Oops

When you mistake cruelty for strength, knee jerk reaction for critical thinking, and hyperbolic grandstanding for smart policy.

Texas built a floating wall of blade-studded, one-ton buoys to maim people trying to cross the Rio Grande, and this week that same cruelty came roaring back to bite the state that built it, when over a hundred of them broke loose in flooding and slammed straight into Laredo, shutting down the nation's number one trade port. Governor Abbott championed this as a signature piece of Operation Lone Star, brushing off warnings that the design was reckless.

This was entirely foreseeable. The Rio Grande International Study Center warned Laredo officials back in March, about four months ago, that flooding could snap the barriers free, and advocates say they had been sounding the alarm even longer. City leaders reportedly waved it off to stay in the federal government's good graces.

Now the chickens are coming home to roost. The Laredo customs district normally processes around $3.5 billion in goods each week, and any shutdown of its busiest crossing bleeds real money real fast, on top of the safety risk to residents downstream.

Update: The bridges were opened again after a brief closure.

But seriously - this is what we do now. It's the same old story from decades ago: Going to such great lengths trying to keep people out, will always eventually result in the realization that you're just putting yourself in a prison of your own making.

So oftentimes it happens

That we live our lives in chains

And we never even know

We have the key

What's the fuckin' point here? These people are risking everything to come here. All they want is their fair shot at a better life for themselves and their families.

Yes - control the borders. Try to make it all work better. And don't forget that in 2024, there was legislation that had full bipartisan support ready for markup and passage in both houses. But Trump took a dump on it because - and several members reported he said this straight out - he wanted the issue for his campaign.

And stupid MAGA people, in their stupid red hats, jumped up and down cheering for him.

Fuck ICE

Six immigrant children spent as long as 505 days in federal custody as their families waited

Immigrant children now spend an average of more than six months in federal custody nationwide— triple the previous peak of the last decade — after the administration of President Donald Trump imposed stringent new requirements for their release.

During the three months CT Insider spent reporting this story this spring, more than two dozen immigrant children sat in federal custody in Connecticut — some in group homes, others in foster care. Court records show many had parents or close family ready to take them in. But the federal agency responsible for vetting those sponsors, the Office of Refugee Resettlement, has kept children in custody for months by imposing requirements no federal regulation or law demands and restarting vetting it already completed, a CT Insider investigation found. One child was held more than 500 days, most of it in a program in New Haven.

In at least six cases, all filed since December, families won their children’s release only by suing.

Federal rules require the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to transfer unaccompanied immigrant children within 72 hours to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement — a child-welfare agency, not an enforcement one, charged with care for children who arrive alone. For these six children, that part worked. They were moved within days.

What came next didn’t work as well. Families answered every demand — birth certificates, DNA tests, home studies, background checks. But the children stayed in custody as the government kept adding requirements for their parents' applications to be considered complete.

Once a parent or guardian applies for a child’s release, ORR regulations require it to decide within 10 days, absent unexpected delays.

Only when lawyers went to federal court did anything change.

Each child was released shortly after a lawsuit was filed — before the government ever had to defend the delays in court.

The federal government would not answer any questions about these cases and declined to comment for this story.

The delays these children face trace to last year, when the Trump administration overhauled how the office of Refugee Resettlement vets the parents and relatives seeking custody of these children — changes the administration says protect them from being released to unsafe sponsors.

In a sworn declaration filed in one of these cases, a top ORR official wrote that, unlike law enforcement or state child-welfare agencies, the agency has no way to monitor children once they’re released or take them back if a sponsor turns out to be unsafe. So, the federal government argues, it must “front-load” its safety checks before release. The federal government would not answer questions about the length of detention, including whether it considers the delays appropriate or if they are doing anything to shorten these children’s stays.

Here are the stories of those six children drawn from court records in lawsuits where the children’s detention was challenged as illegal. CT Insider changed the names of the children to protect their identities. Most families declined interview requests, saying through their attorneys that they fear retaliation from the federal government.

Jean, 12 years old — 505 days in custody

 
Jean was 12 when officials detained him at the U.S. border. He spent his 13th birthday in federal custody — and went on waiting.

The phone at the ORR shelter in California where he was staying would ring, but he refused to take the calls, according to records filed in a federal lawsuit challenging his detention. On the other end was his family — his father, his stepmother, his two sisters. Talking was too painful, a reminder that he could not be with them.

It was "not normal," he told his caseworkers, to be this alone. What he wanted — he said again and again — was to go home with his family in Fort Lauderdale.

By the spring, his family had answered every question the government raised, their lawsuit alleges. A corrected birth certificate. A favorable home study. Background checks that came back clean. In April, ORR released Jean’s two sisters to his stepmother — a sponsor it had already vetted and approved.

The agency kept Jean after a required DNA test showed his father was not his biological parent – a fact court records say his father didn’t know until the test came back His father said it changed nothing: the boy would always be his son. The government kept Jean detained anyway.

Average number of days the government held unaccompanied minors
National data from October 2024 to April 2026.

Then ORR asked for a record no one could obtain, according to the lawsuit. Jean's mother had died when he was three months old, and her death certificate sat in a Haitian government office the gangs now held — records the State Department itself had declared unobtainable. When his stepmother could not produce it, ORR pressed her to withdraw. She did — and ORR transferred him from California to a long-term foster care program in New Haven.

Then she applied again from the beginning. ORR ordered another home study — the first had come back favorable — and denied her by telephone, with nothing in writing, citing the birth certificate she had corrected 10 months before — the original, issued in Haiti, had listed his stepmother, the only mother he had ever known, rather than his biological mother, who died when Jean was three months old.

Two hundred days became 500.

It took a federal lawsuit to end it.

In a court filing responding to the petition for Jean's release, government attorneys gave a litany of reasons why the boy was still in custody — a translator had raised concerns about the family’s first birth certificate submission, his father’s DNA test came back with a 0 percent match and an initial home study found his father had used a belt to discipline a minor child. (Florida child protection officials declined to pursue the discipline issue, according to court filings, because it “did not meet their criteria for abuse or neglect.”)

Government attorneys also questioned Jean’s stepmother — saying they couldn’t confirm his biological mother was dead, or that the stepmother had a pre-existing relationship with him, and noted ORR policies bar sponsors who knowingly submit false information.

But just over two weeks after the government's filing, U.S. District Judge Vernon Oliver ruled for the family and ordered Jean's release.

In making that determination, Oliver called the government’s process in the case “arbitrary and capricious.”

"Every minute that someone is unlawfully denied freedom," Oliver wrote in his final order, quoting a different case "results in an injury that really can never be remedied."

Jean was finally reunited with his family after 505 days, court records show.

Benjamín, 16 years old — 143 days in custody

 
The arrests didn’t take long.

According to a federal lawsuit and a declaration filed in the case, two Buffalo police officers stopped Dennis’ car in August 2025 and collected his driver’s license. They also demanded proof that he and his passengers were in the country legally. Dennis and his brother Benjamin turned over their paperwork and their friend, a U.S. citizen, provided his passport.

They waited, terrified.

Twenty minutes passed and two cars pulled up. Officials from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security got out and approached. Dennis and Benjamin were arrested, handcuffed and transported to a nearby federal facility. Their friend was driven there in the other car.

“They said they were going to take all of us to the ICE station to fingerprint us and that if everything was clear, we could go home,” Benjamin wrote in the declaration. “I was so scared that I was shaking, and my skin felt prickly.”

