"A Church Without a God"

People who die in DHS custody have one thing in common with some of the people arresting them: The government won't show their faces due to specious "privacy concerns".

U.S. residents are quickly watching the place we call home turn into a place where secret police can use secret law to conduct secret operations snatching secret targets from streets, homes, dorms, and workplaces, rendering them to secret prisons, ultimately resulting in secret deaths.

That said, ICE’s acting director reassured members of congress some of his agents previously assaulted, then accused of assaulting them.

“We have nothing to hide,” Lyons said. “ICE will be fully transparent.”

Dan Kowalski’s piece yesterday called it, as usual.

There’s this gorgeous piece of reportage from the Birthright Citizenship oral argument at SCOTUS—a church without a god—this morning, too.

And then there’s this absolutely beautifully, totally devastating piece from Atlanta-based 285 South that’s worth your time if you’re here. ICE and GEO at Folkston threw a guy in the hole and banned his now-husband immediately after they got married.

In my dumb little FOIA world, the picture is much the same.

CBP on Naming the Dead: NBD

In an appeal response provided earlier this week to my CBP Death in Custody Reporting Act FOIA, about which I’ve previously written here and here, the agency not only refused to release the names of people who died in CBP custody, but also, quite absurdly, tries to clawback the prior releases of those names pre-administrative appeal.

Now, I love a good 11-page letter brief as much as the next person. But this reasoning would’ve received an F in my classroom.

“[We couldn’t help them dying, but we’re really concerned about their families’ personal safety.]” Okay.

CBP also says it can’t find any additional death notifications from before FY22, and it’d be inefficient to try. I’ll seek them from BJS instead, I guess. You’d think the agency would maybe keep records of this stuff if it wanted to prevent it.

CBP did, however, release its death in custody list for FY23. I’ve published it here. (tinyurl.com/CBPDeathsFY23)

48 souls gone.

At least 6 homicides—4 by handgun. 2 uses of a TASER or “directed energy weapon.”

Most of the deaths were in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico.

The No Face, No Case Approach to Press Releases

Here’s a link to my current list of ICE deaths in custody, since the Acting Director seems to have sown some confusion in how many people died. It leaves much to be desired. I would welcome help in curating and maintaining it. Lord knows that help’s not coming from the folks generating all the data.

By my count, there’s one undisclosed death in ICE custody since January 20, 2025. The place to look is not, as Aaron’s tweets from yesterday suggest, the detainee death reporting page—ICE doesn’t publish on time, or even acknowledge the language of the statute saying what the time is (30 days). Rather, it’s the ICE press releases page, with the filter “Detainee Death Notifications” filter applied:

A very strange things happens when you go to this site:

All the “very bad” people ICE arrests and detains and deports have photos that the agency likes to post on the webpage. Their faces don’t get masks, like the folks who arrested them. Their privacy interests aren’t implicated, like CBP warns of the dead folks.

But all of those same “very bad” people suddenly cease having likenesses once they’re dead. CBP even claims they cease having names that can be released.

The single most important determining factor in whether DHS will assert your privacy interests on your behalf, and those of your family, is whether you survive your encounter with them.

According to DHS’s logic you have no privacy rights as you’re encountered, detained, prosecuted, deported, rendered to a Salvadoran death camp. But the moment you die, those privacy rights return.

So, as today’s act of quiet, seemingly futile rebellion (tinged with fear and cowardice, since I’m not publishing names and faces of his captors), here is the face of the most recent man to die in ICE custody, 68 year-old Abelardo Avellenada Delgado, who died en route to the Stewart Detention Center after being taking into custody for a probation violation.

His likeness is a public record. Like the rest of this stuff should be. Unless we’re just going to roll over and accept the secret police and the secret death machine they bring.