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It's really easy to read an article like this and dismiss it as “hysteria” or “political sniping”. It's EASY to want to believe that US government agencies would NEVER “disappear” hundreds of people into swampy graves or deaths in foreign prisons.
This is America, we aren't Nazi’s. We DO NOT DO that kind of shit, right?
Until you remember what ICE did during the first Trump administration.
As of December 2024, approximately 1,360 children who were separated from their parents under the first Trump administration remain "unaccounted for" according to the Department of Homeland Security. Advocacy groups assert that the actual number of children who may never be reunited is likely higher.
It's like everyone has "memory hole'd" what happened during the first Trump administration.
1,360 CHILDREN, just "vanished" into the maw of ICE detention during Trump’s first term. And we prosecuted NO ONE for that crime.
How many remember these stories from 2020?
About how ICE was secretly STERILIZING Latina women in detention.
And, yes, it REALLY happened. Here's a 2021 report on it.
Sterilization in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE’s) Detention: Ethical Failures and Systemic Injustice...pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ar…
We examine these allegations as a case study highlighting how the US immigration detention system violates core tenets of medical ethics. We argue that, in the context of long-standing systemic racial biases in our medical system and a baseline mistrust of that medical system on the part of historically oppressed populations, these harms are dangerously amplified. These abuses contribute to a chilling effect that prevents vulnerable patients from seeking care; this compromises the health of everyone, particularly in the era of COVID. This case study has implications for the new presidential administration that has become accountable for ICE and will set the tone of US immigration policy at large.
Why Forced Sterilization in Immigration Detention is a Bellwether for Human Rights Abuses - theadvocatesforhumanrig…
Forced sterilization is outlawed as a crime against humanity, war crime, and crime of genocide in international law. Measures that are intended to prevent births within a group are also prohibited as a crime of genocide under the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, which the U.S. agreed to uphold and prosecute violations of. Several treaties, including the Convention against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which the US has ratified and is legally bound to uphold, prohibit the practices alleged to be carried out in ICE detention.
Yet in the year of Covid this particular bit of Trumpian nastiness got forgotten.
There is a particularly racist bit of MAGAt mythology around the idea of the "anchor baby".
So, it seems RATIONAL to them to "sterilize" Latina women in ICE detention. Because, you know, "if you don't, they will just keep coming back until they can drop an anchor baby".
That's the level of racism and depravity that exits in ICE. People who can go to work each day KNOWING that the "gyno exam" they are going to force these women to take is actually sterilizing them. Without their consent or knowledge.
That was in Trump’s FIRST TERM, when the MAGAts were still “holding back”. Like roaches afraid that a light might get shined on them, that they might “get caught” and “face consequences”. This time, they are acting without fear.
SO,
Why is anyone surprised that ICE may have started "disappearing" people.
What's another "crime against humanity" to them?
There can be no “benefit of the doubt”, or “good faith”, or “trust in their good intentions” with Trump and the MAGAts. They have already shown us who they are what they are capable of the first time round.
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time. People know themselves much better than you do. That's why it’s important to stop expecting them to be something other than who they are. - Maya Angelou
DHS/ICE “disappeared” 1,360 children who may, or may not, be dead.
And they got away with it.
This is a signal of Collapse.
We allowed the construction of a "Gulag Archipelago" in our country. We allowed this to happen to "the strangers among us". Soon this gulag won't just have immigrants in it.
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First they came for the immigrants, and I did not speak out - because I was not an immigrant.
Then they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
—Martin Niemöller
