In July, 2025, the federal government made a choice: Every pregnant migrant girl in its custody would go to one place — Urban Strategies, LLC at 250 N. Crockett St in San Benito, Texas. The authorities previously closed this place down because these girls were being neglected. We’ll expand on that a little later in the article.

Right next door is a museum dedicated to the Mexican-Tejano families and workers who built San Benito with their labor and their lives. These girls are part of that story. They always were. Instead of being welcomed into it, they were placed in a facility next door that had already proven it could not protect them.

THE GIRLS IN THE CONVERTED CHURCH

A church building. For girls being punished in the name of Christian values. The symbolism is doing a lot of work.

Some of these girls are 13 years old. Some are survivors of rape. Some spent weeks crossing the desert without receiving any medical care at all. They are now being housed in a converted Baptist church where no one has screened them for pregnancy complications, no one has checked whether their pregnancies are viable, and if they have an emergency?

San Benito does not have an emergency room.

The nearest one is ten miles away in Harlingen, about fifteen minutes on a good day, longer when it isn’t. The nearest Maternal-Fetal Medicine specialist, the kind of doctor these pregnancies require, is a hundred miles away. In obstetric medicine, every single one of these pregnancies is considered high-risk by definition. Very young girls who have survived significant trauma do not represent a gray area in medicine.

Ten miles, or fifteen minutes, is not a short distance when a fallopian tube ruptures and internal bleeding has already begun. It is not short when a miscarriage turns septic and a girl is going into shock. It is not short when eclampsia escalates into seizure. Gynecological emergencies do not wait. They do not give a patient time to be loaded into a vehicle, driven across city limits, and checked in.

No one has ruled out ectopic pregnancies, where a pregnancy grows outside the womb instead of inside it. It cannot survive. It will rupture. When it does, the bleeding happens on the inside, where no one can see it. The girl goes into shock. She needs emergency surgery within hours or she will die.

One early ultrasound catches it before any of that happens.

For a majority of these girls, no one has done that scan.

And I am not ‘nit-picking’ these girls are at serious risk for this deadly pregnancy complication, and the reason is straightforward. Amnesty International reports that up to 60% of girls and women who cross the border are sexually assaulted and/or raped.

Sexual violence often leads to infections that cause no symptoms — up to 70% of women infected with Chlamydia or Gonorrhea are asymptomatic — so many of these girls would have no way of knowing they are infected.

Left untreated, those infections scar the inside of the reproductive system. That scarring is what causes a pregnancy to grow in the wrong place. Women with that kind of scarring are more than six times more likely to have an ectopic pregnancy than women without it.

That is not speculation. That is not worst-case thinking. That is the predictable, medically certain outcome for at least some of the girls sitting in that converted church right now. The question is not whether it will happen. The question is which girl it happens to, and whether anyone reaches her in time.

Young girls’ bodies are not finished developing. Pregnancy in adolescence carries significantly higher rates of dangerous blood pressure complications and surgical delivery.

These girls also risk losing their fertility permanently. The rape was not enough. The detention was not enough. Now the conditions of their confinement may take from them the ability to ever have children of their own choosing.

Seven anonymous senior health officials within the government itself objected in writing and proposed alternatives. They were career professionals, not political appointees, whose expertise was specifically in child welfare and the care of unaccompanied minors.

They were overruled without explanation by those above them, and it has Stephen Miller's fingerprints all over it.

The order to overrule these seven officials was issued by ORR Chief of Staff Matt O'Neill Levine, under the authority of Angie Salazar, a career ICE agent with no child welfare background who gets their orders from Stephen Miller.

Yes, that Stephen Miller.

A SYSTEM BUILT TO FAIL THEM

This facility had been shut down months earlier. Federal investigators found staff had failed to get these girls basic prenatal care. Biden's ORR lifted the ban anyway, accepting a remediation plan that added no new clinical staff and upgraded no one's qualifications.

Then Trump's team installed two consecutive ICE enforcement agents to run a child welfare agency. Four months in, they chose that same facility, with that same record, in one of the worst healthcare deserts in the country, in a state with a near-total abortion ban, and made it the only place in America for every pregnant migrant girl in federal custody.

This is a system that predates any single president, any single administration, any single person in power. What is happening at Urban Strategies was built over time, by many hands, across many years.

In 2018, ProPublica obtained police reports and call logs from more than 70 of the approximately 100 immigrant youth shelters run by HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement. What those records showed was a system already failing the children in its care — not through chaos or underfunding alone, but through structural neglect that went largely unaddressed. Police had responded to at least 125 calls reporting sex offenses at shelters that primarily served immigrant children over five years. Dozens more calls came from facilities that also housed at-risk American youth, making it impossible to determine the full scope.

“If you’re a predator, it’s a gold mine. You have full access and then you have kids that have already had this history of being victimized.” — Lisa Fortuna, Director of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Boston Medical Center

The children in those 2018 reports were described in almost identical terms to the girls in San Benito today: survivors of violence, malnourished after dangerous journeys, afraid that speaking up would damage their immigration cases. The system that was supposed to protect them was understaffed, undertrained, and largely unaccountable.

Now, in 2026, the same machine roars on. These girls are adolescents, some barely teenagers, whose still-developing bodies are now also sustaining pregnancies. They arrived malnourished after weeks in brutal terrain. Many were raped. Many carry untreated infections that can cause pregnancy loss and cause permanent damage to their reproductive health. Almost none of them have had a single prenatal appointment.

THE LOCATION IS THE POLICY

A local doctor told me she was blown away by how dangerous this is. She was trying to stay calm and clinical about it. I am not a doctor, and I am not going to do that.

These girls are in Texas. Abortion in Texas is not mostly illegal or illegal with exceptions. It is illegal. Full stop. Rape is not an exception. Being thirteen years old is not an exception. Whatever exception you are currently trying to construct in your head, it does not exist in Texas law.

This is under Texas Health and Safety Code Section 170A.002, enacted as House Bill 1280, commonly called the Trigger Ban. It took effect August 25, 2022, thirty days after the Dobbs decision overturned Roe v. Wade.

And this part of Texas where these girls are being held is a place where even physicians who would want to intervene are too frightened of arrest, too frightened of losing everything they have built, to do it.

There was a rule that said if one of these girls needed to end her pregnancy, the government had to help her get somewhere she legally could. That rule is being taken away right now. The money to pay for that travel has already been cut.

Nobody has to say it out loud to a 13-year-old rape survivor. Nobody has to look her in the face. The location says it for them. No doctors, no money, and no legal protection. There is nowhere to go. That is not incidental to this policy. That is the entire architecture of it.

Jonathan White ran this program during Trump’s first term. He was asked about it directly, he admitted it is 100% and exclusively about preventing abortion. White also described Scott Lloyd, Trump’s first-term ORR Director, personally blocking pregnant minors from terminating their pregnancies and calling White late at night to demand that a specific girl be transferred to Texas to prevent her from having an abortion.

This policy tells girls: We don’t want you here. We don’t want your children here. But we will force you to carry a rape pregnancy to term. You fled violence, you were assaulted on the way here, you are thirteen years old — and the position of the United States government is that the fetus matters more than you do. That is not pro-life. That is pro-punishment.

And then what? We’ll detain you through your entire pregnancy in a facility that couldn’t manage basic prenatal appointments. We’ll make sure you give birth in one of the worst healthcare regions in the country. And then we’ll deport you — back to the place so dangerous you left it with nothing, except now you’re recovering from childbirth and you have a newborn in your arms.

There is no version of this that is about protecting children. They are not protecting the girl. They are not protecting the baby. They are using both of them as instruments of a policy whose actual purpose is control.

When these girls go into labor, they will do it in a converted church ten miles from the nearest emergency room, in a facility that could not manage basic prenatal appointments. They will be transported to a hospital for delivery. That hospital is ten miles away, in a region with some of the worst maternal care infrastructure in the country. When they arrive, they will be alone. No family. No advocate. No one who speaks their language in any way that matters. They will be a detained minor, in federal custody, in a state where the doctors in that building are legally prohibited from discussing certain options with them. They will give birth under guard. And then they will be transported back.

And that is the version where they stay. There is nothing that legally stops the government from deporting a girl in her ninth month. Some of them will go into labor in the country they were running from, in the exact circumstances they risked everything to escape. They will not give birth in a hospital ten miles away. They will give birth there.

Wherever there is. Whatever that means for them.

I have spent years fighting for patients who get chewed up by systems that were supposed to serve them, and I know the difference between a system that is trying and falling short and a system that is working exactly as it was designed. These girls were not overlooked. They were found, and processed, and placed with precise, deliberate, documented intention somewhere their options would disappear before anyone ever had to officially admit those options existed.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN NO ONE IS WATCHING?

And underneath all of this is something that should make every single person in this country unable to sleep.

A congressional investigation found over 1,000 credible reports of life-threatening abuse inside immigration facilities in a single year. People being denied food. Denied water. Denied sleep. Reports of guards physically and sexually abusing detainees. In 2025, 36 people died in custody in one year, more than any year in the past two decades.

That 2025 total — as absolutely horrible as it is — took a full year to reach. In 2026, we are three months in, and at least 13 people have died in ICE custody already. A complete list of ICE custody deaths from 2016 on is available by clicking here.

At one facility, a nurse called 911 because a pregnant woman was bleeding. The 911 dispatcher asked her to check whether the baby’s heart was still beating. The nurse said she did not have the equipment to do that. A pregnant woman was bleeding and the person responsible for her care did not have a basic tool that any small town clinic in this country would have on a shelf. That woman was inside a federal facility, in the custody of the United States government, bleeding, and the answer was that there was no equipment.

At least 14 women lost their pregnancies or suffered serious physical harm because of neglect while being held in government custody. Another woman who was coughing up blood had to wait more than two hours for an ambulance to be allowed through the facility’s security gates.

