In the six months since inauguration, the president has wasted no time in stripping away immigrant rights. It wasn’t hours after he was sworn in that he signed a flurry of executive orders, declaring a national emergency on immigration. Later that month, Congress passed the Laken Riley Act which, under the pretense of safety, has been used to indefinitely detain noncitizens without due process for crimes from theft to shoplifting, even if falsely accused.
A new report by Human Rights Watch reveals just how horrible these facilities are becoming, based on the accounts of 11 detainees in three detention centers across Florida, 14 immigration lawyers, and data analysis. The stories in it are harrowing. One prisoner recounts: “Officers made men eat while shackled with their hands behind their backs after forcing the group to wait hours for lunch: ‘We had to bend over and eat off the chairs with our mouths, like dogs.’”
It’s becoming increasingly common for ICE detainees to say they’re being treated like animals. At the recently opened “Alligator Alcatraz,” a detention center in Florida’s Everglades, inmates have said they felt “caged like chickens.” The facility, located in an abandoned airport, is a murky reflection of what ICE jails are becoming: a genuine lapse in human rights practices–and a historical stain for years to come.
These overall conditions are, according to the ICE handbook, in clear violation of standard policy. Besides ensuring basic hygiene, the agency also pledges to detain people with “the most humane manner possible with a focus on providing sound conditions and care.” (But we’re talking about the same government that publishes AI-generated cartoons of immigrant arrests and bad deportation humor.)
In a first-person essay for Vanity Fair, Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University student who was held in a South Louisiana processing facility for 45 days (supposedly for an opinion essay she co-authored about the Israel-Gaza War), draws an eerie parallel between facility officers and the guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment. In the piece, she explains that in an ICE detention center, she felt “horrified, invisible, helpless, and dehumanized.”
And in another excerpt from the report, one woman recounts being held in a facility for men. “There was only one toilet, and it was covered in feces,” she said. “We begged the officers to let us clean it, but they just said sarcastically, ‘Housekeeping will come soon.’ No one ever came.”
The Florida detention centers seem to be only the beginning of a far bigger and much darker movement. Earlier this year, the ACLU uncovered the president’s plan to further expand ICE’s prison network, his own answer to overcapacity. The HRW report isn’t just a haunting account of today’s detention centers; it’s a warning of what’s to come.
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