Congress just added another $70 billion to the budget of ICE and the Border Patrol. Meanwhile, there are no apparent efforts to improve living conditions at ICE detention centers. There seems to be an intention to make life miserable so that detained people ask to be deported. ICE is given leeway to arrest anyone, regardless of their lack of any criminal record. Even citizens and others with valid papers have been held in detention for weeks or months. So much for deporting “the worst of the worst!”
The Columbia Journalism Review reported:
In 2024, Narges Dehghani fled Iran for the United States. She had been a dissident, fighting against the regime, and had been detained, violently interrogated, and sexually assaulted by Islamic Republic agents. In America, she hoped to finally find freedom. Instead, she has been held for fourteen months at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center.
When Dehghani arrived at the Eloy Detention Center, in Arizona, she was “emotionally, mentally and physically wrecked” from her journey to the US-Mexico border. During her intake assessment, she told a psychologist that she was having suicidal thoughts and was immediately put on “suicide watch” in solitary confinement, where she remained for three days. “It’s not like a treatment; it’s a punishment,” Dehghani told the Arizona Daily Star. “That place is not a place you should put a human being.”
Dehghani shared her story with Emily Bregel and Emily Hamer for their excellent series “Inside ICE Detention,” produced by the Daily Star and Lee Enterprises, which examines the impact of detention on immigrants without criminal records. Bregel and Hamer’s reporting found that “ICE is misusing and overusing solitary confinement in ways that violate immigrants’ rights and ICE’s own policies.” Over the past seven months, they have interviewed more than thirty detainees.
“The people who are in detention centers are largely not criminals—about 70 percent of them have never been charged with any kind of crime at all,” Hamer told me. “We wanted to look at the conditions that people are facing in detention because it’s civil detention. It’s not criminal. The conditions are not supposed to be as bad as prison, legally, and yet Eloy Detention Center in Arizona basically looks like prison.”
Last week, the pair published a piece documenting the increasing use of solitary confinement in detention centers to coerce detainees into self-deporting. “ICE is subjecting them to really harsh conditions so that they’ll just give up,” Hamer told me. “We have had detainees tell us that guards are telling them, ‘That’s my whole objective, is to make your time in here as miserable as possible so that you self-deport,’ which is unconstitutional.”
Maksim Borisov, a twenty-two-year-old who faced persecution in Russia for being gay, spent more than a year in ICE detention. At one point, a guard presented him with papers and repeatedly pressured him to self-deport. When he refused, he was thrown into solitary confinement. “This is torturing. They’re torturing me,” Borisov said. “I never broke any law, and I’m being punished because I don’t want to die in my country.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
So, ICE is, following the, “footsteps” of, GESTAPO, rounding up all that the KING sees as, unfitting, and, put them into, the, deportation camps, and now, the only thing LEFT for Trump to do is, to set up a, DEATH camp like, Auschwitz, like Hitler had. And, the, American public still aren’t, revolting???
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Please don’t call them “detention centers.” They’re concentration camps. Americans need to be aware the facilities fitting that description are operating today in the US.
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Please don’t call them “detention centers.” They’re concentration camps. Americans need to be aware the facilities fitting that description are operating today in the US.
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There have been numerous complaints of unsafe and unsanitary conditions at ICE detention facilities. Complaints include spoiled food, abysmal living conditions, overcrowding, lack of medical and dental care and isolation.
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Very pleased to see you calling for this.
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in no place does the constitution suggest that rights listed in the constitution, which include the amendments, are reserved for any selected group
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“Abolish ICE” is a self-defeating call for Democrats, just like “Defund the Police” was in the past.
The call to “Abolish ICE” equates in the minds of many Democrats, as well as independent voters and MAGA voters, with the call for “Open Borders”, which is something no one wants.
A better alternative is “Make ICE Obey Our Constitution!” — the call to require ICE to obtain genuine judicial warrants, instead of ICE’s own administrative warrants, before entering someone’s private home is not only a legitimate call, but can be sold to all voters as protecting everyone’s constitutional right against unwarranted search and seizure, which is something everyone wants.
“Make ICE Obey Our Constitution” also includes requiring ICE to follow constitutional habeas corpus rights against unconstitutional detainment and denial of judicial hearings. Making ICE subject to following constitutional habeas corpus rights would end ICE’s ability to inflict terror on people by making persons disappear into ICE concentration camps.
Enforcing both of these requirements would constrain ICE’s ability to instill terror, which is fundamental to ICE’s “mission”.
ICE is Trump’s equivalent to Hitler’s Sturmabteilung which Hitler employed to terrorize not only his political enemies, but also ordinary Germans and consolidate his power. Think about this: ICE now has a budget larger than that of the U.S. Marine Corps and for months has been building an arsenal of heavy weapons, the kind of heavy weapons that an actual army uses in full combat. Basically, since the Supreme Court put limits on how Trump can use the U.S. military and National Guard against civilians, Trump has formed his own army that is exempt from the constitutional restrictions that the Court has jurisdiction over. ICE is indeed Trump’s personal Sturmabteilung — and the danger to us all is in the Red Zone.
So, while a call to “Abolish ICE” is as politically disastrous as was the call to “Defund the Police”, the call to “Make ICE Obey Our Constitution” has a base of acceptance among all voters and gives Democrats cause for dialog in explaining to all Americans how ICE’s unconstitutional tactics are a threat to citizens of all political views.
Passion can serve a purpose, but well-thought-through slogans are politically more effective.
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