Two hours. While coughing up blood.

The government’s own lawyers documented over 100 reports of facility staff sexually abusing children as young as five years old across 29 shelters in Southwest Key. Five-year-old children, being abused by the adults the government hired to watch over them. The Trump administration looked at that documentation and dismissed the legal case in March 2025. They closed it. They threw it away.

Author’s Note: This is something I covered back in May of last year. It disgusted me then. It still disgusts me now. You can read my original article on the subject by clicking here.

For a 13-year-old who has already survived being raped to be placed inside a system where staff have abused five-year-olds and where the government just buried the only legal case that might have held anyone responsible, that is not protection. That is the government taking a child who has already been violated and placing her somewhere the violation can continue without interruption.

The agreement that sets the most basic legal standards for how migrant children must be treated — Flores Settlement Agreement (1997) — is being threatened.

The Flores agreement was not preventative policy. It was a consequence. Immigration officials abused a child in custody, and a years-long fight led to a federal settlement that forced the government to treat them as human beings.

Flores mandates state-licensed facilities. It caps detention at 20 days. And it requires oversight from outside DHS, because leaving DHS to oversee itself has never worked. Terminating this agreement does not just change the rules for how long a child can be held. It eliminates the last mechanism the public has for knowing what is actually happening inside these facilities.

In May 2025, the Trump administration filed a formal motion to terminate the Flores Agreement entirely.

This is not a new goal for the Trump Administration.

In 2019, Trump’s Justice Department stood before a panel of federal judges and argued, with a straight face, that the Flores Settlement did not require the government to provide detained children with basic hygiene supplies.

And this fight against Flores is starting to move in the wrong direction.

Part of Flores includes free legal help for these children. These lawyers who are often the only adults in this system actually fighting for them, and this was eliminated and only partially restored by a judge’s order, and even that partial restoration runs out at the end of April 2026.

The rules requiring that pregnant girls receive proper medical care are being proposed for elimination.

A senior government official told a federal court under oath that children in these facilities had been properly screened for danger. Whistleblowers from inside that same office said she was lying, that at least one in five children had documented red flags for danger that had been ignored. A federal official lied to a judge about whether children were safe. The children are still there.

And we already know what happens when the rules bend. We saw it in 2016.

America saw children sleeping on cold concrete under Mylar blankets. A sixteen-year-old boy dying of the flu while agents watched him on a monitor and never moved or helped. Unaccompanied minors injected with psychotropic drugs without consent. Children separated from their families and mocked for crying too loudly at night.

One girl, Dixiana, was ten-years-old when she testified about what happened to her inside an ICE detention facility during Trump’s first term. A male officer kicked her awake. She slept on the floor. She was denied water. The cell was so overcrowded that girls had to sleep sitting upright. She cried constantly. So did most of the other children. There were no windows. The lights never went off. She lost track of what day it was. She begged to see her mother. She caught chickenpox while in custody.

All of that happened while the Flores agreement was still in place. Now imagine what they will do without it.

These children survived rape. They survived being trafficked. They survived journeys across deserts and through dangers that most people reading this sentence have never had to imagine and never will. They made it through all of that. And the country that stopped them at the border took that survival and spent months carefully and deliberately building a situation designed to make sure it meant nothing.

They are children. They are pregnant. They are alone and scared and they have no idea that the system that told them it would protect them was being built, piece by piece, to be used against them instead.

I know what it looks like when someone is trying to help and falling short. I have seen that, and it is not this. What is being done to these girls is not a failure. It is a choice. It is a set of choices made by specific people with names and offices and salaries paid by your tax dollars, about children who have no power, no voice, and nowhere to go.

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A note: the photographs here are press images unrelated to this facility or these girls. They are used for context only. No one depicted in this article is a subject of this reporting.

If you have an Android, if you use Google Chrome, or if you use Google Search? It records every search, every email, every location ping, every app download, every photo you take, every late night purchase, every quiet curiosity. It remembers what we forget.

But that shadow stretches further. Google also runs the cloud infrastructure government agencies use. It stores our metadata until investigators request it, and even builds artificial intelligence systems that can sift through human lives at a scale no person ever could.

If you have a Google account, you can actually see just how much data Google has collected on you by clicking here.

They told us that it was only for advertising. That the massive amounts of data that they’ve stored on us stayed inside the company because no corporation would ever jeopardize its edge. Self interest would keep us safe, and greed was framed as a safeguard.

Now, with big tech’s alignment with the Trump administration, that very logic collapses. The same private data they once mined for profit is slowly being positioned as a tool of governance. For Google, that shift is subtle, layered in administrative subpoenas from DHS, government contracts with CBP, and complex legal infrastructure, structured just carefully enough to preserve plausible deniability.

THE DEPARTMENT OF HOMELAND SECURITY WANTS YOUR DATA

This week, it was exposed that the Department of Homeland Security has sent hundreds of administrative subpoenas to Google, Reddit, Meta, and others, demanding that these platforms unmask the identities of accounts that track ICE activity. They are also demanding that the platforms report anyone expressing anti-ICE sentiment directly to the government.

Over the last decade, Google has overwhelmingly complied with millions of government requests for user data, and those requests have been climbing for five years. There is no rule requiring platforms to tell you when it happens, and many people never find out at all.

For example, Amandla Thomas-Johnson, a journalist who advocated for Palestinians, only learned they had been targeted by DHS weeks after the fact. Google notified Thomas-Johnson in April with a brief email informing him that his metadata had already been shared with the Department of Homeland Security.

The damage was done before the message ever arrived. ICE had requested and was given a list of his usernames, addresses, an itemized list including any IP masking tools, telephone numbers, subscriber identities, and credit card and bank account numbers.

Yes, requested. This was a request. Not legally required.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU of Northern California recently wrote to every major tech platform, including Amazon, Apple, Discord, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Reddit, Snap, TikTok, and X, with a single demand: stop complying.

In the letters, they talk about how DHS’s subpoenas are unlawful, and the government already knows this. Which is why when a small number of targeted users challenged those subpoenas in court with help from ACLU affiliates in California and Pennsylvania. DHS did not wait for a judge to rule. It withdrew the subpoenas before any decision could be made.

But this is what the federal government is using to compel private companies to unmask its critics by name.

It’s happening alongside DHS’s existing contract with Zignal Labs, which is already scanning your social media around the clock using AI. This data is all fed into Palantir, a program used by ICE to identify protestors with face scans during the Minnesota ICE protests, even going as far as following some home because it aggregates extensive personal data from phone numbers, physical addresses, names, and more.

And in 2026, the department plans to open multiple government-funded facilities running around the clock, dedicated entirely to monitoring what you post online.

For years, Donald Trump publicly attacked Google almost as often as he attacks immigrants. He has accused the company of rigging search results, suppressing conservatives, and amplifying Obama over him.

At one point, he openly said that Google was working hand-in-hand with China:

In July 2021, Trump filed a class-action lawsuit against YouTube LLC (Google owns this) and its CEO, Sundar Pichai, claiming his post January 6 suspension from YouTube amounted to unconstitutional censorship and a direct assault on his First Amendment rights.

In 2022, despite banning Trumps YouTube account, Google approved Truth Social for Google Play Store.

Google settled that YouTube lawsuit giving Trump $24.5 million in September 2025. That same month, the company was forced to implement remedies in the antitrust case it had lost to the Department of Justice in July that year.

Googles CEO later thanked Trump for anti-trust resolution during the billionaires dinner at the Oval Office.

But the alignment did not begin there. If anything, the ruling formalized what was already in motion.

In 2024, Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO and board member of its parent company Alphabet Inc., had already met with Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

In January 2025, Google donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund. It was not alone. Uber, Amazon, Robinhood, Chevron, and Pilgrim’s Pride all made similar contributions for the same amount or more.

Google also donated millions to Trumps ballroom fund in 2025.

Across Silicon Valley, the number seemed to settle at the around the same figure. One million dollars or more. Nearly every major tech player contributed at that level, often paired with personal donations from their CEOs.

Companies like Perplexity AI, C3 AI, Nvidia, J.P Morgan, Microsoft, Amazon, Bank of America, Blackrock, Coinbase, Goldman Sachs, and even Adobe joined the list.

And it paid off. They knew it would. You could see it in their faces at the 2025 inauguration, Google’s CEO among them. The CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, officially reached “billionaire” status in 2025, and Palantir just boasted to their shareholders that 2025 was their highest earning fiscal year yet.

You can view the entire list of Trumps inauguration donors by clicking here.

TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF POWER

In early February 2025, Google quietly dropped their pledge not to use AI for weapons or surveilling people. That same year, when Trump attempted to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” Google did not push back but instead announced on Twitter it would update Google maps to align with, ‘official government sources.’

When Trump illegally extended the TikTok ban, and then Trump demanded that Google and Apple put it back on the app store. They did. In 2025, Google, Microsoft, and Meta ended ‘DEI reporting’ on workplace diversity in alignment with the Trump Administation..

Google Search prohibits autocomplete for the phrase, ‘impeach Trump’

And of course, they have aligned with the White Houses “AI Action Plan” and the U.S. government uses Googles AI, Gemini. They are also among the companies pursuing Project Vault and FORGE, a program built around extracting the critical minerals that power EVs, batteries, semiconductors, and the entire architecture of the AI economy.

Earlier this year, Google (who owns the Android operating system) discretely removed Pride Month, Black History Month, Indigenous Peoples Month, and Hispanic Heritage Month from its default Android calendar.

GOOGLE POWERS ICE?

Think back to what Google knows about you. That same infrastructure is under contract with the Department of Homeland Security and ICE.