For hours, he wrote, the ICE officers questioned them and told them America would pay them $2,000 to leave the country — even though the brothers explained they had Special Immigrant Juvenile Status and Deferred Action, protections from deportation. Since last year, the Trump administration has been paying immigrants to self-deport.

Then the officers told them to sign some papers, written in English. No one explained what they were, according to court documents.

"I didn’t think I had a choice to say no, so I signed," Benjamin wrote.

His brother, who had just turned 18, was put in handcuffs, and ankle chains and taken away.

“I cried and begged them to please let me go with my brother,” he wrote.

Dennis was deported home to Ecuador.

There's been a dramatic shift in the number of unaccompanied children processed by the government

The next day, Benjamin wrote he was flown to a shelter in Texas where he learned what he had signed: a form in which he agreed to leave the country on his own. Benjamin was held in Texas for two months, then moved to a shelter in Groton. He couldn’t understand why he was there. He had been through it once before.

Court records show Benjamin first came to the U.S. when he was 12 years old. He was detained then, too, and released to his dad within weeks after the government vetted him and approved him to be his sponsor.

When DHS arrested him this second time, ORR started the vetting process all over.

Weeks became months.

“I don’t understand why they have not let me go back to my papa,” he wrote. “I feel like I am never going to get out of here.”

In Groton, the days are identical, he wrote. The shelter is a house. Benjamin spends all his time in three rooms: his bedroom, the living room and dining room. Class happens at the dining table where children also eat — ages 13 to 17, one lesson for everyone. Showers are at 5 p.m. On Saturdays, nothing. He can’t go outside unless a staff member joins.

“I feel trapped,” he wrote. “I feel like a delinquent.”

Two days before Christmas, Benjamin was released from federal custody — 143 days after his arrest, and four days after lawyers filed a lawsuit over what they called an illegal detention.

With Benjamin released, his lawyers dropped the case — and the federal government never had to defend his detention, or the delay, in court.

Camila, 5 years old — 118 days in custody

 
Camila is five.

She paints. She dances. She runs. She likes being around other people. This is from court records, where her mother in a sworn declaration tried to describe who she was before the federal government detained her.

She was born in Atlixco, an agricultural city in central Mexico, and lived there for the first five years of her life, first with her parents, then after both parents left to find work in the U.S., with her grandparents. She spoke with her mother almost every day on video calls. Birthdays and Christmas gifts arrived in the mail.

In the summer of 2025, her mother told her on a video call that she was going to be a big sister. A few months later, Camila crossed the border into Arizona. How a five-year-old got from central Mexico to the border, and with whom, isn’t in the records and her mom declined to share those details during an interview. What is: her parents weren’t allowed to take her because of their immigration status, so the government labeled her ‘unaccompanied’.

She spent the next four months in federal immigration custody — first in a detention center run by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, then in a shelter in eastern Connecticut, where she was the youngest by far. And then she was moved to New Haven, the city where her mother lived. Camila's mother, who entered the country illegally, has a pending application seeking legal residency in the U.S.

At night Camila slept in a foster home. Her days were consistent: breakfast to evening was spent at an office building fitted with classrooms, where she was the only child in her class.

She got to see her mother once a week — for an hour.

A child psychiatrist who evaluated her in the final weeks of her detention wrote that she had nightmares and refused to talk about her family. The doctor wrote in that evaluation submitted to the court that Camila was processing what was happening to her through her play.

“She is having nightmares, is avoidant of discussion of her family and separation, and she manifests anxiety through her play,” Dr. Laine Taylor wrote. “Her play evaluation... clearly demonstrated that she is struggling with anxiety and fear.”

Camila is home now, released three days after lawyers filed a lawsuit challenging her detention. There is a new baby brother in the apartment.

She paints. She dances. She runs. She has a pink princess-themed room, but she sleeps with her mom.

“She doesn't like to be away from me,” her mom said during an interview. “When she's away from me, she thinks these people are going to come back for her.”

Liam, 15 years old — 255 days in custody

 
On Jan. 5, Liam’s mother received the call she’d waited eight months for. Her son Liam was finally coming home.

Minutes later, the shelter called her back. There was a mistake. She couldn’t pick Liam up yet, but they would call her back soon.

By the time U.S. District Judge Vernon Oliver heard arguments for and against Liam’s release on Jan. 15, his mother was still waiting for that follow-up call, according to the lawsuit she filed challenging his detention.

It all began in May 2025, when local police arrested Liam at 15 following a fight. Agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrived at the station after Liam’s father got there to pick him up, separated the two and took them both into custody. Liam went to an ICE office in Burlington, Massachusetts, then an ORR shelter in Texas for three months before finally landing at Noank Community Support Services, in Groton, Connecticut.

Whether, and how, ICE ever contacted Liam’s mother after his arrest is a matter of dispute.

Liam’s mother and his attorneys said in court filings that ICE called her when he was in Burlington but did not tell her she could pick him up there. She didn’t hear from him again until he was in Texas.

Meanwhile, the government made a series of seemingly contradictory statements, according to Oliver’s ruling. In one filing cited in the ruling, it said ICE couldn’t locate or contact her. In another, it said ICE asked her to pick Liam up but she didn’t show — and if she had, ICE would have also arrested her. That same filing said she was at the police station during his arrest.

In a May letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees ORR, U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., pointed to allegations that federal officials have used children as bait to arrest their sponsors. Officials, Wyden said, have used the threat that they will arrest and deport a sponsor to pressure a child to accept voluntary deportation.

ORR removed a Biden-era regulation last year that prevented it from sharing information about sponsors’ immigration status with ICE or disqualifying sponsors because of their immigration status.

The government’s full response to Liam's habeas petition isn’t open to the public. But in a court filing defending its decision to designate Liam as an unaccompanied minor instead of turning him over to his mother, the government said it acted appropriately.

“DHS had no choice but to declare Petitioner a UAC," the government said, using the acronym for "unaccompanied alien child," the legal term for such immigrant children.

Oliver was blistering in his assessment of the government’s claims in Liam’s case, calling them “disturbing” and saying they were “full of significant incongruities.”

Before his arrest, Liam liked to play in his neighborhood and help his mother in the kitchen. In the shelters, he grew anxious and depressed. A psychological evaluation last December recommended his release “as soon as possible so he can return to his family, which is crucial for his well-being.”

Oliver ordered ORR to release Liam in mid-January, 27 days after the lawsuit challenging his detention was filed. His mother was finally able to pick him up the following day.

Miguel, 14 years old — 167 days in custody

 
Miguel was 14 years old and wanted to be a teacher. He should have been in middle school. Instead, he was taught inside the building where he was held in New Haven — a converted office fitted with classrooms — alongside his 16-year-old brother and an 11-year-old, both in federal custody.

Not able to enroll in a neighborhood school, he had been "isolated from peers and deprived of basic opportunities for the educational and social-emotional growth that's critical to [his] development," the lawyers seeking his release wrote in the petition asking a federal judge to release him.

Miguel was born in the highlands of Guatemala, into a family too poor to keep him in school. He and his brother worked the family's field, but it was never enough. Last December they crossed the border illegally to join their father, who had left to find work in the U.S. years earlier.

