The Illusion of Difference
A Day of Contradictions in the Deadly US Bordering Regime
I want to start by sharing how much I appreciate all of you who spare a few minutes of your time and energy reading this stuff. Thank you.
It fuels my will to keep doing this work, even and especially when it’s hard. Today it was hard.
Thank you especially to everyone who’s chosen to share resources and subscribe lately. I’m more grateful than I’m able to express right now.
For people paying attention to how the US treats people on the move, today was not just hard, but exceptionally busy. And instructive.
“. . . the Light of Truth”
This morning, Lighthouse Reports published an absolutely essential report on last year’s deadly fire inside a migrant prison in Juarez. If you have not yet watched it, I would encourage you to click through and do so. Nothing that comes after these links will be as singularly important as absorbing this devastating, visionary reporting. A team led by Border Chronicle’s Melissa del Bosque (you should subscribe to that Substack while you’re there) that included La Verdad in Juarez and Bob Moore’s El Paso Matters in Texas. Something we aspire to in documenting tragedies like these is to infuse dignity, respect, precision, clarity, and humanity in every moment of the storytelling. We want to leave anyone who watches or reads feeling like they have both a greater understanding of why this occurred and a burning rage to act and prevent it from happening again.
Ida B. Wells said the way to right wrongs is to shine the light of truth upon them. This team did that and more.
“Power Concedes Nothing . . .”
Speaking of taking action action, read this Truthout story from Mike Ludwig on the latest from Tacoma. Here is the set of requests Detention Watch Network lifted up from the 300+ folks inside the deadly facility who are on hunger strike, and La Resistencia’s organizers who are working to protect and liberate them. Here are their demands:
Demand the DOJ conducts an investigation and e-mail US Representatives to demand a statement and investigation
Follow La Resistencia for updates
Hunger Striker Demands are:
The shutdown of Northwest Detention Center
An end to solitary confinement everywhere
An independent investigation into the death of Mr. Charles Leo Daniel Daniel, and everyone who has suffered at the hands of ICE and GEO
An accountability and reparations process
Same Difference
As the Supreme Court effectively allowed the State of Texas to regress to its original condition as a vigilante white settler colonial state by enforcing SB4, the Biden Administration and Congress reportedly agreed to fund 7,500 more beds in deadly human cages to imprison the people Texas and the coming chorus of copycat posses will soon arrest. A deal to avert a government shutdown by increasing ICE’s detention capacity 22% is an agreement by the Biden government to look the other way while more people die in custody. Both Texas and the federal government have decided the means of governing isn’t providing for people’s material needs. Rather, it’s making “security” the only government entitlement program and defining that security as gratuitous racialized violence and death.
Shocking New FOIA Death Records
We got some new FOIA records in today from one of the ongoing litigations involving deaths in ICE custody.
Tortured to Death at Kay County
They show a woman predicting her own death from medical neglect:
Hours after her last phone call she is literally pleading for her life. She sent eight of these:
These records reveal ICE medical staff in the Dallas office knew this young woman who predicted her own death in custody would not get proper treatment at the Kay County Detention Facility in Oklahoma. A nurse suggested ICE transfer her to the Prairieland Detention Center, operated by LaSalle Corrections, where the woman ultimately died.
One of the most perverse aspects of the torture the US government subjected this woman to, however, is that the staff at Kay County mistranslated her pleas for help. She was banging on the cell door, telling guards she could not take being left there to die. They mislabeled her cries for help as threats of suicide. “I feel like I’m dying” became “I want to die”. And she suffered the consequences of that mistranslation.
Based on this egregious error, a more egregious one followed. Kay County and ICE let a detention officer with a bachelor’s degree in psychology put this person into solitary confinement. He ordered her changed into a suicide smock and then locked her into a padded cell by herself
The Medical Director for Turn-Key, the company responsible for healthcare at the facility, told ICE death reviewers “I’ve never seen a single page of records for this patient.”
She died following a long hospital stay after being left essentially untreated in detention by ICE for weeks, drugged by the detention center’s formulary, and labeled bulimic when she begin losing weight precipitously as a result of her untreated conditions.
Oversight without Consequences
ICE’s ICE’s Office of Detention Oversight found 42 deficiencies during a scheduled inspection in August 2023. The agency did a follow-up, though, and that number went down to 14. The prior year—2022—ODO’s unannounced inspection also found 42 deficiencies. Once again, ODO let Kay take the make-up test, and the got that number down to 12. The year before that, in 2021, ODO’s unannounced inspection found 43 deficiencies. A follow-up inspection in August 2021 reduced that number to 27. Wanna guess how many deficiencies ODO found during its 2020 unannounced inspection—just months after the woman in these records died? 43. Wanna take a stab at how many dare mention this woman’s death?
As of March 14, ICE imprisoned 92 men there. The agency knows the poor care and standards violations in this 21 year-old asylum-seeker’s preventable death put each of these 92 men at risk. But it simply chooses to ignore those risks.
If you or someone you know might be willing to help us locate this person’s family so that we can share with them what we’ve found, please let me know?
One wonders whether part of the increased federal funding for ICE detention beds Joe Biden just made a deal with Congress to secure will go to continue paying the people who took this woman’s life.
She was trapped behind bars not so different from those in Juarez. She pleaded for her life and made her amends that no help was coming. When it comes to the migrant cages on the northern side of the border, we see fires everywhere with people locked inside. The one person who has the key and promised to open these doors in order to get it has decided that rather than put the fires out, or at least, let people escape that they might live, he wants to fan the flames. Not so different from what happened in Juarez or Tacoma, after all.
#DetentionKills