In 2025, hidden in federal contract documentation, it was confirmed that Google had been secretly powering CBP border surveillance towers with AI capable of automated human detection and mass-scale video storage. The company had previously said it wasn’t doing this. It had been doing this.

As of February 2026, more than 800 Google employees have formally petitioned leadership after it was revealed DHS was using Googles cloud servers, condemning Google for allowing its technology to be used this way.

STEPS YOU CAN TAKE TO PROTECT YOUR DATA

The first step is checking your Google Account Activity controls. Go to myaccount.google.com, click “Data & Privacy,” and turn off Location History, Web & App Activity, and Ad Personalization.

These settings allow Google to track your movements, save your searches, and build an ad profile on you — so turning them off is a quick win.

Next, delete the data Google has already collected on you. You can wipe your search and location history and set up auto-delete so it doesn’t pile up again.

Small habit changes also go a long way. Swapping Google Chrome for a browser like Firefox or Brave, and using DuckDuckGo instead of Google Search, cuts down on how much data gets collected in the first place.

The truth is, if you use Google services, some tracking is unavoidable. But taking these few steps can seriously limit how much Google knows about you.

You can also download all the data they have on you at www.takeout.google.com

This is not just a story about Google. It is a story about what happens when the most powerful surveillance infrastructure ever built decides that power is more valuable than principle. Every search you have ever made, every location ping, every quiet 2 a.m. curiosity — that data was never just for ads. It was always a resource waiting for the right buyer, the right administration, the right moment. That moment has arrived. What we are watching in real time is the architecture of a surveillance state being assembled not through legislation, not through public debate, but through contracts, donations, quiet policy deletions, and unanswered subpoenas.

Once it is fully built, it will not be dismantled easily or willingly. The question is not whether you trust Google. The question is whether you trust every government that will ever exist, now and in the future, with a complete and detailed record of your life. Because that is precisely what is being handed over — not to this administration alone, but to the institution of state power, permanently and without your consent.

The steps listed above are small, but they matter. Take them anyway, and then demand more from the companies that built this shadow and from the representatives who are supposed to keep it in check. Silence, at this point, is not neutrality but permission.

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See, the road to the Holocaust did not begin in Berlin. It passed through lecture halls, grant committees, and the Ivy league institutions of America.

Long before 2026, America had already proven that they believe some lives are worth less than others through eugenics programs, laws targeting Native Americans, and Jim Crow laws. In the early 1900s, Yale stood at the center of American eugenics, helping seed the ideology that led to the executions of millions of people.

The Holocaust was not a sudden rupture in human morality. It was the logical endpoint of ideas that had already been rehearsed, funded, and validated in America. At the time, these were neve reviewed as radical ideas, and the danger was in the fact that they were considered respectable. They were the ideas of "important" men in high places.

The History Books Lied: The Century-Old Roots of America’s Nazi Problem

In school, we are taught a sanitized version of America. We are taught that America has always been the good guy. The freedom fighter. The country that steps in when things get bad because freedom matters to us more than anything. If you do not stand for freedom, you are not an American.

That same framing shows up when we learn about the Holocaust. We are taught that America ultimately stepped in to save Jewish people from Hitler’s terror. I remember being in seventh grade watching The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. I remember the class talking about how shocking it was that America did not step in sooner.

The Nazi race laws (Nuremberg Laws) were created based off of American sterilization statutes, segregation policies, and academic eugenic ‘theories’ that had already been tested on Black Americans, disabled people, Indigenous communities, the mentally ill, and the poor. There is no speculation here, only Hitler's own words. Writing in Mein Kampf, he praised the United States as the sole nation moving toward the 'volkisch' (racial) state he envisioned for Germany.

It started way back to when Hitler was a child. As a child, he loved the novels of Karl May. These were tales of a white pioneer named Old Shatterhand who conquered the American West. In those pages, Hitler did not see a tragedy of indigenous displacement. He saw a success story.

He viewed the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the ‘internment camps,’ and the reservation system as the ultimate proof of concept for his own expansion. Hitler often cited this as his justification for Lebensraum.

When Hitler read about the Trail of Tears, about families collapsing in the mud, children starving behind military lines, entire nations reduced to mass graves, he did not recoil in disgust. Instead, he used it as the foundation for his own genocide. His words.

And when the Third Reich began to codify its hatred, it looked at American law. A Nazi lawyer named Heinrich Krieger studied the United States with academic precision. He reported back to Berlin that America possessed the ‘most advanced’ race laws in the world.

Hitler called Madison Grant’s book, The Passing of the Great Race, his “Bible” because it promoted white supremacy and eugenics. He also idolized Henry Ford, praising him in Mein Kampf and using Ford’s antisemitic pamphlet, The International Jew, as Nazi propaganda. Hitler even kept a portrait of Ford in his office and was inspired by his industrial success.

Ford’s company actually successfully sued the U.S. government after the war for bombing its factories located in Germany.

The Nazis admired how America had forbidden interracial marriage. And they were fascinated by our one drop rule. This was a legal mechanism so extreme that even some Nazis initially worried it might be too harsh for the German public. So many do not realize that as of 2026, it’s only been 59 years since interracial marriage became legal in all 50 U.S. states.

We held the Nuremberg Trials to punish an ideology we had refined in our own courtrooms. We put the world on trial for using our script, but we never held a Jim Crow Trial.

There is a hope for a reckoning in 2026 — people are calling for the American Nuremberg trials for the deaths of detainees and Americans at the hands of DHS — a hope that the scales will finally balance.

But the scale was broken long ago by a paperclip. Operation Paperclip. When America brought the Reich’s scientists home and gave them new names and new labs, we didn’t just save their lives — we saved their logic. You don’t put yourself on trial after all.

And these ideologies and laws that the Nazis loved? They didn’t just appear out of nowhere. They were dreamed up by the ‘smartest’ people in America. While Jim Crow was happening in the streets, the ‘science’ behind it was being taught in the classrooms of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

The Nazis didn’t look at America as a backwards country; they looked at us as a teacher. They saw that our most prestigious universities and our richest families — like the Rockefellers and the Carnegies — were already spending millions to prove that some lives were worth more than others.

All of this supported by the very men who got rich during the ‘industrial revolution’ and made millions from world war II.

The Production of Non-Persons

American eugenics normalized the logic of murder by wrapping it in paperwork, credentials, and science. The Nazis did not begin with Jews. They began with the disabled, the institutionalized, the poor, and those already deemed unfit to live. By the time genocide reached its most visible victims, the moral groundwork had already been laid.

While the world saw the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Institution as beacons of progress, these organizations were bankrolling eugenics.

They didn’t just fund “research”; they funded the infrastructure of human culling.

The Rockefeller Foundation poured millions into the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Germany. This wasn’t a secret. They were intentionally funding “Racial Hygiene.” They paid for the salaries and the microscopes of men like Otmar von Verschuer, who would later mentor Josef Mengele, often called the ‘Angel of Death’ of Nazi Germany because of the sheer amount of deaths under his watch.

Even after the Nazis took power in 1933, Rockefeller continued funding German eugenicists like Ernst Rüdin, the architect of Hitler’s required sterilization laws.

To these men, humanity was just a corporate ledger, and the “weak” were a line item that needed to be deleted to ensure a “purer” profit. This was also the curriculum of the elite. Professors at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton taught that social problems like poverty or “feeblemindedness” were ‘biological crimes.’

They created the term “Life Unworthy of Life” (Lebensunwertes Leben), but the concept was refined in American lecture halls. By labeling human beings as “defective,” these Ivy League academics gave the Nazis the ‘scientific’ permission to stop seeing people and start seeing ‘waste.’

In 1927 Virginia, America ran a facility specifically to house and sterilize the "unfit." This is where Carrie Buck was sterilized, leading to the Supreme Court case (Buck V. Bell) where Justice Holmes infamously declared,

“It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.”

Around the same time, American doctor named Dr. Harry Haiselden allowed "defective" babies to die and advocated for their elimination. He often refused to perform needed surgery for children born with severe birth defects and allowed the babies to die.

J.P. Morgan? Yep, he was involved, too, and his influence went far beyond banking and into institutions his family controlled, especially the American Museum of Natural History under his nephew Henry Fairfield Osborn. The museum became a hub for eugenics and hosted major congresses in 1921 and 1932 that sold the ideology to politicians and the public as “science.”

The Carnegie Institution also funded the Eugenics Record Office (ERO) at Cold Spring Harbor, Long Island. It run by two men named Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin. Their goal was to create a "registry" of the American bloodline and systematically prune it.

If you’re anything like me, Palantir just came to mind. Their modernized version of this is ImmigrationOS which also creates entire networks of families.

The Carnegie Institution walked so that Palantir could run.

And yes, even “euthanasia” was America’s idea, as the 1911 Carnegie-funded report from that Island explicitly proposed “lethal chambers” to eliminate those deemed a burden to the ‘national germ-plasm.’

Harry Laughlin, the man running the show on Long Island, drafted something called the "Model Eugenical Sterilization Law."

It was a template for states to use. When the Nazis wrote their own "Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring" in 1933, they modeled it closely on Laughlin’s version. The Nazis were so grateful for Laughlin's work that Heidelberg University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1936 for being a "pioneer" of racial hygiene.

And all of this matters because the Holocaust didn’t start with Auschwitz.

It started with a “mercy” request for a child. In 1939, the parents of a baby named Gerhard Kretschmar wrote to Hitler, asking for permission to have their son — who was born blind and missing limbs — legally “put to sleep.”

Hitler saw this as the perfect opening. He dispatched his personal physician, Karl Brandt, to authorize the killing, effectively making the state the final arbiter of who deserved to live. This single case became the spark for Aktion T4. The first, although less often talked about, genocide of the Nazis.

The Nazis established a "Committee for the Scientific Registration of Hereditary and Severe Diseases."