Their father, in Providence, court records show, wanted only to bring his sons home. It would take more than five months. From the first week, his attorney says in court records, he told the government he wanted to sponsor them — and was told to find an English speaker to help with an application that wouldn't come for nearly four months. When an official finally called, she said his immigration status made him ineligible, that he should find someone else, that the people he lived with might doom the case. None of it was true, his attorney told him. He moved anyway, then resubmitted documents the system had lost. He took a DNA test for a relationship no one questioned, and sat for a home study that his lawyers say no rule required.

The waiting wore on Miguel. The separation from his father, he said in a sworn statement, was so "painful" that it was "hard to think about anything else." He cried often, and the stress brought headaches and fevers. He described his detention as “being stuck in a waiting room for something that never happens.” He was "desperate,” his attorney said, to feel his father's hug again.

On May 19 — four days after his lawyers sued, 167 days into his detention — the government released Miguel and his brother to their father.

Luis, 16 years old — 167 days in custody

 
Luis was 16 and wanted to be a lawyer, or maybe an architect.

But rather than spending time in school, he and his younger brother spent nearly every day inside the same New Haven building. There were occasional excursions — a park, the aquarium — but when the weather was poor or cold, they did not go outside at all. At night, they slept in the homes of foster parents — people who, when they first arrived, were strangers. They were dropped off each morning before breakfast and picked up just before dinner.

In one respect the detention fell harder on Luis: unlike Miguel, he still faced deportation. His brother's immigration case had been terminated in February, but Luis' remained open and was due in immigration court in Hartford on May 21.

The waiting hit him hardest at night.

He couldn't sleep and was prescribed sleeping pills. He called the prolonged detention a "nightmare" and said in a sworn statement that "the pain is getting worse every day." He came to fear that "the day will never come" and described his and his brother’s confinement as "waiting somewhere they don't belong."

On May 19 — two days before that hearing — records show he and his brother were released to their father.

Update On Our Concentration Camps

These assholes actually tried to turn the American Auschwitz into a tourist attraction.

You are nine kinds of fucked up, America.

Alligator Alcatraz is no more. Tents, cars, signs disappear from airport site 

The bright blue sign reading ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ outside the silver chain-link gate at Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport has been removed. The airstrip, formerly used to hold immigrants in industrial tents, is now cleared with only a few structures and cars remaining. And after Gov. Ron DeSantis invested over a billion dollars to transform the Everglades runway into an immigration detention center, it now looks as if that never occurred.

Aerial photos shared with the Miami Herald show that the airstrip, seized from Miami-Dade by the DeSantis administration through an emergency order, is mostly vacated. The now-closed first-of-its-kind state-run immigration detention center had been established to support the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.

As of Sunday, people who have monitored the facility’s entrance since last summer told the Herald that the black-and-gold Florida Highway Patrol vehicles, which had been parked at the one-way entrance with their blue sirens flashing, had left. Only one unidentified vehicle remained, sometimes assisting with opening and closing the gate as cars entered; someone from the vehicle had keys to unlock the fence.

Overhead photos of the airstrip, shared with the Herald, also show that all the tents had been removed, leaving the airstrip bare.

“Not much left but a couple of trucks and a few contractors standing around,” pilot Ra Schooley, who took the aerial photos Sunday morning, remarked to the Herald.

The Florida Department of Emergency Management did not respond to the Herald’s request for comment.

Miami-Dade mayor’s office told the Herald on Monday that the state had not returned control of the property to the county.

n June, DeSantis announced that the detention center, a brainchild of his attorney general, James Uthmeier, was shutting down and had served its purpose. DeSantis credited the site with detaining almost 21,000 immigrants and touted it as a model for how states could partner with the federal government on immigration enforcement.

DeSantis said that the airstrip facilitated the deportation of immigrants, whom he described as ‘dangerous people.’ During the announcement of the facility’s closure, with Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, standing under a white tent on the airport’s runway, DeSantis said that the detention center was never meant to be permanent.

“I said from the beginning that this was an emergency solution that would be temporary,” he told reporters in the June press conference.

Environmental conservationists, immigration lawyers and advocates, who welcomed the closure of the detention center — where immigrants reported poor living conditions and faced pepper spray and beatings — also raised concerns that the facility may have harmed the nearby Everglades wetlands ecosystem. 

The environmental groups were the first to file a lawsuit against the state and federal governments when the detention facility was hastily erected within days last summer. The groups have maintained that in the rush to support Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration by building the facility, the government failed to comply with federal environmental regulations that require an impact assessment before such projects are undertaken.

The case involved a Florida federal judge temporarily shutting the site in August, but the order could not take full effect; an appeals court paused it and later found that the judge might have overstepped their authority by ordering the site to close. The case is still working its way through the courts.

The groups also accused the DeSantis administration of pollution, citing that the detention center’s diesel-powered generators and bright lights had exceeded federal standards and required a special permit that they say the state never obtained.

As the facility’s closure became imminent, Miami-Dade’s mayor, Danielle Levine Cava, announced in June that the federal parks system would assume control of the airstrip and the 17,000 acres surrounding the Big Cypress Preserve. Previously, Levine had rejected purchase proposals from DeSantis, who later took ownership of the land through state powers.

Environmental groups followed the mayor’s recommendation by calling for the airstrip to become an environmental preserve. A letter from the Friends of the Everglades, the environmental group whose founder fought in the 1960s for the airport to be shuttered, laid out a five-point plan that called for the airport runway to be removed completely and for the land to be returned to “a purpose that reflects their environmental significance.”

Other environmentalists, like Betty Osceola, have called for the land to be returned to the Miccosukee Tribe, whose lands surround the airport.

“This has been doing training missions and training flights, and will continue to do that,” DeSantis said when asked about the future of the airstrip in June.

A notice from the Federal Aviation Administration currently says the airstrip is closed to planes until September.

DeSantis, who has pushed for the Everglades restoration project, still found that the more than a billion dollars spent operating the detention center for less than a year was worth it.

Aaron Parnas

First, why would private sector "conservatives" be OK with taking orders from a centralized federal government?

Second, does Stephen Miller think firing a coupla hundred thousand brown people will give his ICE goons that many more chances to fuck with immigrants?

Third, if this isn't just another Trump fuck up, what Project 2025 purpose might it be meant to serve?

Fourth, if it's just another Trump fuck up, how deep is the resulting recession/depression likely to be?

America The Contradiction

Anna Connelly

Aaron Parnas

Kid's got balls. I wonder if she'd be willing to lend some to the dog-ass Republicans in Congress.

Their Next Gambit

It's always a matter of coercion or outright force for these assholes.

They don't get what they want with persuasion and negotiation, so they try to muscle their way through.

Fuckin' bullies. Weak shit bullying pussies.

Trump’s border chief threatens to close customs at top US airports

Markwayne Mullin said officers in some Democrat-run ‘sanctuary’ cities could not be relied upon to enforce immigration policy

President Trump’s new homeland security secretary has suggested he will withdraw customs officers from the airports of Democrat-run “sanctuary cities” that protect undocumented migrants.

The proposal from Markwayne Mullin, who was appointed to the role last month, would affect international travellers at many of the busiest airports in the United States, including JFK in New York, Los Angeles international airport and Denver international airport.

“If they’re a sanctuary city, should they really be processing customs into their city?” Mullin said on Fox News in his first interview since taking up the role.

Sign up for The Times’s weekly US newsletter
His words are seen as an attack on local sanctuary policies, which typically limit police co-operation with federal immigration authorities.

“Right now remember the Democrats are wanting to defund Customs and Border Patrol,” Mullin added, misnaming Customs and Border Protection. “Well, who processes those individuals when they walk off the plane?

