers would’ve jumped in to help with transparent public statements and an immediate inquiry.
Instead, he called the Trump administration’s response to the attack “shameful.”
“It’s back to where we were years ago,” Bryant said. If confirmed, “this will go down as one of the most egregious failures in targeting and civilian harm-mitigation in modern U.S. history.”
Flooding cities with federal officers more used to dealing with border crossings and customs enforcement has led to multiple killings by these officers. They’re not trained to do what they’re being ordered to do. And their new hires aren’t being given the training they need because, apparently, the job of ejecting non-whites from this country is too important to be done within the constraints of the law.
The end result has been the broad daylight murders of American citizens, which are immediately greeted by official government statements claiming the victims of these murders are “terrorists” who are seeking to kill federal officers. Nothing could be further from the truth, as recordings made by citizens and the officers themselves have shown.
But this administration traffics in lies regularly, and it does what it can to keep these lies from being exposed by refusing to release body cam footage captured by officers at the scene, while simultaneously denying any outside agency’s request to perform the sort of shooting investigations that used be considered “normal” before this highly abnormal administration took over the Oval Office.
The government has constantly portrayed victims of federal officers’ gunfire as violent individuals. These claims have always been repudiated by footage captured by people not employed by the federal government.
Via Radley Balko — who points out federal officers have shot at least four people and “brazenly lied” about it every time — here’s another undoing of the government’s narrative about its officers’ violent actions, brought to us by CBS News, which has obtained body cam footage the administration definitely hoped would never be made public.
Video of the March 2025 fatal shooting of American citizen Ruben Ray Martinez obtained by CBS News appears to contradict claims by federal officials that Martinez was shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent because he “accelerated” and “intentionally ran over” another agent with his car.
Much like the government claimed Renee Good was trying to run over officers, before an officer’s own phone recording that he deliberately leaked to a conservative news outlet showed otherwise, DHS spokespeople claimed the victim of this shooting was trying to harm federal officers.
ICE claimed Martinez “accelerated forward” towards an ICE agent and the DHS’s statement insisted the shots that were fired by officers were “defensive.” It also claimed Martinez “intentionally ran over an officer.”
Nearly a year later, body cam footage obtained by CBS News is bringing the truth: this was another unjustified homicide.
But body camera video, which has not been previously reported, shows that Martinez’s vehicle, a blue Ford Fusion, was stationary or going at a very low rate of speed when he was fatally shot. When gunshots are heard in the video, the brake lights of Martinez’ vehicle appear to be on.
It’s unclear whether any of the officers were wearing body cameras during this shooting. And it really doesn’t matter, because the administration is universally unwilling to release footage that might undercut the lies it (and its employed officers) have told in defense of seemingly indefensible actions.
The only reason this footage is available is because it wasn’t captured by federally-owned body cameras. Instead, the footage was recording by a South Padre Island police officer who happened to be on the scene when this shooting occurred.
The recording also shows the standard operating procedure of nearly every law enforcement agency, federal or not. Officers are always more concerned with roughing up and cuffing an impending corpse, rather than seeking immediate medical assistance for the person they’ve just shot.
In this case, two minutes passed after ICE officers shot Martinez, during which they dragged him from the car, threw him face down on the pavement, and handcuffed him. No officer provides medical care of any type. It’s only when EMS shows up two minutes later that anyone tries to save the life of someone who’s now too far gone to be saved.
This administration will lie and lie and lie about its officers’ actions, secure in the knowledge that it controls the recordings, paperwork, and any other actual facts about the shootings its officers engage in. But every time its efforts are undone, either by recordings made by others or — in the Renee Good murder — by an officer who actually was stupid enough to believe his cell phone recording would buttress the government’s bullshit claims.
The killings aren’t over yet. The administration — despite having some second thoughts about its oppressive anti-migrant tactics — still oversees an exceedingly well-funded, extremely large immigration enforcement effort. This sort of aggression — especially when completely divorced from even the most minimal of oversight — is always going to result in people being killed by government forces.
But while the government may have the funding and the power, it can’t prevent outsiders — ranging from legal observers to activists to local law enforcement officers — from exposing the administration’s lies. And it’s starting to have an effect. Some drawdown is happening, and the most visible faces of anti-migrant aggression — Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino and former DHS boss Kristi Noem — have been indefinitely sidelined. The tide feels like it’s turning. But expect the administration to continue lying about pretty much everything because that’s its default setting.
I come here to celebrate the apparently permanent sidelining of former DHS head, Kristi Noem. I know the adage usually does some hedging before damning with faint praise, but I’m not interested in praise, faint or otherwise, much less pretending this isn’t worth celebrating.