They forced midwives and doctors to report every baby born with "defects," and then, under the guise of "specialized medical care," the state began taking these children from their families.

Parents were told their children were being sent to elite clinics for revolutionary treatment. In reality, they were being sent to killing centers.

The Nazis used the exact “economic burden” logic championed by that ERO office on Long Island. They calculated the cost of “feeding the unfit” down to the last pfennig, convincing the public that killing these children was an act of fiscal and biological responsibility.

Families knew that when the ‘grey busses’ arrived, they would never see their loved ones again. But they didn’t stand up against it. Which just shows us how fascism slowly creeps in.

When the children arrived at these clinics, they were murdered by starvation or lethal injection. When that became too slow, they developed the first gas chambers using carbon monoxide — the literal prototypes for the gas chambers at Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka.

By the time the Nazis began the mass deportation of Jewish families, they had already murdered 70,000 to 300,000 of their own “unfit” citizens — the children, the mentally ill, the homeless, the addict. They didn’t have to invent a system of genocide; they just had to apply the “science” of eugenics, which had been peer-reviewed in America, to a new target.

When Nazi doctors were finally put on trial at Nuremberg for their eugenics and genocide programs, they didn't plead insanity. They simply read the American laws aloud. They cited Buck v. Bell. They pointed to California and Virginia and asked, "How is our crime different from your law?"

To them, it was all the same, it was simply the killing of the “non-person.”

How the Truth Was Buried in American History Books:

But wait, why were we told otherwise? Well, because the elites wanted it that way.

Before the U.S. even entered World War II, the Rockefeller Foundation who quietly funded eugenics, also secretly funded the Council on Foreign Relations to plan the postwar world in secret. The project, called the War and Peace Studies, existed because the U.S. State Department did not have the staff, money, or long-range planning capacity to do this work itself. So a private, elite ‘think tank’ stepped in and effectively performed the job of government.

Between 1939 and 1945, a small group of experts quietly wrote plans for what the war was supposed to accomplish and what the world would look like afterward. Funded by Rockefeller money, they designed institutions like the United Nations, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Bank in private, and the U.S. government later used those plans with little public input.

If you don’t know what those are:

• The IMF controls countries by loaning money only if they cut basic services.

• The World Bank locks poorer nations into Western corporate systems through “development” projects.

• The United Nations decides who gets sanctioned, punished, or invaded.

The real point is that these systems were privately designed by the privately owned Council on Foreign Relations with Rockefeller Foundation money, adopted into our government without our say, and have spent decades since moving decisions about money, war, and survival out of public reach and into elite hands.

Because these "rules" were built into the very foundation of global law and money, the system now runs like an automated machine that protects elite interests regardless of who is elected or who is still alive.

And after the war, the Rockefeller Foundation went a step further. In its 1946 annual report, it openly stated that it funded a “History of World War II” through the CFR. The purpose was not neutral scholarship.

The report actually explicitly says the goal was to prevent a repeat of the post–World War I period, when journalists and historians challenged official narratives and exposed profiteering, imperial motives, and diplomatic failures.

We spend our days looking for the ghost of the Third Reich in the heavy boots of the state, terrified that we are becoming something foreign, something monstrous. But the ultimate horror isn’t that America is turning into Nazi Germany; it’s that the machinery of the Holocaust was built with American parts, tuned by American intellectuals, and fueled by American law.

Hitler didn’t infect us; he was our star pupil who proved that our own ideas could be scaled to industrial slaughter. So when we look at the cages, the raids, and the silent complicity of 2026, we aren’t witnessing a democracy sliding into a new fascism. We are witnessing a history that has finally circled back to its source. The darkness hasn’t invaded us — it has just come home.

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Sources are hyperlinked throughout article.

One was a teacher. She spent her days explaining the difference between a metaphor and a simile to kids she’d substitute in for. She was a poet. She was a mother of 3. She was the person we tell our kids to grow up to be. She was shot and killed by ICE agent Jonathan Ross on January 7th, 2026.

The other? An ICU nurse at the VA shot and killed just days ago. A man who spent his career stitching back together the broken bodies of the people we sent to war, only to be killed in his own community by the government he served for filming. His last action in this world was helping a woman ICE pushed to the ground.

Outside of Minnesota, Keith Porter was shot and killed by an off-duty ICE agent on New Years in LA. And another person was just shot by CBP just hours ago in Arizona — that story is still developing. And just a few months ago Silverio Gonzales was murdered by shot and killed by ICE after dropping his son off at daycare. Like Renee, DHS also claimed he ‘weaponized his vehicle’ but it was proven a lie by video footage.

Meanwhile, the public is being flooded with noise about Bovino’s demotion, Tom Homan stepping in, and the GOP visibly cracking at the seams as Mike Pence & Rand Paul call for a federal investigation, GOP Minnesota governor candidate Chris Mandel steps down.

So, what does that mean? What happens next?

When the Medical Examiner ruled Renee Good’s death a homicide, that is not a criminal judgment. That was a medical classification meaning ‘a human being was killed by another human being.’ The entire report has not yet been released as it’s an ongoing case.

But that ruling triggers a legal chain reaction.

It forces the case out of the morgue and into the hands of prosecutors. The Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, specifically County Attorney Mary Moriarty.

And yes, a state prosecutor can charge a federal agent. Federal badges do not not give you the right to murder no matter what what JD Vance says. DHS is not permitted total immunity. Period.

But it’s not cut and dry as state charges being filed and Ross being held accountable by being prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

What most people do not realize is the moment Moriarty files charges, Ross’s attorneys can (and likely will) invoke 28 U.S.C. 1442, the federal officer removal statute. That law allows any federal officer charged under state law for acts performed “under color of office” to immediately remove the case from state court to federal court immediately.

And yes, Jonathan Ross’s attorneys can invoke this regardless of despite the fact the Department of Justice has refused to investigate or prosecute him, and despite the fact they locked the Minnesota BCA out of the case. The statute exists specifically to override state authority. So much for ‘states rights.’

If this case is moved to federal court, the entire thing changes. Federal court means a federal judge, a federal jury pool, and federal rules, and that is not neutral. Federal judges are trained to defer to federal authority because thy work in the same system.

Federal judges strictly control what evidence juries are allowed to see. Video can be limited. Context can be excluded. Prior conduct or history of the agent — like the fact Jonathan Ross was in another incident like this months before — can be ruled “irrelevant” and really it just places the case inside a system built to protect the federal government. That’s exactly why they do it.

If federal court takes the case, instead of of a Hennepin County District Judge, the case would be assigned to one of the Article III federal judges in the Minnesota district. These judges are presidential appointees with life tenure. Meaning they never leave. They sit on their asses until they die and they don't answer to anyone. It is a total 50/50 coin toss on if Renee gets justice.

• The first is Katherine ‘Kate’ Menendez and she is the one DHS is probably worried about. Just recently she filed an injunction on ICE for their unconstitutional and illegal tactics in Minnesota.

• Jerry Blackwell is the prosecutor (now judge) who put Derek Chauvin behind bars and he knows how to rip use of force excuses to shreds.

• Jeffrey Bryan is a reformer who looks at proportionality instead of just following orders.

• Last you have Laura Provinzino. She is an prosecutor who put a man so depraved they called him ‘Minnesotas Epstein’ behind bars who knows every dirty secret in the DOJ playbook and how the federal government protects criminals.

• Eric Tostrud is a Trump pick and a Federalist Society stooge who lives for immunity and federal supremacy. He is the judge who issued a TRO this week blocking the BCA from access to the investigation. He is exactly who Ross and DHS are praying for.

• Patrick Schiltz is the Chief Judge. He clerked for Scalia and even taught Amy Coney Barrett. However, just today he ruled ICE director Todd Lyons must come to court he will be held in contempt.

• Finally you have Nancy Brasel, another Trump appointee.

The whole thing is a rigged game of judge roulette and the outcome depends on which one of these elites is holding the gavel.

So, here’s where we are.

We have a teacher who spent her life finding the right words, and a nurse who spent his life stitching back the people we sent to find the right wars. Two people dead in one city at the hands of our federal government.

We are told that we are a nation of laws. But right now, we’re a nation of terror and loyalist judicial appointments. We are waiting to see if the robe is bigger than the badge. Because if it isn’t — if we decide that a federal agent can execute a teacher in her car and a nurse on his feet and then hide behind a removal statute that gives them immunity — then we need to stop pretending we’re a democracy.

The legal system will keep us waiting on the cases for Renee Goods and Alex Pretti, but we are not waiting on them to tell us what is right. We do not know what their judges or their courts will decide. However, we do know one thing for certain. We know what is right and what is wrong. We have the power to hold them accountable.

Justice does not only come from a signature on a piece of paper or a ruling from a distant courtroom. It also comes from the streets. It comes from neighbors looking out for neighbors. It comes from every single one of us refusing to look away when our people are at risk. We cannot let them divide us or make us feel small while we wait for their news.

We must stay locked in and stay strong together. Our unity is the only thing that has ever forced the hand of those in power. When we stand as one, we are a wall they cannot break. When we speak with one voice, we are something they cannot ignore.

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And the machine moves fast. While those attorneys were packing their boxes, the vacuum they left behind was filled by the exact brutality they were too principled to fight. We went from a bureaucratic failure on Tuesday to a six-month-old baby needing CPR & foaming at the mouth from military-grade munitions and chemical agents on Thursday.

On top of everything else, ICE is now running a protection racket on the Pine Ridge Reservation, kidnapping Oglala Sioux citizens and then claiming to have 'lost' them in the system the moment the tribe refused to trade their land rights for their people's freedom.

The DOJ’s Most Wanted? Renee Good’s Family Apparently

According to the Department of Justice, the people responsible for Renee Good's death include her widow, two elected officials, and Renee herself. The only person apparently not responsible is the man who was holding the gun — Jonathan Ross.