“If they’re a sanctuary city and they’re receiving international flights, and we’re asking them to partner with us at the airport, but once they walk out of the airport they’re not going to enforce immigration policy? Maybe we need to have a really hard look at that, because we need to focus on cities that want to work with us.”

Twelve states and 18 cities are recognised as sanctuary jurisdictions by the US government. Their status has survived a number of legal challenges.

New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans, San Francisco, Seattle, Philadelphia, Denver, Boston and Chicago are all on the list. Each of those cities has a big airport.

Mullin, a former Oklahoma senator, replaced Kristi Noem as head of the department after Trump fired her last month. She had carried out the president’s mass-deportation agenda for more than a year.

Model was ‘paid $25 a minute to talk dirty with Kristi Noem’s cross-dressing husband’
Experts said Mullin, a longstanding ally and friend of Trump, was unlikely to go through with the customs proposal as it would devastate the aviation industry, but still expressed concern.

“I did some research. By administration’s own definitions this would end international air travel at US airports where about 58 per cent of international traffic happens,” Todd Schulte, president of the pro-immigration political advocacy organisation FWD, wrote on X, “so would crash economy (hence won’t happen). [But] it’s very bad it even gets floated!”

Gavin Newsom, the governor of California and a possible Democratic presidential contender for 2028, also condemned the idea. “If you thought the economy was bad with Trump’s war driving prices at the pump up … just wait until international travel is halted at some of the busiest airports in the world,” he said on X. “Talk about a stupid idea (no wonder it’s being considered by the Trump admin).”

California Governor Gavin Newsom gestures during a press conference on law enforcement efforts targeting illicit fentanyl in San Diego.
Gavin Newsom called the proposal “stupid”

Federal funding for the Department of Homeland Security lapsed on February 14, triggering a partial government shutdown and a prolonged stand-off between Democrats and Republicans over immigration enforcement funding.

The Trump administration has long fought a legal and political battle with sanctuary jurisdictions. Last year a federal judge in San Francisco issued an injunction prohibiting the White House from retaliating against sanctuary cities by withholding federal funding.

Lighten Up, Stephen

If Trump decides he needs to soften the approach, which is unlikely, or least it's not likely that he'll allow the perception that he's "going soft" on anything, then the question (as always with politicians) will be how many MAGA rubes will flip-flop with him on this one too, versus how many will break with him.

Normal people would just come out and say, "OK, so that didn't work quite the way we wanted it to work, so we're going to try something a little different."

Normal people would do that, because that's just good business. But Trump is not normal, and he's not good at business, so I'm not going to start expecting him to behave like a good business guy - or as a normal guy either for that matter.

In the meantime -

REMEMBER THE EPSTEIN FILES

Trump Throws Stephen Miller Under the Bus in Surprise Show of Panic

On the surface, Trump wants less attention paid to mass deportations. Meanwhile, Miller is taking new and hidden steps to wreak havoc in the lives of undocumented children and their families.

Has Donald Trump finally figured out that Stephen Miller’s fascist cruelties have become a niggling political liability for him? Well, maybe. A striking report in The Wall Street Journal suggests Trump may be moving to marginalize Miller’s influence. But Trump appears to think the difficulty can be cured by a few optical tweaks, when the real culprit is a deeper ideological one.

Trump wants to “lower the profile of his mass deportation effort,” the Journal reveals. He wants voters to think the targets of these deportations are “bad guys,” not noncriminal undocumented residents. He wants less visibility for ICE raids in cities, fewer public confrontations with local officials, and less public talk about “mass deportations,” which, he now grasps, are hideously unpopular.

Tellingly, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles now sees deportations as a liability for the midterms, per the report. That Trump is siding with her on the politics here is a sign of political panic and a rebuke to Miller, who apparently delights in flaunting the administration’s vicious sadism and overt white nationalism—and seems certain that latent majorities are quietly cheering along.

To be clear, this report deserves serious skepticism. It very much bears watching whether ICE will actually end up deprioritizing the removal of noncriminal immigrants. Trump mostly wants the appearance of a pivot: According to the Journal, he wants a focus on “criminals” in GOP “messaging.”

But recalibrating the “messaging” won’t address the public’s broad rejection of Trumpism’s deeper anti-immigrant project. And all signs are that this project is fully forging ahead.

Case in point: Miller just met with Texas state legislators and floated a truly extreme proposal. The New York Times reports that Miller discussed the idea of ending state public funding for the education of undocumented children, and asked the lawmakers why they hadn’t passed a bill limiting funding for education so it only goes to kids who are citizens or are lawfully present in the United States.

This idea—denying public school to undocumented children—has mostly passed under the radar, but it’s a long-held dream of the anti-immigrant right. The basic aim is to destabilize the lives of undocumented families as another way to encourage them to self-deport. But there’s an even more pernicious ideological aim at work here.

Getting a red state to attempt this would run afoul of a 1982 Supreme Court decision, which blocked states from denying public education to young people based on immigration status. Plyler v. Doe is not as well known as the other big civil rights rulings, but it’s momentous: It held that restricting public education this way would violate the Fourteenth Amendment’s enshrinement of equal protection before the law.

Miller and his allies are gunning for Plyler. If a state did restrict education to migrant kids, it would likely provoke another court battle—possibly providing an opening for the right-wing court to overturn Plyler.

That would be seismic. The basic principle at issue is whether these kids are to be regarded as equal persons despite being undocumented. The Burger court found that denying them education would relegate them to an unacceptable subclass status. As immigration law scholar Hiroshi Motomura explains, the ruling embodied the idea that “the emergence of a permanent subcaste is intolerable within a national constitutional culture based on equality.”

Miller really wants to end that “constitutional culture based on equality.” It’s hard to know whether Texas lawmakers will do his bidding—or how the high court would rule if they did. But if it worked, other red states with many immigrant families in them could follow.

This would immeasurably impoverish our nation, but the effort advances Miller’s ideological project in still another sense. Trump wants the Supreme Court to rule in favor of his 2025 executive order ending birthright citizenship. That of course also involves the Fourteenth Amendment—its guarantee that all persons born in the United States are automatic citizens.

Here again, Trump and Miller are aiming at something very profound, if maliciously so. As legal scholar Akhil Reed Amar writes, the “big idea” animating the Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause, its “moral north star,” is that birthright citizenship enshrines a guarantee that all persons are born free and equal—their status is not dictated by blood. The goal of undoing this, Amar notes, is to make the constitutional order more “hereditary” and “caste-like.”

That’s precisely what Trump and Miller want. You can hear echoes of this in JD Vance’s now-infamous suggestions that heritage, not adherence to creedal ideals, makes one American. As Jamelle Bouie explains, Vance’s vision is of “tiered citizenship” based not on equality of birth but on one’s “connection to the soil and to the dead.” Ned Resnikoff hears hints of this in Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s Western-civilizational-supremacist rhetoric, as well.

Miller’s apparent push to end the guarantee of public education involves undocumented kids, not American-born citizens. But it, too, would create a permanent subclass by denying those kids equality before the law. “Miller’s true goal is to use immigration as a tool to chisel away at the Fourteenth Amendment,” Chris Newman, counsel at the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, told me. “Until he’s ejected from the White House, all our rights are in danger.”

