On her Monday report, Rachel Maddow again focused on the Chaos administration's efforts to build scores of new ICE prison camps by retrofitting empty warehouses all over the country, and the ongoing protests to stop them. There were well over a hundred protests in just the past week, as well as lawsuits and other official efforts--as every one of these proposed sites is being opposed.
She noted again that the national media is by and large not covering this story, though local TV news and local newspapers are, as well as reports on specific efforts on social media and Substack.
She is correct, of course that it is an important story, and worth covering not only for the threat that these concentration camps pose but for the effectiveness of the opposition, as not one of them has been completed and many have been abandoned.
But another important story not being covered anywhere near its importance is what is happening to real people every day in ICE prisons that are open right now. Individual stories make the news for a day or two, especially the more novel of the outrages. Like the 85 year old French widow of an American army veteran with a valid application for a green card who was taken bodily from her bed, chained and otherwise restrained and imprisoned for more than two weeks. Formerly a supporter of the Chaos immigration policy she saw the realities of these prisons where people were "treated like dogs." Her own fragile health was worsened, and now suddenly deported back in France she is being treated for PTSD.
Other stories fly by. The mother and five children who have been imprisoned without trial for almost a year in Texas, where all of them have experienced serious physical and psychological consequences, all because of something the divorced husband did... The family that escaped religious persecution in India and in the normal course of applying for asylum were suddenly forced into the Dilly concentration camp, where some 5200 parents and children have been imprisoned.
Other stories focus on the lack of proper nutrition and especially of medical care, and the consequences: such as the child that suffered lifelong hearing loss because of an untreated infection. Inmates at many of these prisons have died. These stories are not about unusual cases: they are the norm.
From the slipshod and at times demonstrably corrupt selection of victims, to their initial treatment (worse than animals taken to the slaughter) to the death camp conditions and the reflexive lying and resistance to court orders of officials--there has been nothing like this on American soil in generations, if ever (perhaps only treatment of Native Americans in the 19th century.) This is beyond cruelty and blatant injustice. This is official sadism.
And it is for-profit sadism. This is the apotheosis of turning over the mechanics of imprisonment to profit-making corporations, on the always dubious theory that they will do the same job more efficiently and yet still make a profit, which began in the Reagan administration and has grown to massive proportions since.
We don't even have to wonder what future historians might say about this. We can pretty much guess what past historians would say about it, once they got beyond speechless horror. There is nothing so basic to American principles and practices, and nothing so despicably cruel except the withdrawal of lifesaving aid to millions of the world's most impoverished children engineered by the sadist racist Musk.
Have even the worst of the worst ever been treated like this in America? Thrown in prison and their locations kept secret, denied fundamental rights, and imprisoned without trial and without a sentence? And done so openly and intentionally? Have people only accused of relatively mundane violations of immigration law ever before been terrorized, forced from their homes in bedclothes, manacled and thrown into trucks and buses with less care than if they were packages? All as regular practice? Children who are the definition of innocence before the law, seized in fear, imprisoned for weeks and months, exposed to diseases, their lives shattered, with effects on their bodies and minds that will likely last the rest of their lives?
But it is not the worst of the worst that are being imprisoned by ICE. It is ICE and the people doing the imprisoning who are the worst of the worst. The soul of America is at risk because of this alone, and though there are many stories and many protests, this demands greater sustained attention.