Yes, the DOJ ordered a criminal investigation into Renee’s grieving widow, Becca Good, while simultaneously overruling Joseph H. Thompson’s attempt to let the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension determine if the shooting was even lawful. As a result six prosecutors (including Joesph H. Thompson) resigned in protest this week.

They objected to the targeting of the victim. They objected to the protection of the shooter. But objections are just noise if you don't stay to enforce them. By resigning, they didn't stop the corruption; they just ensured the next person in the chair would say 'yes’ further consolidating Trumps power in the Department of Justice inline with the goals chapter 17 of Project 2025.

But lets go circle back to Jonathan, let’s talk about the medical miracle that is Jonathan Ross. The official narrative being pushed by DHS is that he was hospitalized with internal bleeding after Renee “weaponized” her car against him. But medical science must work differently for federal agents, because less than 36 hours later, he wasn't in an ICU… he was playing mover.

He walked away from the shooting. He drove himself home. And then, he was photographed by the Daily Mail alongside other masked men hauling heavy computer towers and plastic bins to relocate his family. He is lifting, walking, and driving, all while wearing the exact same mask he wore when he took Renee’s life.

If you want to know who the bad guys are, look at who isn’t being investigated.

DHS is protecting Jonathan Ross. The DOJ is sitting on its hands. The FBI has slammed the door on state investigators, locking the BCA completely out of the loop.

And somehow, that isn’t the worst news.

There is a six-year-old boy who just wants to go to first grade. He just lost his mother. He has lost his father not long ago. And now, thanks to a coordinated campaign of harassment by deranged MAGA lunatics, he has lost his classroom, too. Renee Goods 6-year-old sons school has been bombarded with so much hate and so many threats that they had to shut down in-person learning and move him to online classes. They are hunting a grieving child.

But he isn’t the only child this week to become collateral damage in their ‘war’ against Americans.

A Baby Choked on State-Issued Chemical Munitions

To understand the sheer depravity of what happened on Tuesday, you have to understand where the Jackson family started their evening. They were a family of eight driving home from a basketball game. A mom, dad, and six kids between the ages of 6 months and 11-years-old. They’d stopped at a grocery store on the way, and were looking forward to the rest of the night together.

But their route home took them to a street where protests about the shooting of Renee Good were. When they hit the blockade, they tried to safely get through without hurting anyone. They rolled down the windows to plead with the federal agents standing in the road, explaining that they had a car full of children and just needed to get through the line to get home.

Their windows were down, their lights were on. Agents saw the children in the back of the car according to the Destiny Jackson, mom of the six kids hospitalized that night.

The agents didn’t wave them through or turn them around. Instead, ICE agents responded by rolling flash-bang grenades, smoke grenades, and tear gas canisters directly underneath the families vehicle. The explosion was immediate & the violence from the flash-bangs caused the airbags to deploy and the doors to lock, sealing the family inside a cabin that was instantly filling with ‘Maximum HC’ smoke and chemical agents. The family had to scramble out of the car with help of bystanders, spilling onto a street choked with toxic haze.

It was in that chaos that the six-month-old baby boy began to deteriorate. Exposure to the chemicals caused the baby boy to foam at the mouth, and he quickly began choking on his own fluids and stopped responding. His mother, standing on the side of a militarized street, had to perform CPR on her own son while EMS units struggled to navigate the wall of federal barricades and smoke.

And how did the agency handle this? With a smear campaign — their specialty. The official Twitter account of DHS initially posted a statement claiming the parents were “violent agitators” who had intentionally brought their children to a riot. It was a blatant lie designed to get ahead of the news cycle. When the facts became undeniable, they quietly deleted the tweet.

Their spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, later released a statement to news outlets to walk back the accusation, awkwardly pivoting to blame the protesters for the fact that her agency fired chemical weapons at six children.

We need to talk about the smoke. Reports indicate that ICE has escalated its crowd control tactics that night by deploying 'Maximum HC Smoke,' grenades.. a munition containing Hexachloroethane (HC). This isn't standard riot control… it is a known carcinogen and a central nervous system depressant.

This chemical was deemed lethal by the U.S. Army in a 1994 study, which found that high concentrations cause injury and death to soldiers. They stopped using it.

The official report from the U.S. Army has scrubbed from the government's own database as of 2025. I had to pull the study from the digital archives of the Wayback Machine because the official record has been purged.

The use of this lethal HC smoke is not new to the Trump administration, It was first deployed on American streets by DHS agents in Portland during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, leaving women with irregular menstrual cycles, the environment sick, and those affected lifelong health issues. It is currently being used against Gaza in M150 munitions. Now it’s being used again in Minnesota.

ICE is Kidnapping Indigenous Americans

And if you thought the moral rot was confined to city streets, look at what is happening on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

It seems the federal government decided to dust off America’s oldest playbook. We have a long, bloody history of imperialists exploiting Native Americans — of trading blood for soil — and here we go again… ICE abducted four Oglala Sioux citizens, released one and were holding the remaining 3 as leverage in a “deal.”

The Oglala Sioux are noted for being great warriors who fought in many battles and won.

Remember that these are indigenous Americans. United States citizens. To them, we are the immigrants. They are members of a sovereign nation whose treaties predate the federal agencies now claiming they have authority over them.

When the tribal leaders attempted to locate their missing members, they weren’t given a case number; they were given an ultimatum. The federal government told them to sign a ‘Memorandum of Understanding’ granting agents access to sovereign tribal land, or else they might never see their people again. The Oglala Sioux refused to be extorted. They stood firm. And in immediate retaliation, ICE suddenly ‘lost’ the detainees.

You lose your keys. You lose a receipt. You do not lose three human beings in a high-security federal detention system unless you are trying to make them disappear. This is extortion, plain and simple.

The powers that be have endless resources; Dissent in Bloom only has you. This investigation relies 100% on reader support to keep digging where others won’t. Please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber to keep the lights on. ♥

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The agents who moved on them didn’t knock or even shout orders. The first agent to reach Patty’s side jams a canister nozzle against the air intake vents near the windshield wipers. Inside the car, the air instantly turns caustic. A high-dose stream of pepper spray flooded directly into the sealed cabin, weaponizing the car’s own ventilation system.

This is a tactic that mirrors the times that DHS agents have used pepper spray on the air intake valves of inflatable costumes worn during protests.

The chemical cloud clawed at their lungs, their skin, their ability to think. If either of them had asthma, COPD, or even mild respiratory illness, this wouldn’t just be assault… it could’ve been a death sentence. They would’ve been the third and fourth victims of DHS — who already executed Renee Nicole Good in Minnesota and Keith Porter in LA — in the last 2 weeks.

An agent swings a tactical baton, shattering the driver’s side window. Safety glass exploded inward, showering Patty in thousands of glittering, brutal pebbles that mix with the snow on her lap. The cold air rushed in, followed instantly by armored hands.

There is no preamble. No “step out of the vehicle.” No attempts to even check an ID. They do not care if you are a citizen or not.

Hands opened the doors and grab Patty before she can even orient herself. On the other side, the passenger door was wrenched open. Brandon was hauled out by his jacket, stumbling, still suffocating from the gas. He tried to find his footing on the ice, blinking furiously against the burn to see what is happening. Before they can catch their breath, they are arrested and taken in separate unmarked SUVs.

As Patty sat there, blinded and gasping for air, the agents didn’t offer medical aid. They mocked her appearance, followed by a message. They invoked the name of Renee Good and used her body as a warning.

“That’s why that bitch is dead,” they told her.

It was a statement of intent. They weren’t just justifying a murder; they were promising a sequel. They wanted Patty to know that the distance between a jail cell and a grave is much shorter than she thinks.

They did all of this simply because Patty and Brandon were watching, they were documenting, and they were witnesses. They want people to be afraid to show up and hold them accountable for the things they are doing.

In July 2025, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem claimed that “Violence is anything that threatens them and their safety, so it is doxing them, it’s videotaping them where they’re at when they’re out on operations.” This isn’t true. No matter how much they try to convince you it is. Filming enforcement is a constitutionally protected right.

If they have nothing to be ashamed of, why are they so afraid of being seen? Why attack the watchmen? Why cover your faces? Be proud of what you’re doing. Show the world who you really are.

The debate over whether DHS is at war with its own citizens is over. We know that the DHS has turned “immigration enforcement” into a Gestapo-esque secret police force.

WHAT THEY EXPERIENCED INSIDE

Patty and Brandon were then abducted by ICE agents and taken to the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building. They state they were put in adjacent cells reserved for U.S. citizens, one for men and the other for women.

This is the facility ICE is using to hold all of the people they’ve rounded up in Minneapolis. It was only a few days ago that they turned away three sitting members of Congress from conducting an oversight visit here.

So, it is clear that this is not a detention center, it is a black site. This black-site nonsense is a tactic ICE has been utilizing for years going back to the first Trump administration in 2016.

If Congress can’t oversee the enforcement of the laws they wrote, then the laws don't matter. And if the laws don't matter, then Patty and Brandon aren't citizens, and they don't have rights. They have luck, and luck is not a form of governance nor a constitutional right.

On their way to their ‘U.S. Citizen’ cells, they were given a first-hand tour of the cruelty. Patty recalls seeing three male agents watch as one female detainee was trying to use the toilet. They didn't turn around, or just leave the cell. They stood there. They don't need to touch her to violate her.

Humiliation is not just emotionally painful. It is recognized in international human rights law as a form of psychological torture when used deliberately to degrade, punish, or control. Being forced to use the toilet in front of guards, as described in recent ICE detention reports, is a textbook example. Studies show that severe humiliation activates the same parts of the brain as physical pain and is closely linked to PTSD, depression, and long-term trauma.