The true essence of Miller’s project resides here. It is to treat immigrants—not just undocumented ones but lawfully present ones, and even their American-born children—as fundamentally unfit to become American, as a civilizational threat of existential proportions. That threat must be arrested via mass forced removals—hence the Department of Homeland Security’s rhapsodizing about 100 million deportations—and via an end to treating immigrants and their kids as equals.

Overturning Plyler and ending birthright citizenship are aimed at that goal—and both initiatives are alive and well. So are Miller’s efforts to snuff out every legal pathway for migrants to come here for humanitarian reasons. So too is his construction of massive prison camps to facilitate all those expulsions. So is his effort to deport as many people as possible regardless of their deep ties to communities here: In 2025, only 14 percent of those arrested by ICE had violent criminal records.

Trump can dress this up with spin about targeting “criminals” all he likes. But until all the ethnonationalist, civilizational-emergency-mongering nonsense is exorcised, the deeper problem will fester. Trump believes all those ideas himself, but the depth of his commitment to them has never been all that clear. One doubts he’ll be so inclined, but should he ever want to stop this madness, only one move on his part—a big personnel move—can truly put an end to it.

The Camps

Seized Art, Eavesdropping Guards: Parents Describe a Clampdown at Dilley Detention Center as Kids Shared Their Stories

Detainees told ProPublica that art supplies have been removed in room searches, immigrants have lost access to Gmail and staff hover within earshot during video calls. The Trump administration and a private prison operator disputed detainees’ claims.

When guards appeared earlier this month outside the room Christian Hinojosa shared with her son and other women and children at the immigrant detention center in Dilley, Texas, she guessed what they might be after. She quickly donned her puffy winter jacket, then slipped a manila envelope inside it. “Thank God the weather was cool,” she said — the jacket didn’t raise suspicions.

Then, she said, she was instructed to leave the room while eight to 10 guards lifted up mattresses, opened drawers and rifled through papers. In the envelope were kids’ writings and artwork about life in America’s only detention facility for immigrant families, a collection of trailers and dormitories in the brush country south of San Antonio. She planned to share their letters with the outside world.

Guards have taken away crayons, colored pencils and drawing paper during recent room searches at Dilley, according to Hinojosa and three other former detainees, along with lawyers and advocates in contact with the families inside.

Guards have taken artwork, too, they said — even one child’s drawing of Bratz fashion dolls.

They said detainees have lost access to Gmail and other Google services in the Dilley library amid stepped up searches, seizures and restrictions on communications, making it more difficult for them to contact lawyers and advocates.

They and family members said guards sometimes hover within earshot during detainees’ video calls to relatives and reporters.

“We Are Kidnapped Help!”

Seven-year-old Mathias Bermeo, a detainee at Dilley wrote: “I’m writing this letter so that you can hear my story. I need you to help us. I have been detained for 23 days with my mom and my 3-year-old sister. I cry a lot. I want to get out of here go back to my school. They don’t treat us well here. There are many children. We are kidnapped help!”

The detainees and others interviewed for this story said these measures increased after the Jan. 22 arrival of Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old in a blue bunny hat, sparked protests and congressional visits. They said the clampdown intensified as children and parents at Dilley wrote letters to share with the public and reporters and relatives recorded video calls with the detainees, including those published by ProPublica this month. The children’s stories, many told in their own words, fueled an outcry over the scope of the Trump administration’s deportation campaign, which the president had promised would focus on criminals.

The detainees said the more they tried to make their voices heard, the more difficult it became.

One mother, who asked to remain anonymous because her immigration case is still pending, told ProPublica that she and her three kids watched through a window as guards swept through their room in late January, removing drawings from the walls and placing colored pencils and crayons in plastic bags before taking them away.

With little schooling available at Dilley and weather too chilly for kids to want to play outdoors, drawing had been the children’s main diversion, the former detainee said. “What were they going to do now?” she said. “They were so bored.”

After the room inspection, the woman said, the children just “cried and cried and cried.”

“I Can’t See My Pet Willi”

A detainee at Dilley wrote, “I feel bad being here! Bad because I can’t because I can’t see my pet willi and I can’t eat what I want and I can’t see my friends from school and at home.”

CoreCivic, the private prison company that runs the Dilley facility for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in a written statement that routine inspections of living facilities are a common practice and that detainees are informed of what items they are allowed to have in their rooms.

“We vehemently deny any claims that our staff have confiscated or destroyed children’s personal artwork or their related supplies,” the statement reads, adding that there are examples of kids’ artwork “proudly displayed” throughout the facility.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, said in a statement that “ICE is not destroying children’s letters,” but the agency acknowledged that in one case “all the written items in the cell were seized” as part of an investigation of a mother who DHS said refused to comply with a search and pushed a detention center employee. CoreCivic referred questions to DHS when asked about this incident. ProPublica was unable to reach the mother for comment.

This week, DHS issued press releases that it said were “correcting the record” about Dilley, saying “adults with children are housed in facilities that provide for their safety, security, and medical needs.” DHS’ and CoreCivic’s statements to ProPublica did not answer questions about Google services being blocked or whether guards listen in on Dilley detainees’ calls.

U.S. Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat, visited Dilley after Liam and his father, both originally from Ecuador, were picked up in Minnesota and transferred in January. He went again last week and was asked at a Friday news conference about reports of children’s letters and drawings being suppressed.

“I believe those stories, because I’ve heard similar stories myself,” Castro said.

He said he’d been told repeatedly that guards had warned detainees not to talk to him. “Yes, I think there’s a lot of secrecy there,” Castro said.

DHS did not respond when asked to comment on Castro’s assertion about the guards. A CoreCivic spokesperson said, “We are not aware of any staff member warning residents not to speak with Rep. Castro.”

The Dilley Immigration Processing Center first opened during the Obama administration primarily to hold families that had just crossed the border. Then Biden ended the practice of detaining families in 2021. President Donald Trump restarted it even as border crossings in his second term hit record lows. Now ICE is ramping up immigration arrests inside the country, and Dilley holds many families who have been living in the United States for years.

The families spend their days behind a metal fence, sleeping in rooms that hold six bunk beds and a common area with a few small tables and desks. More than 3,500 people have cycled through the detention center since the Trump administration began sending families here last spring.

A ProPublica reporter who had been speaking with families at Dilley since late last year went to the center for an in-person visit in mid-January and asked families whether their children would want to write about their experiences. On Jan. 22, we received a packet of colorful drawings and handwritten letters from a detainee who had been recently released, which we later published.

Then on Jan. 24, dozens of detainees staged a mass protest in the yard, which was photographed from above, where they yelled “libertad” and held up hand-drawn signs. The signs were made using the detention center’s art supplies, former detainees said.

That protest and Liam’s detention triggered widespread media coverage and a visit by Castro, who arrived on Jan 28. Supporters gathered outside Dilley, and some clashed with state troopers. At the beginning of February, Liam and his father were released, and ProPublica published the letters it had received. By that time, it had become clear to detainees that their voices — especially children’s voices — had gotten broad public attention.

They kept writing.

“We were looking for help,” said Hinojosa, who collected letters at ProPublica’s request. “We were looking to be heard.”

Hinojosa, along with her 13-year-old son, Gustavo, both originally from Mexico, were released in early February after four months at Dilley to return home to San Antonio. (Although a 1990s legal settlement holds that children should generally not be detained for more than 20 days, DHS has said the settlement should be terminated because newer regulations have addressed the needs of child detainees.)

