Things got scary November 5 at the very latest. And I haven’t even been in the US for years.
The deportations, both the indiscriminate ones and the vindictive ones, represent a very high level of lawlessness, one that hasn’t been seen in a long time. Not only are they ignoring due process, they’re actively thwarting it, and openly bragging about doing so. They’re not even trying to pretend to be remotely decent. The case you mention isn’t even close to the worst of them; that one could at least theoretically have happened before.
The deportations were also a campaign promise. Actually the campaign promise was even more extreme.
It’s part of a systematic plan. There’ve been a lot of administrative and personnel changes obviously designed to weaken institutions that are supposed to prevent things like that.
ICE has always had a reputation for a relatively thuggish, xenophobic organizational culture. It was already primed to get worse. As soon as Trump signalled aproval, it did get worse.
Bad conditions in detention centers are nothing new. There’s never been any willingness to spend what it would take to do them right, or to put in the kind of controls you’d need. It’s politically risky to act like you care about “illegal immigrants”, whereas it can be politically rewarding to “get tough”. The 2020 “kids in cages” scandal was a rare case of something that got some traction. But, sure, I imagine that the newly emboldened ICE is even more indifferent to bad conditions, and may even be actively trying to make them worse. And of course if a center is already bad, putting more people into it and moving people through it fast is only going to make it worse.
Things got scary November 5 at the very latest. And I haven’t even been in the US for years.
The deportations, both the indiscriminate ones and the vindictive ones, represent a very high level of lawlessness, one that hasn’t been seen in a long time. Not only are they ignoring due process, they’re actively thwarting it, and openly bragging about doing so. They’re not even trying to pretend to be remotely decent. The case you mention isn’t even close to the worst of them; that one could at least theoretically have happened before.
The deportations were also a campaign promise. Actually the campaign promise was even more extreme.
It’s part of a systematic plan. There’ve been a lot of administrative and personnel changes obviously designed to weaken institutions that are supposed to prevent things like that.
ICE has always had a reputation for a relatively thuggish, xenophobic organizational culture. It was already primed to get worse. As soon as Trump signalled aproval, it did get worse.
Bad conditions in detention centers are nothing new. There’s never been any willingness to spend what it would take to do them right, or to put in the kind of controls you’d need. It’s politically risky to act like you care about “illegal immigrants”, whereas it can be politically rewarding to “get tough”. The 2020 “kids in cages” scandal was a rare case of something that got some traction. But, sure, I imagine that the newly emboldened ICE is even more indifferent to bad conditions, and may even be actively trying to make them worse. And of course if a center is already bad, putting more people into it and moving people through it fast is only going to make it worse.