These aren’t isolated abuses… they are systemic tools of control. And they leave people so broken, so stripped of personhood, that many stop speaking, stop screaming, and stop believing anyone is coming to help.

The two reported hearing other detainees who were screaming and wailing for help, though most were staring at the ground. Broken.

“Just hearing the visceral pain of the people in this center was awful,” Patty O’Keefe recalled. “And then you juxtapose that with the laughter we heard from the actual agents. ... It was very surreal and kind of shocking.”

Patty O’Keefe sat in a holding cell. She was not permitted a phone call, but at some point she reports that she was allowed to talk to a lawyer.

Brandon Siguenza was granted the one thing Patty was denied… a dial tone. He called his wife. He didn’t waste time on details. He just needed her to know he was alive and he was in immigration custody.

Because he knew the math. He knew that in this world, where U.S. citizens are getting shot in the face for the simple act of witnessing, holding the police accountable is no longer a civic duty, but a daily wager with your own life and today, he had managed to walk away alive.

But for Brandon, the phone call was just the start. He had no idea what was going to come next.

Soon after they moved him to a second room and put a deal on the table that was as cynical as it was racist. They looked at the name “Siguenza,” checked a box in their heads, and assumed he had family on the wrong side of the border. The offer? Cash or protection papers for his “undocumented relatives” in exchange for a contact list.

They wanted the names of organizers. They wanted the names of neighbors. They were trying to bribe him with safety for family members that didn’t exist, assuming that because he is Hispanic, his loyalty to the law was negotiable.

But the racism is just the start. Understand what they were actually asking him to do. They weren’t asking for help solving a crime. They were asking for inventory.

They tried to make him complicit in the destruction of his own community. They tried to turn a citizen into a predator, using the safety of his (imaginary) family and fellow activists as the currency.

To make matters worse upon release, Siguenza reported that he was escorted into an area where tear gas was deployed, and he was struck repeatedly by paintball rounds. Punishment for not playing their little games.

I want to reflect back on the fact they put them in a separate holding cell reserved for U.S. citizens. That cell proves they know exactly what they are doing. They know they are capturing people who have the right to leave. And the most terrifying part of that sentence isn’t the “capture.”

To DHS, citizens possess a very dangerous weapon. They have a return ticket. They get to walk out the front door at the end of the day. At least for now.

The others don’t have a ticket. The others are in a black hole.

This is terrifying knowing that ICE has killed before. They are killing now. 32 people (that we know of) have died in ICE custody in the last year. 2025 was the deadliest year for ICE detainees in over two decades. They separate the citizens because they need the witnesses to leave before the body bags come out. The citizens are there to be scared straight. The immigrants? They’re there to be erased. That’s exactly why thousands of men who disappeared from the concentration camp Alligator Alcatraz have still yet to be accounted for.

What happened to Renee, what happened to Patty and Brandon, it is just the start. There are over 2,000 DHS agents and counting in Minnesota right now. They keep sending more. They used the Somali daycare fraud lie paraded by Nick Shirley (a TPUSA linked influencer) as justification to put agents on the ground to ‘fight fraud.’

The result? Death. Destruction. Chaos. People who will never see their loved ones again because of a small man with a large ego feeling emasculated.

On New Year’s Eve, an off-duty DHS agent shot and killed Keith Porter. One week ago they executed Renee in broad daylight and the Trump-loyal FBI blocked local investigators from investigating the case. The same day they attacked a high school and tormented students. Now schools are offering kids to stay home and study remotely so they won’t be exposed to violence and tear gas.

Shortly after, they dragged a disabled woman out of her car.

Last night they shot someone else (this time in their leg) and put six children in the hospital. The kids were in a car with their Dad who was trying to get them out of the neighborhood. ICE threw a flash bang at the car leaving 6 children injured, one of whom was less than a year old. DHS said the parents were radical agitators. But we’ve seen time and time again how they lie and lie. Just like they did when they killed Renee. Just like they did when they killed Silverio outside of his child’s daycare in Chicago. Said he tried to run them over with his car (just like Renee) but video footage cleared his name just like it did hers.

Minnesota is fighting back. Thousands have flooded the streets. And we need to do the same.

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Content Warning: This article contains graphic photos and videos. Viewer discretion is advised.

Look at the life of Renee Nicole Good. She was a mother who loved her children. She was a daughter who was cherished. She was a wife, a dog mom, and a vibrant soul who for 37 years occupied a space in this world that can never be filled again.

Twelve hours ago, Renee woke up in her home. Tonight, her wife goes to bed alone. Her child will never see her again. Not because of a “tragedy,” but because of an execution. This week the Trump administration sent 2,000 ICE agents to Minnesota. And because of that?

Renee was murdered by ICE because she was a witness who refused to look away.

As she lay in her car, the sound of the gunfire was immediately followed by the sound of a crash. Her vehicle continued on and crashed into a parked white Honda Accord Coupe and electric pole several feet down the street.

A physician happened to be there and saw what happened. He tried to provide the help he was trained to give. They didn't just say "no." Witnesses and reports describe agents drawing weapons on the doctor to keep him away from a dying woman. For fifteen minutes, Renee lay without medical attention.

When the professional first responders finally arrived, their path was blocked by ICE vehicles, forcing them to carry their gear and walk to the scene while every second counted. They would rather let a mother die in the snow than allow a witness to see what they’ve done up close.

The Department of Homeland Security looked at Renee, and they don’t see what her mother sees. They call her a terrorist, a violent rioter. Not a human.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called the act of driving away an “act of domestic terrorism” against ICE officers by a motorist who tried to run them over with her vehicle. Then the President spoke. He said she was “very disorderly.” He said she “viciously ran over an ICE officer.”

But look at the video. Look at the compliance. Look at the car driving away as the agent chases her with the gun in his hand. Do you see an ICE agent being run over? Or do you see a mother driving away and being shot at? You don't shoot a person multiple times in the face because you’re being 'run over' by a car that is moving away from you.

I want to know what kind of terrorist has a glove compartment full of stuffed animals? I want to know what kind of ‘domestic threat’ fills their back seat with children’s toys and crayon drawings?

They are trying to weave a blanket of lies around her memory so the truth doesn't leak out. They want to bury the woman and leave only the label. They want you to forget that she was a human being.

They are telling you that what you just saw did not happen. They are telling you to stop believing in your own eyes.

The labels they throw at Renee are designed to make you feel separate from her. They want you to believe that as long as you are not a “terrorist” or a “rioter,” the gun will never point at you.

She was told to leave. She tried to leave. So they pursued her. And they shot her over and over in the face until she was dead and her car crashed into another.

If an agency can chase down a mother and kill her for leaving, then 'freedom' is just a word they use until they decide to pull the trigger. Today, she was the target. Tomorrow, the State will find a label for you. For me. For us.

This is why we are all Renee Nicole Good. The "terrorist" label is not a description of her actions but it is a tool of dehumanization. If a woman can be executed while complying, then compliance has no meaning.

When the State can rewrite a murder as a defense and a retreat as an attack, the Law has become a fiction. America, as a concept of individual liberty, is dead.

This isn’t someone else’s fight. It’s YOURS. It’s MINE. Change doesn’t wait for a leader; it waits for a person with the courage to say, ‘I saw what happened, and I will not be lied to.’

Don’t wait for the next person to speak. By then, it might be too late. It’s on us.

Call to Action (The “Next Steps”)

• Join the Vigil: If you are local community members are gathering at the site of the shooting (34th and Portland) to demand justice. Many cities nationwide — like in Columbus, Ohio — are having emergency protests this evening.

• Demand the Footage: Call for the full release of all federal footage, which ICE and the FBI are currently withholding.

• Call on Congress: The National Immigration Law Center is calling on congress to block funding for DHS and urged local officials to use every law available to hold ICE accountable. Join them.

  • You can find your representative and senators contact information by clicking here.

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Todd Lyons stood at that podium back in April and talked about moving human beings from Point A to Point B in forty-eight hours like he was pitching a logistics contract. Internal documents — leaked, obviously, because nobody’s proud enough to put their name on this in the light of day — outline their plan for a “feeder system.”

Seven massive industrial warehouses, and 16 smaller ones. All located near airstrips for rapid deportation. They want these buildings to hold five to ten thousand people per building. The smaller warehouses would be used for staging meaning used for initial processing, identification, and "sorting" of detainees immediately after arrest. The "mega centers" would be export hubs.

They’re planning on using AI for "rapid sorting." They want to solve the "bottleneck."

You know how they’ve “solved the bottleneck” till now? Firing immigration judges and not even looking for new ones according to their FOIA response. You don't fire the entire judiciary because you want a more efficient legal process; you fire the judges because you want to bypass the legal process. Which they’ve tried. Repeatedly trying to use the National Guard as makeshift immigration judges.

As pointed out by , they are pushing for “100 million” deportations. There are only fifty-one million immigrants in this country. Total. Foreign-born individuals, legal or otherwise. Fifty-one million. That’s naturalized citizens, green-card holders, and undocumented. There are 65 million Latinos total. There are an estimated 48 million black folks in America. You don’t get to a hundred million without de-naturalizing citizens.

But here’s why this is scary NOW. This isn’t a ‘concept’ anymore; it’s $30 million dollar reality.

In late 2025, the Department of Homeland Security awarded a contract to KPB Services LLC (a subsidiary of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation’s economic arm). The listed reason for the contract is "due diligence services and concept design" meaning identifying potential warehouses, locations, and deciding how the factories would work.

The Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation has since vowed to cancel this contract after members of the community outcry because — shockingly — nobody thought to ask the people living there if they were okay with it.