“My parents say it’s been 4 months but for me and my little sister,” a 9-year-old wrote in one of the letters Hinojosa gathered. “It feels like a year I just want to go to the United States to be with my grandparents and finally end this nightmare.”

“I’m writing this letter so that you can hear my story,” a 7-year-old wrote in another of the letters. “I need you to help us … I cry a lot. I want to get out of here go back to my school.”

“I see how they treat us like criminals,” wrote Edison, a seventh grader from Chicago who was born in Guatemala, “and we’re not.”

“We Are Not Criminals”

While detained at Dilley, 7-year old Diana wrote: “I lived in oregon We were detained in a hospital parking lot I feel bad because I miss my stuffed animals I don’t want to be here and I miss my friends and also miss my teacher and my house and my bed. we are not criminals I’m a very pretty girl.” Obtained by ProPublica. Alien Registration Number redacted by ProPublica.

CoreCivic said that Dilley residents are given a written description of property they’re allowed to have in their living areas, and that decorating rooms with personal items is permitted “provided they do not present a health or safety hazard.”

Former detainees told ProPublica they experienced room searches before January but that they typically were carried out by just two employees at a time, not eight or more.

After guards searched Hinojosa’s room following the protest, she said, she and the other residents were unable to locate their colored pencils, which were purchased at the commissary and stored in a little cup atop the writing table where the kids liked to doodle. “Even knowing that we had paid for those ourselves,” she said, “they removed them.”

“There were many, many families whose children had their pencils and what they created thrown away,” said a third mother, who also asked to remain anonymous because of her immigration status.

“I Just Want to … Finally End This Nightmare”

A handwritten letter with a drawing of four people trapped behind bars:

Nine-year-old Valentina wrote: “I have been detained for a long time. My parents say it’s been 4 months but for me and my little sister Jireth it feels like a year I just want to go to the United States to be with my grandparents and finally end this nightmare that my family has had to live through, I feel like I’ve had the worst days of my life I want God to help us get out of here so we can be happy again and study together as a family. Please help us and our parents get out of here thank you.”

Former detainees and their family members described close attention by guards during calls home, some of which happened via tablet computers in a common area.

Edison, the 13-year-old Chicago seventh grader, cried during a recent video call home that his father shared with ProPublica, saying he felt locked up.

The father, who asked that his son’s last name not be used, recalled the boy saying before the recording began, “Dad, there’s an agent here and he’s watching us.” He said his son sounded panicked.

The mother who said she watched guards sweep her room told ProPublica that after the January protest inside Dilley, a half-dozen guards were posted in a room where calls took place. “Every time someone came in to make a call,” she said, “they practically stood behind you.”

As families held at Dilley continue to try to make themselves heard, Hinojosa and other recently released detainees are determined to help.

Hinojosa carefully protected her fellow residents’ letters and drawings before her release. Every time she left her room, she wore the CoreCivic-issued puffy gray jacket and tucked the drawings and letters inside.

“I carried them around with me all day to prevent anyone from taking them,” she told ProPublica. “I knew they were valuable.”

Many of the pieces she carried were different from the vibrant paper drawings ProPublica received in January. With paper in short supply, Hinojosa said, children drew pictures on the backs of old artworks. With crayons and colored pencils now scarce, some drew in plain pencil.

Hinojosa walked out of Dilley earlier this month with her son Gustavo and with 34 pages of drawings and letters. They capture the names and lives of dozens of people.

Along with long notes from moms who remain inside are simple sketches by the kids detained with them: a teddy bear. A bus going home. A pet cat named Willi. A family of three stick figures trapped behind a wire fence. A family of six stick figures trapped behind a wire fence. A single small stick figure trapped behind a wire fence. Many of the drawings show faces, and most of the faces are frowning.

Today's Rich

Immigrants - people here legally are otherwise - are better for the US economy than Republicans.

And always remember, there was a workable proposal for real Immigration Reform on the table ready for Congress to take it up, haggle it out, and vote it into law in the summer of 2024, but Trump jumped in and told the dog-ass Republicans to throw it out so he'd have an issue to run on.

First, we got "They're eating the dogs - they're eating the cats."

And now we've got roving gangs of masked thugs raiding daycare centers and hanging out in Home Depot parking lots, hunting down anyone who looks a bit too brown - and killing people who pose absolutely no threat to anyone.

None of us should trust any politician too much, but damn - you can trust Republicans about as far as you can spit a bowling ball.

The Cato study:

Cato Study: Immigrants Reduced Deficits by $14.5 Trillion Since 1994

Immigrants’ Recent Effects on Government Budgets

Today, the Cato Institute published “Immigrants’ Recent Effects on Government Budgets: 1994–2023,” a study on the fiscal effects of immigrants—legal and illegal—that builds upon the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) fiscal effects model. The paper, which I coauthored with Michael Howard and Julián Salazar, is the first to analyze three decades of federal, state, and local government budgets to determine how immigrants affected the total US government debt and deficit.

In this paper, we wanted to accomplish two main things:

1) Provide the first-ever assessment of the total net fiscal effect of all immigrants from 1994 to 2023, rather than a one-year snapshot or forward-looking projection like many other studies. We wanted a sufficiently long period to assess claims like those by White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, asserting that immigrants have already sucked us dry.

2) Provide the clearest explanation for the mechanisms driving the fiscal effects of immigration on government budgets.

Immigrants Have Reduced the Deficit Every Year

Every year since 1994, when data collection began, immigrants have paid more in taxes than they received in benefits from the federal, state, and local governments. The fiscal benefits have continued to rise, reaching their highest level ever in 2023.

The fiscal surplus from all immigrants from 1994 to 2023 was $14.5 trillion, compared with a deficit of $48 trillion without immigrants. That means that immigrants cut deficits by nearly a third in real terms over the last three decades.

Why the Average Person Is Fiscally Positive

How can immigrants be so fiscally beneficial when the country overall is running such extreme deficits? The answer is that a big part of the US budget is pure public goods—primarily the military and interest payments on past debt accrued before the immigrants came—which don’t scale with population growth. These are essentially fixed costs or sunk obligations that the United States will have to cover whether immigrants come or not.

The figure below shows how, in most years, tax revenue exceeds the costs of providing benefits—that is, everything that requires scaling with population growth. Thus, immigrants will be fiscally positive so long as they are at least average in their revenue creation and benefits received. In fact, immigrants are significantly better than average in both aspects of the fiscal equation.

Immigrants Pay More Taxes, Receive Fewer Benefits

Immigrants pay more in taxes than the average person. This is counterintuitive because they have lower hourly wages, but because they work at much higher rates (the blue line), they end up with higher per capita incomes (the gray line) and pay more in taxes than their share of the population predicts (the dotted line). Thus, immigrants have been better at generating revenue for the government than the average person.

Are their tax revenues overwhelmed by the costs they impose? Here’s everything the federal, state, and local governments spent money on over the last 30 years in per capita dollar amounts. Immigrants did not create significantly higher costs for any items and saved the government enormously in two areas: old-age benefits and education costs.

Immigrants cost less as retirees: First, the savings on old-age benefits are not because immigrants are significantly less likely to retire. Instead, it is because they are far less likely to receive a government pension, since they were less likely to have government jobs and thus less likely to receive expensive government pensions. The main reason, though, is that they were simply barred from applying for Social Security and Medicare because they either arrived too late in life to earn the necessary qualifying work history, or they are here illegally or in a temporary status and ineligible for that reason.