Noem openly pined for the VP position, but shot herself in the foot by shooting a dog in her gravel pit and then telling the world about it in her incredibly premature memoirs. What was meant to be a self-congratulatory anecdote about doing what needs to be done was correctly read by pretty much everyone as little more than a person gloating about inflicting misery on animals and her own children.
Kristi Noem spent most of her time as the DHS Secretary making sure she showed up front and center in social media posts. She also was always the first to portray anyone killed or wounded by federal officers as “terrorists,” and refused to walk back those comments after the facts proved otherwise.
She gifted herself with an expensive private jet so she could arrive at the next photo op in style. She moved into an expensive taxpayer-funded residence despite already living in another expensive taxpayer-funded residence. She blew $220 million on an ad campaign featuring her blown-dry looks and vapid statements that apparently also funneled some of that windfall back into her own pockets.
She continued to stay the course even as the national winds shifted in response to oppressive, blue state-targeting “immigration enforcement” efforts. She stood idly by while her officers violated rights, physically assaulted peaceful protesters, and literally murdered two people in one US city alone.
Realizing this putsch was hurting him more than helping him, Trump first sent Nazi-cosplayer Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino back to the actual border, forcing him out of the spotlight and back into the necessary but not-at-all-glamorous job of actually securing the border.
Noem was next. In a somewhat surprising move, Trump booted a true MAGA believer into irrelevance, taking Noem from an “is” to a “was” while she was engaged in a press briefing. She’s now the Special Envoy to the Shield of the Americas, which is exactly the sort of made-up position you’d shunt someone into if you didn’t want to be blamed for their hiring, but also didn’t want them to do any more damage to your administration.
Now that Noem’s been turfed, the knives are out. It’s not just leading GOP members now pretending she’s this administration’s Nikolai Yezhov. It’s also pro-Trump outlets like Fox News smelling the blood in the water but, of course, only speaking out now that the water’s more red than blue:
We can now openly admit what has been unfolding before our eyes for a year: that Kristi Noem was an utter, complete, total catastrophe, her tenure in charge of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) little more than a self-promoting crusade.
She was unqualified for the job from day one, and largely responsible for the awful excesses of ICE and the frustrating failures of FEMA.
President Donald Trump’s decision to fire her, which took way too long, liberates many Republicans to acknowledge what many in the media, including me, along with Democrats and outside critics, have been saying all along: Noem was a slow-motion train wreck.
Walk into the ocean, Howard Kurtz. You pretend like you’re a journalist and analyst and yet you state — openly! — that you weren’t willing to speak out against Kristi Noem (an apparent “utter, complete, total catastrophe”) until after Trump fired her. If you had any spine or ethics, you would have made your opinions known months ago and been hailed as a savvy insider. Now you just look like a practice squad Monday morning quarterback.
But enough about Kurtz. Here’s more about Noem, who was a spectacular failure on every level. Here’s another lowlight of Noem’s short federal career, as reported by The New Republic:
ICE’s former deputy director, Madison Sheahan, wasted millions of taxpayer dollars on 2,500 vehicles custom-wrapped to say “ICE” on the side, three sources told the Washington Examiner. The gaudy cars feature massive ICE logos, red stripes, and a golden decal of President Donald Trump’s name on the back window.
Noem stans might want to pretend this doesn’t have anything to do with her since it was a former deputy director handling this purchase. No dice, weirdos. Noem has made it clear since day one that she’s the only one who can approve spending like this, which is something she used to defend refusing to send FEMA aid to places that weren’t sufficiently Trumpish.
That’s on top of other things that may have forced Trump to dump a die-hard ally. The first was the $220 million-worth of masturbation Noem performed, which came in the form of Noem-focused DHS ads featuring her sitting on a horse in front of Mt. Rushmore in South Dakota. Noem claimed the ad campaign was approved by Trump while testifying to Congress. Trump immediately said otherwise when questioned by reporters.
Then there were the three jets (two Gulfstreams and a remodeled 737) Noem wanted for her own personal use as DHS Secretary. On top of that, there were the rumors that Noem and her de facto chief of staff, Corey Lewandowski (another ridiculous MAGA asshat) were having an extramarital affair.
All of this was piled on top of a rapidly disintegrating “surge” in Minneapolis, which single-handedly managed to turn public opinion against Trump, at least in terms of immigration enforcement. Noem insisted on being the public face of this, competing with fellow sadists like the previously-mentioned (and similarly demoted) Gregory Bovino.