But that doesn’t mean it’s over. They will find another contractor. Once you have the blueprints for a cage, the cage is already halfway built. What happens when these designs move from Todd Lyons head to the earth? We all know that if they build these facilities, they won't tear them down when the immigrants are gone. They will simply find a new category of 'unperson' to fill the space.

WAREHOUSES ARE FOR STORAGE, NOT PEOPLE

Warehouses are typically "shells" designed to keep goods dry, not to provide the high-frequency air exchanges required for health. In a standard warehouse, air circulation is minimal.

The insulation is non-existent. They are heat islands in August and ice boxes in January. And the plumbing? The sewer lines are designed for a warehouse staff of less than a hundred. To support 10,000+ people, they’d have to tear up the concrete slabs and the foundation of the entire building to lay miles of new pipe. Which they won’t do. They haven't done it for the tent camps like Alligator Alcatraz, ‘Deportation Depot’ and Lonestar Lockup; why would they do it here?

Head of DHS, Kristi Noem, has already admitted that the cruelty is the point. The inhumane conditions are supposed to “incentivize” people to give up their rights and agree to deportation.

If a fire were to break out, people will die. The sprinklers are sparsely hung, made to handle high-piled cardboard and plastic. Once they start putting walls up inside, they’re going to create areas that the sprinklers can’t reach. The fire code for warehouses assume a low occupant load. There aren't enough exits. There aren't wide enough corridors. If a fire starts in a "Mega-Center," people will die.

Warehouses often burn significantly faster and more intensely than other buildings like houses or offices. While a house fire might stay contained to a single room for several minutes, a warehouse fire can engulf thousands of square feet in a very short time.

If you haven’t yet, go ahead and search the internet for an image or a story of a warehouse fire. Now picture 10,000 people packed into one, and tell me how many people you believe are surviving that? Employees and detainees.

As it stands, most ICE detention centers are already horribly understaffed. The OIG found a facility in New Mexico running at fifty-four percent capacity for staffing. People were working mandatory 16-hour-shifts just to keep the doors open. They’re telling guards at the end of their shift, "You can’t leave because the relief didn't show up."

And even if they hired someone, federal security clearances to take the job? They take six to eighteen months. By the time the background check clears, the applicant is already working somewhere else for better pay. In Texas, these places are only offering employees nineteen dollars an hour.

And why should the companies care? They’re getting "availability fees." The government pays them a fixed monthly rate just to keep the lights on, even if the building is a ghost town. They generate revenue by not hiring. It’s a business model built on a skeleton crew. Much like nursing.

And when the guards get exhausted — when they’re working their sixth mandatory double-shift of the month — they stop talking. They use excessive force. They use solitary confinement because they don't have the numbers to manage a population through anything else. It’s not an excuse. It’s not acceptable. But it’s a fact.

Fifty percent of the facilities that already exist have no continuous physician coverage. Buffalo has seven hundred people and no doctor on-site until late 2026. Half of them have no psychiatric providers. Ninety-five percent of the deaths in custody between 2017 and 2024 were preventable.

If a doctor had been there to do a triage, those people would be alive.

They can’t staff the facilities they already own! And yet, Todd Lyons is at the podium promising "Point A to Point B" efficiency. They’re manufacturing a disaster, funding it with forty-five billion dollars awarded to them in the “Big Beautiful Bill”, and calling it efficient.

THE SCIENCE OF DEHUMANIZATION AND HOW IT LED US HERE

There are two ways to strip a person of their humanity. You can do what the President does and compare them to animals, to "vermin," to creatures. That’s "animalistic" dehumanization.

But what Todd Lyons is doing? That’s the machine. He’s turning people into cargo. Cargo doesn't have a life. Cargo doesn't have a crying child. Cargo doesn’t have hopes, dreams and fears. Cargo has a “shipping label” and a number. Not a name.

When you think of an immigrant as a "package," you stop thinking about fear or trauma. You strip away what Haslam calls "Human Nature" including their warmth, agency, emotional depth. You aren't "hurting a family" anymore; you’re "processing a unit."

It’s a form of psychological erasure, and heartbreakingly, it works.

In one Princeton study, Dr. Lasana Harris and Susan Fiske fMRIs on participants. When people looked at people they perceived as "high-warmth" — businessmen, athletes — the empathy center of the brain lit up. And when they saw the "low-warmth" people like the homeless or the addict? The brain didn't react. It didn't see a person. It saw an object.

Dehumanization quite literally leads people not viewing a human as a human.

They’ve created a state where a significant portion of the country can watch a video of a child in an industrial warehouse and only see "inventory" that’s slightly behind schedule. And they’re applying that same rhetoric and animalistic dehumanization… calling people, “radical, leftist lunatics” if they dare step in their way. Creating the psychological acceptance in society needed for their next ‘unperson’ to put behind those walls. You. Me. Them. Us.

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But this is what the Trump administration has labeled “safe,” a place it can now send not only the 232 South Sudanese people who just lost protected status, but anyone who dares to seek asylum in the United States.

According to the U.S. State Department, Americans should not travel to South Sudan for any reason because it’s full of, “carjackings, shootings, ambushes, assaults, robberies, and kidnappings” and, “foreign nationals have been the victims of rape, sexual assault, armed robberies, and other violent crimes.” And if you do go, they urge to make sure you have your will written.

South Sudan was not a willing partner in this deal. The administration secured this deal by exploiting South Sudan’s desperation — threatened to cut off the remaining aid to the area — following massive DOGE-led budget cuts, which eliminated over 75% of U.S. aid to the region earlier in the year leading to 1,600 preventable deaths in the region from causes like cholera—a disease contracted through contaminated food and water

Trump and his staffers then celebrated the USAID cuts with cake.

South Sudan has been war torn for decades, and is on the precipice of yet another civil war after the last one ended just six years ago.

The ‘deal’ for South Sudan to take in asylum seekers and deportees was forced through behind closed doors in May 2025, never disclosed to the American public, never even posted to the Federal Register, and was only exposed after whistleblowers revealed the U.S. had planned secret deportation flights to South Sudan and Uganda.

The U.S. sent 8 men there in July after SCOTUS allowed them to, and according to Tom ‘Border Czar’ Homan, “They're free as far as we're concerned. They're free, they're no longer in our custody, they're in Sudan.”

Under U.S. law, asylum seekers cannot be expelled to a country where their life or freedom would be threatened, and they are entitled to notice and a meaningful opportunity to contest removal.

South Sudan is only one of fourteen countries who have signed an ‘Asylum Cooperative Agreements’ (ACA) agreement with the United States. Under these ACAs, the U.S. can expel asylum seekers to countries they have never stepped foot in by claiming they’re a safe ‘third’ option. These places are mostly scattered in Africa and Latin America.

These “third country” deportation agreements are designed to meet DHS’s stated goal of 1 million deportations a year. At least 58 countries have been approached.

SHELTER VS. PRISON: THE ASYLUM LOTTERY

As shocking as it may sound, certain ACA agreements would lead to outcomes that are less dangerous for migrants than remaining in the United States right now. Places like Ecuador have stated they will provide shelter and a place in society for asylum seekers.

The issue is that there is no actual framework determining who is sent to a country that will actually help them, and who is transferred to a foreign prison in El Salvador or Eswatini.

That’s not an exaggeration. We all know about CECOT — the mega prison in El Salvador — that was used to hold 252 Venezuelan people. But did you know about the men being kept (without charges) in solitary confinement at the Matsapha Correctional Complex in Eswatini? A place at almost 200% capacity and riddled with human rights violations.

The Trump Administration has found themselves some very powerful friends — Nayib Bukele the Dictator of El Salvador and the Mswati III the king of Eswatini — men who will throw people in their cages without question.

I suppose when you give $5.1 million to the king of Eswatini upfront, and then hundreds of millions more a few months later for ‘health’ funding.

The king of Eswatini is worth millions, he has 15 wives, 30 children, owns Rolls-Royces, private jets, and multiple palaces. At the same time, up to 70% of Eswatini’s people survive on less than $2 a day in a country ravaged by HIV/AIDS, and U.S. taxpayers are now sending him more money.

And Nayib Bukele of El Salvador got $6 million of American tax-payer money to put Venezuelans in CECOT for 4 months. Amounting to over $200,000 for each man.

Those 252 Venezuelan men that were later used in a trade to get 10 Americans out of Venezuelan prisons, including Wilbert Joseph Castañeda, a Navy SEAL arrested in Venezuela in 2024 for allegedly staging a CIA-backed coup in Venezuela by supplying 400 guns to Tren De Aragua with the plan to attack several government buildings creating confusion so they could overthrow Maduro. (Yes, the same gang that the U.S. government says is infiltrating America to justify DHS crackdowns & Border Patrol operating hundreds of miles from the border.)

The prisoner swap was also framed as Bukeles idea, of course, and he was awarded for that, too. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio publicly thanked Bukele for his "leadership" and his role in facilitating the deal.

Now, knowing this it’s important you understand that it is completely up to the Trump administration where they decide to send people.

With this in mind, remember that this is the same administration, who not long ago, had explicitly threatened to send Kilmar Abrego Garcia to Uganda if he continued to fight back in court.

The same administration who attempted to secretly deport a plane full of Guatemalan children by themselves. The same administration who secretly tried to deport multiple flights of men to South Sudan and Uganda. The same administration who flew a plane full of Venezuelan men to CECOT despite a judges order.

There is a reason their detention camps — like Alligator Alcatraz & Alexandria Staging Facility — are all located near private airstrips.

They want sending people to places like South Sudan — a place Americans are told to avoid by all means if they want to live — to be like,“[Amazon] Prime, but with human beings” according to ICE Director Todd Lyons.

But let’s talk about what we DO know: More than 8,000 people were flown to third countries because the government claims that their countries of origin refused their return. That claim collapsed when it was exposed that in many cases no request was ever made. At the same time, thousands of people have vanished from detention sites, including Alligator Alcatraz, with no record of where they went or what happened to them. They just disappeared.