Immigrants cost schools less: Immigrants arrive in the United States at the average age of about 25, meaning that the United States gets workers without having to pay to educate them. Even though they are more costly when in school—due to bilingual education needs—they are much less costly overall because they are so much less likely to be in school. The result is that immigrants cost the US education system about half as much as the US-born population.

Immigrants aren’t big welfare users. The savings on education aren’t lost in the welfare state. Immigrants are much more likely to be in poverty but use roughly an average amount of what we call “needs-based” assistance. That includes traditional welfare, food assistance, Medicaid, refundable tax credits, and unemployment insurance. The entire reason for this disconnect between poverty rates and welfare use rates is that many immigrants are here illegally and so are ineligible to apply for welfare in most states. This conclusion, that immigrants use welfare at the same rate as the US-born population, matches the Trump administration’s conclusion in 2018.

Here is the full picture of spending and taxes for immigrants from 1994 to 2023. Immigrants—legal and illegal—paid more in taxes every single year than they received in benefits, broadly defined, and the gap has grown over time.

Immigrants Don’t Cause Deficits

Here’s another way to look at our main conclusion. Immigrants accounted for 14 percent of tax revenue and 7 percent of government spending from 1994 to 2023. Even if the government had not spent a dollar on immigrants, while somehow still getting all their tax revenue, the US government at all levels would still have run a $20 trillion deficit. Immigrants are not to blame for government deficits. Indeed, they reduced the deficit by about $14.5 trillion.

We use the highest-quality data available for this report and the best methods for this type of analysis. Although there are undoubtedly methodological finer points that can be debated, these broad conclusions are inescapable:

1. The average additional person is fiscally positive because pure public goods are such a big portion of the budget.

2. Immigrants generate more tax revenue. Immigrants’ employment rates are well documented. The correlation between income and taxes is well established.

3. Immigrants use fewer benefits. The effects of status-based limits on welfare and entitlements are clearly apparent in numerous data sources. The savings from education are indisputable, as immigrants are less likely to be enrolled in school.

Since these effects are not driven by the absence of immigrant retirees, we shouldn’t expect our conclusion to reverse after tracking a specific cohort of immigrants over time. Indeed, when we do follow the cohort that entered from 1990 to 1993, we find that after three decades, the cohort was still paying far more in taxes than they received in benefits, and that the fiscal gains had grown over time. In total, this cohort reduced the deficit by $1.7 trillion.

Our paper also concludes:

• Without the contributions of immigrants, public debt at all levels would already be above 200 percent of US GDP—nearly twice the 2023 level and a threshold some analysts believe would trigger a debt crisis.
• Even low-skilled immigrants—those without bachelor’s degrees—reduced the debt by $2.8 trillion.
• Immigrants in all categories of educational attainment, including high school dropouts, lowered the ratio of deficit to gross domestic product (GDP) during the 30-year period.
• Illegal immigrants likely reduced the deficit by at least $1.7 trillion.
• Even including the second generation, who are mostly still children who will become taxpayers soon, the fiscal effect of immigration was positive every year, reducing the debt by $7.9 trillion.

Table: Fiscal flows and GDP effect by citizenship and education, cumulative, 1994–2023 

Concluding Thoughts

Overall, the main conclusion of our paper is that there is nothing systematically wrong with US immigration policy regarding the fiscal effects of immigrants. There is nothing unsustainable about the US immigration system. We could have scaled immigration as it existed without burdening government budgets. For years, nativists in Congress and the administration have wrongly claimed that immigrants are behind the growth in debt and that the US immigration system allows foreigners to take advantage of Americans’ generosity. Our data completely repudiates this view. Immigrants are subsidizing the US government.

The best way to balance the budget is to reduce spending—particularly on wealthy retirees—but rather than hinder our efforts to control deficits, immigrants are helping.

You can read the entire study here: Immigrants’ Recent Effects on Government Budgets: 1994–2023

On Liam And His Dad

I knew there had been a win in court. I didn't know how bigly the judge had dunked on Kristi Noem and Donald Trump.

This is outstanding.

Liam

(cribbed and paraphrased from a FB post by Richard Ojeda)

I look at my own sons now - grown and busy building their lives - and I have to think about how much has been possible only because they got to grow up safe, protected, and never afraid of the people who were supposed to be there to help.

That’s why the story of a five-year-old boy being detained by ICE, pulled out of a car in his own driveway and held hostage in order to lure his family out of their home, hits me like I've been kicked in the stomach. No parent should ever have to imagine their kids being put in that position, and no child should ever be forced to carry that kind of fear.

I’ve been around for quite a while, I've seen what real threats look like, and a kindergartener with a backpack, wearing a bunny hat, is not one of them.

Using a child to project power or to make a point isn’t law enforcement - it’s cruelty. And it violates everything this country claims to stand for.

When my kids were little, their biggest concerns were all about being on time for the school bus and playing and wondering if they could talk me into fixing their favorite chicken enchiladas for supper - feeling loved.

Liam’s world was shattered in an instant by masked agents who decided terrorizing a child was an acceptable tool for achieving a fucked political goal.

If we allow this to be normalized - if we look away because it’s happening to someone else’s kid - then we’ve already lost something fundamental about who we are.

Terrifying times. pic.twitter.com/iN7Z3US9Xk

— Harry Eccles (@Heccles94) January 24, 2026

Today's Hawk

Where are the arrests and the seizures of massive amounts of street drugs?

• Gang members
• Drug rings
• Sex traffickers
• Coyotes

If it ever was about "illegal immigrants" or the "worst of the worst" that's long been over.

They're going after any and all brown people.

And we fuckin' told you - assholes.

A Reuters photographer captured the image of a man named Saly being taken from his house and marched into the cold by ICE agents, who didn’t bother finding out who they were arresting.

Saly’s brother-in-law shared the story on the Hmong American Experience page on Facebook.

“ICE came to my brother-in-law Saly’s apartment, broke down the door, trashed the place, handcuffed him, and put a gun to his daughter-in-law’s head. They did not allow him to put on proper clothing and forced him outside in freezing weather.”

“Saly is a naturalized US citizen. He has NO criminal record.”

“ICE drove him around for nearly an hour, questioned him, and fingerprinted him. Only after all of that did they realize he had no criminal history and no reason to be detained. They then dropped him back off at his apartment like nothing happened.”

“We believe they were looking for someone who previously lived there, but instead of asking for identification, they chose violence, intimidation, and humiliation.”

Every few hours, we get a new story of some outrageous act of violence and intimidation from these lawless thugs.

Just ONE of these stories should be enough to trigger major investigations into ICE and their withdrawal from the field — but it keeps happening over and over and over again as our rights get violated and our citizens get brutalized, terrorized, and thrown in prison for no reason.

WTF ICE?

What does it say about the system when a guy says he might get better treatment if he's deported to a place he had to flee in fear for his life?

In recorded calls, reports of overcrowding and lack of food at ICE detention centers

In early May, NPR began receiving desperate messages from family members of detainees in Florida.

It was accompanied by a screenshot of a photo of a man with swollen red eyes, with another screenshot of his full detainee information.

"Please help me. Im desperate."

The woman who sent it, Maria, was texting about her brother at the Krome Detention Center in Miami. She requested their last name be withheld for fear of retaliation against her brother, who has been held in detention for more than two months.

She told NPR he had a fever, a serious eye infection for almost two weeks, and says he was denied medication for both.

