The Horrors

Welcome to Friday.

Wait, How Exactly Did ICE Manage to “Lose” More Than 1,000 Alligator Alcatraz Detainees?

from the inestimable Charlie Pierce at Esquire   (paywalled)

It appears that the agency is just as incompetent as it is cruel.

Well, mercy me. The well-oiled machinery of the Stephen Miller Roundup seems to have slipped another gear. From the Miami Herald:

As of the end of August, the whereabouts of two-thirds of more than 1,800 men detained at Alligator Alcatraz during the month of July could not be determined by the Miami Herald. The Herald had obtained the names from two detainee rosters. Around 800 detainees showed no record on ICE’s online database. More than 450 listed no location and only instructed the user to “Call ICE for details”—a vague notation that attorneys said could mean that a detainee is still being processed, in the middle of a transfer between two sites or about to be deported.

Excuse me?

They had these people isolated in a prison camp in the middle of the damn Everglades and, somehow, they managed to lose them in transit to God knows where? These people simply don’t care enough to run a policy that isn’t cruel and stupid. Being cruel and competent is beyond them. Being benign and stupid is beyond them. Their only talent is being cruel and stupid.

Some Alligator Alcatraz detainees who couldn’t be located in the ICE database might have been deported—even though the internal data obtained by the Herald show the vast majority of detainees didn’t have final orders of removal from a judge before entering the facility. Some of those deportations occurred as a result of detainees deciding to abandon their ongoing immigration cases to put an end to their detention at the facility and its harsh conditions, which included being held in chain-link cages in tents with little protection from the elements. “It became a game of chicken to see who’s going to blink first, to see if the client’s going to say ‘I don’t want to be detained in these conditions just send me back,’ ” said Miami immigration attorney Alex Solomiany.

Heads they win, tails they’re lost.

I honestly don’t know what’s worse to think about.  1,000 human beings lost?  1,000 human beings disappeared?  1,000 shipped off to a black site somewhere?

This is why we organize, donate, and speak up.  Right?

As If ICE Couldn’t Get Any Worse, But Here We ArePost + Comments (94)

We all know that people are losing their jobs, and possibly their careers for criticizing Charlie Kirk, and sometimes for merely quoting Kirk in his own words!

I want to quote parts of this article by Charlie Pierce.  The actual title is shown below, but it’s important to not that it shows up as “thought crimes” in the URL itself.

Charlie Kirk’s Assassination Has Taken Us Down a Dark, Orwellian Path  (paywalled)

by Charles Pierce

What the hell is going on in this country? If the authoritarian Right wants to make a cult of martyrdom out of an unforgivable act of public murder, it should go ahead and do so. But there is absolutely no reason for them to drag the rest of us into their rituals. Flags at half-staff and threats against local officials who decline to do so? Tributes at major league ballparks? A memorial service at the Kennedy Center? Professors fired over their reactions to the event on social media, most of which paled against the things that Kirk said, as a matter of course, that made him rich and influential.

From NBC News:

Even worse, the members of the Cabinet have signed onto the scouring of social-media posts in search of (once) protected speech that they deem disrespectful. Pete Hegseth is leading the way at the DoD. He’s already got one head on his wall.

From USA Today:

Nice to see who’s advising the defense department these days on personnel matters. Unsurprisingly, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has joined the parade, turning the visa process upside down and into even more of a mess than it was before.

Returning to the situation with Karen Attiah, the game was given away with that line about how Attiah’s posts “endangered” her colleagues. That’s the real thing here, isn’t it? To threaten reprisals against thought crimes and then follow through by any means, fair or foul. I’ve lived through how conservatives used the suicide of Vince Foster as a truncheon on the Clinton administration, and before that they used the suicide of a woman named Susan Coleman for the same purpose. That’s how the infamous “Clinton Body Count” was born. Its reach extended all the way to the 2016 murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich, whose corpse was used as a club on Hillary Clinton. So, frankly, coerced conservative demands for respect for the dead ring a little false to me.

I was about to write “scary times”, but it’s worse than that.

Dangerous times.  And they are not just dangerous, they are disingenuous.  Hell, they are lying liars who lie.

Open thread.

I thought it was 2025, but it’s apparently 1984Post + Comments (157)