We should all dance on the professional grave of Kristi Noem, who sold out entirely to MAGA just to be stuck in a Special Envoy cubicle until she either gets demoted again or decides she’s better off back in South Dakota. Noem made her own bed. Now she gets to lay in it, along with her killed dog, which means she’s not only having to deal with her own shittily-made bed, but the fleas that come with it.
She couldn’t even make it 18 months. That’s heartening. That means a bunch more people who sold their souls for MAGA rock and roll are likely to find their loyalty repaid with GTFO orders from the boss man who won’t tolerate anything that doesn’t immediately look like a win. They deserve everything that’s coming to them, including the possibility of criminal or contempt charges for playing fast and loose with the laws and the US Constitution while holding, however briefly, their positions of power.
We won’t miss you, Kristi. You were the epitome of everything people hate about political appointees. The most you can hope for is that your swift defenestration will be somehow instructive for those following in your shady, subordinate footsteps. If not, you’ll be nothing more than a foul breeze, remembered only for the odor you created while passing through the political system. But you were exactly what Trump wanted, right up until he decided he didn’t.
Say what you will about cops — even the federal ones — but they have nothing on the people charged with guarding people who have been detained or imprisoned. The cruelty of cops is slightly tempered by the fact that anyone with a cell phone, dash cam, or doorbell surveillance device might catch them in the act. It’s not much a deterrent (and it’s a far better deterrent than police body cameras, ironically enough) but it’s better than the absolute nothing that’s in place in detainment centers, jails, and prisons.
Cops can control their own cameras. Prison guards can control an entire network of cameras. And they’re far more used to dehumanizing people than law enforcement officers on the outside.
So, it’s hardly surprising that the people keeping an eye on the thousands of migrants being imprisoned indefinitely by this administration would be the most inhumane. If citizens stuck in prisons are treated like (diseased) cattle at best, the people dumped into ICE detention centers are treated like something even worse: vermin. That’s a loaded term. And I’m using it correctly when speaking about this administration.
The calls to 911 poured in from staff at Camp East Montana in Texas, the nation’s largest U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility, at a rate of nearly one a day for five months, each its own tale of pain and despair.
A man sobs after being assaulted by another detainee. Another bangs his head against the wall after expressing suicidal thoughts. A pregnant woman complained of severe back pain and also had coronavirus.
Even worse is what’s been said by the detainees. Welcome to the Trump’s brave new world, where bigoted anti-migrant enforcement is now coupled with the potentially deadly effects of this administration’s anti-vax healthcare stance:
The detainees describe a camp where an average of about 3,000 people have lived per day in loud and unsanitary quarters, diseases spread easily and sleep is a luxury. The center will be closed to visitors until at least March 19 because of a measles outbreak, according to U.S. Rep. Veronica Escobar.
That’s mass inhumanity, aided and abetted by an administration that doesn’t care how many people die so long as it can claim some sort of revenge over COVID-19 policies put in place in the last year of Trump’s previous presidential term.
Here’s the more selective inhumanity, which isn’t any better:
At one point [detainee Owen Ramsingh] said he overheard a security guard talking about bets made among the staff over which detainee would be next to die by suicide. The guard said he had paid $500 into a pool, with the total pot riding on the outcome. The talk was particularly jarring, he said, because he had contemplated suicide himself.
Some of you might be saying to yourselves “Well, that’s just something one guy said.” And that’s true, it’s just one guy saying this. But this is also just one guy saying this:
The DHS spokesperson said Ramsingh’s account was false, though provided no indication of how the agency had sought to verify that.
True or not, these are the facts on the ground in Camp East Montana:
Ramsingh said he heard of the betting pool after Jan. 3, when ICE said security guards responded after a 55-year-old Cuban man tried to harm himself and then used handcuffs and force to restrain him. A medical examiner ruled that Geraldo Lunas Campos’s death was a homicide caused by asphyxia.
Given what we know about what’s happening in this detainment center, coupled with what we know about the historical sadism of “screws,” this doesn’t seem that far-fetched. Then there are the 911 calls — placed by the guardsthemselves — that made it clear at least six other detainees had attempted or considered attempting suicide during that same time period.
So, while it could just be some guy saying something, consider this: the DHS has more to gain from denying this than Ramsingh — who has already been deported — has to gain from making this allegation.
I don’t find this allegation unbelievable. It seems like exactly the sort of thing people trained and encouraged to treat detainees as less than human would do, especially when suicides and suicidal ideation are a daily occurrence. The government contractors employing them are profiting from human misery. Why shouldn’t they?
