Chekhov's Gun Range
Why does a concentration warehouse need a gun range?
February 20, 2026
Happy FOIA Friday to all who celebrate — including and especially those highly skeptical of DHS’s claims that it lacks money to keep ICE’s FOIA shop running when it has money to keep ICE’s Twitter account running. One’s required by law; the other’s propaganda.
I don’t generally do calls to action here. That’s for others, who do it better.
But I would really encourage anyone who’s against secret concentration camps to call or write your lawmaker and tell them don’t reopen DHS without requiring them to fully fund their FOIA office. Masks Off means records out.
With that said, we have a new fatality to report in ICE detention, a troubling new trend away from detention death transparency toward detention death secrecy, and an even more troubling architectural design element that can have only one plausible use (despite all the implausible ones).
Man Who Died in Florida Previously Detained in Camp East Montana (But shhhh…ICE doesn’t want you to know that)
Today (Friday), ICE announced the death of 27 year-old Guatemalan national Jairo Garcia-Hernandez at the Larkin Community Hospital in Florida on February 16, 2026. That was Monday, which was a federal holiday. So, once again, ICE violated its policy requiring public notification of deaths in custody within 48 hours. The agency may have violated its Congressional notification policy as well, given the lack of any indication in the materials Austin Kocher received from a congressional source about Lorth Sim’s death in Indiana on Tuesday.
Like Mr. Sim, who ICE arrested in Boston during a check-in, Mr. Garcia-Hernandez was transferred hundreds of miles from the site of his arrest. The latter decedent’s arrest happened in New York state following a local police department’s outreach to Border Patrol after encountering him in January 2025. His most serious charge, according to ICE records was possession of a firearm. Too bad he wasn’t a Mexican cartel [sic] in cahoots with an Army base.
Garcia-Hernandez—whom ICE admits “had a long history of severe medical complications and was already in ill health when he was taken into ICE custody,”—was detained at two different behavioral health hospitals during his 13 months in ICE custody. One was in El Paso, Texas, the other was in Hollywood, Florida.
Based on the information ICE provided, we can locate Mr. Garcia-Hernandez in the detention data ICE released to the Deportation Data Project. By finding his unique identifier, d1275e76a391f95eb5ab125e15947d460060ee13, we can track him through the system. Eternal gratitude for the good folks at DDP for making this possible.
ICE booked him in to the Larkin Behavioral Health Services hospital in Florida on September 7, 2025, and booked him out of that facility on September 19, 2025. ICE booked him in to the El Paso Behavioral Health System facility in Texas at 11:00 p.m. on September 23, 2025, where he remained until at least October 15, when the DDP data run out.
What ICE doesn’t tell the public in this release, and what it likely will never tell anyone without being forced to do so through FOIA litigation, is that Mr. Garcia-Hernandez had also been detained in a bunch of other detention centers and hospitals during the more than year he spent in government custody:
First, ICE imprisoned him at the Akima-run Batavia facility in Buffalo, NY for nearly eight months until he was hospitalized from August 20 to August 23, 2025. Suicide attempt? After getting out of the hospital, ICE sent him back to Batavia from August 23 through September 5, went it flew him to GEO’s Alexandria Staging Facility in Louisiana (perhaps to prepare him for deportation?). From there, ICE took him to the Florida Larkin Behavioral Health Services facility on September 7, where he remained for less than two weeks before being transferred to . . . Camp East Montana.
Garcia-Hernandez was Camp East Montana from September 19 - 23, whereupon he was booked into the El Paso Service Processing Center before finally arriving at the El Paso Behavioral Health System hospital at 11 pm on the 23rd.
God knows how many other places ICE moved him from October 15, before he was eventually re-admitted to Larkin in Florida prior to his death on February 16.
And only ICE knows why its press release omits all the detention facilities he’d been housed in, why ICE felt it could carry out a deportation of him, and whether it ever bothered to initiate removal proceedings against him while it imprisoned him for 13 months. Like Larry Ellison, I think the difference between God and ICE is that God doesn’t think she’s ICE.
Chekov’s Gun Range
Having analyzed the plans ICE provided Social Circle, GA city officials for the 8,500-person, $128 million, 1 million square foot concentration warehouse the agency plans to open in the next several months, I have a single, straightforward question:
WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK?
Why does the warehouse need a gun range? (it’s in the upper right-hand corner, nestled between the “warehouse” and the “security room.”
If images like the ones above invoke CECOT, that’s on purpose (I believe). And we are, consequently, just a short period in time from images like this:
Except at SoCot, the gore will be under the protective coating of the newly fabricated warehouse roof.
ICE Dummy Death Reports Just Got Worse
Yesterday ICE continued retreating from historical practice and its commitment to comply with congressional requirements to release information about deaths in custody. What were once four-page reports with detailed timelines — themselves a poor replacement for the detainee death reviews Congress had in mind when it required ICE to affirmatively publish death information — are now tight one-pagers that provide less information than the press release.
You can compare the formatting for yourself. Here’s the first Death Report ICE ever released. Here’s one they released this week.
No more dates of birth. No more immigration history. No more timelines.
Basically all the stuff Congress had in mind. And, incidentally, all the story I and others have been using to critically assess the agency’s narratives in these cases.
Mask off?