This Is Much Worse Than Mere Detention
"You’re reading the Jamelle Bouie newsletter. Historical context for present-day events.
Writing about a recent ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit that affirmed the Trump administration’s policy of mandatory and indefinite detention for immigrants held by either ICE or Customs and Border Protection, my colleague David French makes a point that bears repeating:
There are thousands upon thousands of immigrants facing brutal conditions who’ve been convicted of no crime and haven’t even been accused of a crime beyond their initial alleged illegal entry.
People who have lost legal status because they have overstayed their visas, he also notes, “aren’t guilty of any crime at all, since their original entry is lawful.” And even illegal entry is “a misdemeanor for a first offense.”
Immigration detention is not a criminal procedure. And yet the Trump administration is treating it as a criminal punishment. It is using detention to inflict pain on anyone — immigrant or citizen — caught in its grasp. It is subjecting detainees to horrific conditions of deprivation and abuse, meant to pressure people into leaving the country, even if they have valid asylum claims or even legal status. And the administration is trying to expand its system of internment camps, purchasing warehouses across the country meant to hold tens of thousands of people — an archipelago custom-ordered by America’s most famous real estate developer, Donald Trump.
It would not be an exaggeration to call these “concentration” camps. “A concentration camp exists wherever a government holds groups of civilians outside the normal legal process — sometimes to segregate people considered foreigners or outsiders, sometimes to punish,” Andrea Pitzer writes in “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.” Conditions within the administration’s detention facilities certainly meet the bill.
Here’s how a Russian family described its four-month ordeal at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in an interview with NBC News:
“Worms in their food. Guards shouting orders and snatching toys from small hands. Restless nights under fluorescent lights that never fully go dark. Hours in line for a single pill. “We left one tyranny and came to another kind of tyranny,” Nikita said in Russian. “Even in Russia, they don’t treat children like this.”
Or consider this ProPublica exposé of the same facility, focused on the children who have been caught in the administration’s immigration dragnet.
Kheilin Valero from Venezuela, who was being held with her 18-month-old, Amalia Arrieta, said shortly after they were detained following an ICE appointment on Dec. 11 in El Paso, Texas, the baby fell ill. For two weeks, she said, medical staff gave her ibuprofen and eventually antibiotics, but Amalia’s breathing worsened to the point that she was hospitalized in San Antonio for 10 days. She was diagnosed with Covid-19 and RSV. “Because she went so many days without treatment, and because it’s so cold here, she developed pneumonia and bronchitis,” Kheilin said. “She was malnourished, too, because she was vomiting everything.”
A recent report from the American Immigration Council notes that one man who suffered a medical incident at the so-called Alligator Alcatraz facility in Florida was denied pain medication and forced to sit for hours in “in blood and feces-soaked clothing.” The rapid expansion of the detention system — along with the administration’s clear indifference to the health and safety of detainees — will almost certainly lead to continued and worsening abuse of the people held in these facilities.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, I asked readers to think seriously about Trump’s plan to remove millions of people from the United States:
Now, imagine the conditions that might prevail for hundreds of thousands of people crammed into hastily constructed camps, the targets of a vicious campaign of demonization meant to build support for their detention and deportation. If undocumented immigrants really are, as Trump says, “poisoning the blood of our country,” then how do we respond? What do we do about poison? Well, we neutralize it.
What we see now, with the immigration dragnets in American cities and the horrific conditions in the administration’s detention facilities, is what the president promised in his campaign. He said he was going to punish immigrants for being immigrants, and here he is, punishing immigrants for being immigrants, with every tool he has at his disposal."
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