"There are a lot of sick people there, and they aren't getting medical attention," she said in a phone interview. "They are sleeping on the floor and sometimes don't get meals."

Florida has pledged to be a national model for state cooperation with President Trump's immigration crackdown. As detention centers here and across the country fill up, NPR has received an outpouring of messages about severe overcrowding and inhumane conditions in immigration facilities across the state.

More than a dozen detainees, family members and lawyers described similar issues as Maria, including detainees underfed and in ill health. Krome, which is run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has been dogged for years by allegations of inhumane conditions and investigated by the Department of Justice in 2000 on accusations of sexual abuse. This year alone, there have been two deaths at the facility: Ukrainian immigrant Maksym Chernayak and Genry Ruiz Guillen of Honduras.

This morning, a group of Krome detainees assembled in the patio to form a human "SOS" sign.

In a written statement, ICE told NPR that "a group of detainees at the Krome Service Processing Center (Krome) decided to stage a peaceful sit-in in the center's recreation area. There has been no injuries or use of force of any kind during this demonstration." It added, "U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is committed to ensuring that all those in the agency's custody reside in safe, secure, and humane environments under appropriate conditions of confinement."

Private prisons and local jails are ramping up as ICE detention exceeds capacity

"I had a client who was at Krome," says Miami based lawyer Jeff Botelho, who adds the client recently told him that "they had been sleeping on the floor for a week or two. For food, he said they were given a cup of rice and a glass of water a day. It was very concerning."

Lawyers, advocates and experts are warning that overcrowding is the new normal across the country. The federal government is holding more than 48,000 people in immigration detention, about a 20% increase since January. But deportations are not keeping pace. Experts say that's largely what's driving the overcrowding in detention centers.

"There's incredible pressure to ramp up arrests inside the interior of the United States," says Adam Isacson of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), a nonprofit immigrant advocacy group. He estimates that ICE is at 125% detention capacity. "And so far, there has been, if anything, just a slight increase in the capacity to actually deport people."

ICE told NPR that "some ICE facilities are experiencing temporary overcrowding due to recent increases in detention populations. We are actively implementing measures to manage capacity while maintaining compliance with federal standards and our commitment to humane treatment. The reality is that these accusations do not reflect ICE's policies or practices."

What do the detention and deportation numbers say? 

The increase to nearly 50,000 detainees marks a sharp increase from the number of detentions during the Biden administration, which climbed to 39,703 in January 2025.

Syracuse University professor Austin Kocher, who tracks immigration statistics, notes that immigration arrest numbers are simply not made available by local or federal officials.

ICE did not respond to NPR's questions about Florida's detention numbers so far this year.

Deportation numbers are even trickier to come by. The government says it has deported 139,000 people as of April 2025. Some experts are skeptical that those figures are accurate.

"Up until about three weeks ago or so, things were pretty consistent with what they were in terms of the end of the Biden Administration," says Tom Cartwright, who has been tracking deportation flights for years. "Typically four to five deportation flights per day."

But Cartwright says that number has increased in the last few weeks to six to seven flights a day, mostly to Central America. And while he has no way of knowing how many people are in each airplane, he calculates each plane has the capacity to carry between 120 and 150 people.

At most, that's an estimated 1,050 people being deported every day out of the 50,000 or so who are detained.

Overcrowding, illness and hunger reported  in detention facilities 

"They're serving rotten food. People are getting sick. My spouse is not eating," J. told NPR in May. His loved one was being held at Glades County Detention Center in Moore Haven, Fla. He asked that we refer to him by his first initial because he fears retaliation against his loved one.

J. is one of the many family members of detainees who called NPR to report their loved ones not receiving meals or getting rotten food. Detainees who NPR spoke to over the phone confirmed this, and many said they'd had to sleep on the floor for weeks.

The situation at Krome Detention Center is believed to have gotten so dire, Democratic Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz of Florida paid a surprise visit there last week. She told NPR that in the intake area, two to three dozen men are "crammed into the perimeter of a very tiny room for up to 48 hours. They defecate in front of each other, they eat, they sleep on stone floors. It's really inhumane."

Advocates say this situation is playing out nationally.

"We have seen a rapid deterioration over the last few months," says Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director at the nonprofit advocacy group Detention Watch Network. "We're hearing reports … that there isn't enough food." She says she's increasingly been hearing accounts from people in detention going hungry. "I've heard people use the word 'starving.' "

There have been nine deaths in ICE detention since January, which is on track to be the deadliest year since 2020. At least three of those deaths have been in Florida.

Major expansion of detention facilities coming 

The Trump administration is promising to increase the rate of arrests of immigrants to 3,000 people a day. "President Trump is going to keep pushing to get that number up higher each and every single day," White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told Fox News last week.

Miller was discussing the sweeping budget bill passed by the House and now before the Senate. It would provide $75 billion over the next couple of years in additional funding for ICE, including $45 billion for detention facilities and $14.4 billion for removal operations.

"We can have, permanently, the safest, strongest, most secure system in American history," Miller told the network.

But immigrant advocates warn the measure will expand mass detention and surveillance.

"I think that it is not designed to increase the removals of people who are not legally allowed to be here," says Deborah Fleischaker, former acting chief of staff for ICE during the Biden administration. "It is designed to hold more people for longer."

Fleischaker believes ICE has historically been underfunded. But she says the bill as written "is so significant and so extreme. What they're trying to enable … I don't think it is within the imagination of the American people when they voted for Donald Trump."

Isacson of WOLA adds that the actions occurring now will multiply. "Plainclothes people using rough tactics and covering their faces to take people off the streets and sort of muscle them into vehicles," he says. "This is going to be common. And it's going to become much more common to see that all around the country military bases may have detention facilities."

"What are the chances my deportation flight will make a wrong turn?"

"I am anguished. I have not heard anything about my son."

Late in May, NPR began receiving messages from Vivian Ortega, a mother in Venezuela, regarding her son, Jhonkleiver Ortega.

Jhonkleiver Ortega came to the U.S. three years ago and was working in construction. He was picked up while driving in November 2024 for not having a license, which under Florida state law is not available to immigrants without legal status. She told us she had sold her house in Venezuela to pay for his $7,000 bond in January. When he went to his next court hearing in February, he was detained.

Vivian had heard from him infrequently, and she was terrified "he was barely eating in there."

Data trackers and policy experts say the Trump administration's goal of deporting one million migrants a year is so high that encouraging self-deportation is paramount. "The fact that [detention] is often so unsafe and unhealthy leads me to believe that there's also a desire to wear people down," says Isacson.

High-profile flights — with migrants sent to the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo, Cuba, and to El Salvador's notorious detention center CECOT and, more recently, a flight headed to South Sudan — have sent a strong message. For Vivian, the possibility was a source of constant anguish.

On June 3, NPR was able to locate Jhonkleiver Ortega at Glades Detention Center in Florida. He had been to immigration court the day before. NPR was given permission by the family to record his conversation with his mother.

"They told me they had to review my asylum case," Ortega told his mother. "They told me I have to send proof that I was tortured in Venezuela. And in four months they would give me an answer. And I said I can't anymore. It's been months of this. They barely feed us here. I can't anymore. I asked to be deported. This week or next I will be on a flight to Venezuela. If they give me a call from Louisiana I'll call you before the flight."

"What?" his mother asks.

"I asked the judge what are the chances that my flight will get lost and accidentally end up in another country? And she said if that happens you call the deporter. Or email me."