HOW MUCH IS A PERSONS LIFE WORTH?

Every country that agreed to accept asylum seekers from the United States was paid in some form.

In places like South Sudan, the payment came as survival. In others, including Eswatini, Uganda, and El Salvador, it came as billions of dollars in direct financial benefit.

Uganda has financially ‘scored’ the most from American taxpayer.

This was another case where officials attempted to keep the agreement out of public view for as long as possible. The agreement was quietly finalized in the summer, without any public announcement.

In August 2025, Uganda initially denied it was ready to take migrants due to a “lack of facilities.”

The perfect language to justify giving them an unspecified amount of money for "settlement infrastructure" as part of the deal. Uganda disclosed the deal a month later. It was not entered into the Federal Register until a month later in September 2025.

It’s a sociopathic loop: we’re using taxpayer money to build ‘settlement infrastructure’ in a country that codified the death penalty for being gay. No, I’m not being dramatic, homosexuality is a crime in Uganda, and the punishment is death.

That money for this infrastructure would likely come from DHS’s $10 billion “discretionary fund,” aka their ‘slush fund.' Funds that can be spent with little oversight as long as they are labeled as protecting borders. Paying for immigration infrastructure abroad conveniently fits that definition.

In many cases, the Trump administration used leverage. One of its most effective tools was the promise to lift so-called “reciprocal tariffs,” in Guatemala, El Salvador, Ecuador, Panama, and Honduras. The same tariffs Americans were told existed to make things equal. Instead, they were bargaining chips in human trade negotiations and stock market manipulation.

Imagine fleeing violence, passing your credible fear interview, then being put on a plane to a country you have never heard of, where you do not speak the language, have no lawyer, and no way home.

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They slung backpacks over one shoulder. They checked their phones. They waited in pick-up lines and walked familiar routes home, thinking about winter break, holidays, sleeping in, the small relief that comes with the end of exams. Some were already arguing with siblings over who would sit in the front seat. Some were texting parents they could see just down the road.

A car door opening is usually nothing. That day, it was everything.

Students at Dublin Scioto — a high school located in the Dublin suburb of Columbus — watched as entire families were pulled from vehicles just outside campus. These kids learn that, in real time, whatever protections adults promise about schools being safe had evaporated the moment federal immigration enforcement decided otherwise.

What’s happening in Columbus is part of a larger escalation. More than 200 ICE agents have been deployed here in the weeks following Trump’s comment on Somali people, referring to them as “garbage” earlier this month.

For those who are unaware, Columbus holds one of the largest Somali communities in the country. Since then, enforcement has spread outward. More stops. More detentions. For ICE, looking ‘foreign’ is enough.

Compared to other high schools in the district, Dublin Scioto serves more immigrant and refugee households.

In one video, a passerby asks police on scene if the people detaining a family are ICE. The officer says they do not know and tells the passerby to keep moving. If police do not know who is detaining people in unmarked cars, figuring that out should be the priority.

Dublin City Schools Superintendent Dr. John Marschhausen — who was recently addressed by the ACLU over Dublin’s First Amendment violations tied to transgender student activism — has publicly denied the abductions occurred. The video evidence, along with the accounts of students and families at Dublin Scioto, contradict that denial.

TARGETING THE DISMISSAL BELL

What became clear over the course of the day was that this was not a random act of cruelty, but a planned citywide operation. Immigration vehicles were positioned near multiple schools at once, spanning nearly every level of education. Children exiting a school day do not have lawyers. They do not have warning. They do not have a choice.

They weren’t just outside international schools. They were also positioned at public and private elementary, middle, and high schools, all happening at the same time. By nightfall, the perimeter expanded, and raids were witnessed in private student housing tied to the Ohio State University campus.

Four agents waited outside of Horizon Science Academy with smiles plastered across their faces.

One student at Saint James the Less, a Catholic elementary and middle school in Columbus, described ICE attempting to enter the school during an early release day. According to the student, office staff refused to let agents inside. ICE then waited nearby and stopped parents as they tried to pick up their children.

Inside at least one school, there was no confusion about what was happening. The response was immediate:

In front of Westland High School, witnesses report watching as ICE chasing someone in broad daylight, right outside the school. Their presence was also reported at Norton Middle School, Whetstone High School, Riverside Elementary, Columbus International, Imagine Great Western Academy, Valleyview, HSA Primary, and schools in Gahanna and Westerville City Schools. This may not be a complete list.

One parent reported that ICE drove through the area around World Language Middle School and Colerain Elementary, testing the edges of the neighborhood. The community responded immediately. People surrounded the schools, made themselves visible, and refused to move. The vehicles kept driving. That’s the power of the people.

COLUMBUS IS ONLY ONE CITY IN A LONG LINE OF CRUELTY

What unfolded in Columbus was clear. Families were pulled from cars outside schools. Enforcement appeared at dismissal across multiple campuses. Police said they did not know who was detaining people. School officials denied what students and parents say they witnessed. All of it happened as a surge of ICE agents moved through a city with one of the largest Somali communities in the country.

Children watched adults fail to protect the spaces they were told were safe. Parents learned how quickly routine can be interrupted. Communities learned how wide the operation really was.

But people did not disappear into thin air. Neighbors showed up. Parents surrounded schools. Students spoke. The presence of enforcement was met with the presence of community, and that mattered. We fight for one another because survival has always been a collective act.

I will keep following ICE in Columbus and beyond. I will keep documenting where they go, what people see, and what institutions deny. I refuse to look away from someone else’s pain, because they are someone’s child, someone’s parent, someone’s whole world. And this will remain a place to share information, to warn one another, and to stand together. Because none of us should have to face this alone.

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On June 11, 2025, Randall Alberto Gamboa Esquivel made his usual daily call to his family from inside an ICE detention facility in Texas.

The next day, the calls stopped.

For weeks, his sister Greidy Mata tried to find out what had happened. Detention staff dodged answering for weeks, and then eventually told the family that Randall had a, “medical issue” but wouldn’t elaborate further.

Desperate for help, the family hired two lawyers, both of whom scammed them. It wasn’t until August of this year that a third attorney finally located Randall. By then, he was unconscious, hospitalized, and no longer able to walk, eat, or speak.

He had been diagnosed with severe encephalopathy a form of major brain injury that can cause coma, and rhabdomyolysis, a dangerous breakdown of muscle tissue that can lead to kidney failure.

Together, these conditions indicate a catastrophic medical event that had gone untreated for far too long.

Knowing his health was declining by the day, ICE arranged for his quick deportation to avoid responsibility. He was flown out of the U.S. via an air ambulance — something that costs over $100,000 — where he died less than eight weeks later.

ICE’s official numbers for 2025 don’t include Randall’s death.

That’s because ICE has a well-documented practice of releasing or deporting critically ill detainees shortly before they die, so their deaths don’t count as happening in their custody.

What Happened to Randall Inside ICE Detention?

Randall Alberto Gamboa Esquivel arrived legally in the United States in December 2024. At 52, he came on a standard B-2 visitor visa, which typically allows up to six months of stay. But within two months of entering the country, he was taken into custody by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and placed in the Webb County Detention Center in Texas, a facility operated by CoreCivic.

At some point between February and June 2025, Randall was transferred to Port Isabel Detention Center, one of the five ICE-run detention facilities. But even in these “government” facilities, the staff you see on the floor are private contractors, not federal employees.

It’s also one of the few detention facilities in America with it’s own built-in immigration court.

During his months in detention, Randall called his family every single day. It was routine. It was how they knew he was alive. On June 11, 2025, he made his usual daily call. By June 12th, 2025, the phone went silent.

His sister, Greidy Mata, immediately began calling the detention center. She asked where he was, what had happened, and why the calls had stopped. No one gave her a straight answer. For weeks, the family was left in the dark. She didn’t know what happened, where he was, or if he was even alive.

They were finally told Randall had a “medical issue,” but the ICE facility wouldn’t tell them anything else.

Terrified, his family scrambled for legal help, only to be scammed by the first two attorneys they hired. When a third lawyer finally tracked him down in early August. When they eventually found Randall, their hearts were broken because they found was devastating. This was no longer the Randall they knew and loved.

Randall was now unconscious, hospitalized, and in a vegetative state. He could no longer walk, speak, or eat. He had been diagnosed with severe encephalopathy and rhabdomyolysis.

These are not sudden conditions. They point to a profound medical crisis, one that likely developed over time and went untreated.

ICE has made no attempt to explain how Randall had gone from regular daily phone calls to being completely incapacitated. Why? Because he didn’t die in their custody. If ICE releases or deports someone before they die — even if the person is unconscious, critically ill, or on life support — the agency has no real obligation to investigate what happened or disclose any information to the public.

The entire time, his family was not informed of his hospitalization. Their attorney had to find him on his own. They likely would’ve deported Randall without ever notifying them if he hadn’t.

ICE and the History of Deporting People on Their Deathbeds

What happened to Randall isn’t rare, and it isn’t new. One of the biggest problems I see is that people treat this brutality like it suddenly appeared out of nowhere. It didn’t. Every horror we are witnessing now is an escalation of a system that has been dehumanizing people for years while the country looked away.

I was guilty of that too. This isn’t about shame. It’s about telling the truth. None of this is new. The cruelty is just growing because ICE has been allowed to operate without accountability for decades.

One of those long-documented patterns to avoid accountability includes what happened to Randall. They quietly release or deporting very sick detainees right before they die. It’s a way to avoid taking the blame because the death “didn’t happen in their custody” even if the conditions of custody were to blame.

In February 2025, ICE quietly rewrote its internal rules on how detainee deaths are tracked.

The new policy, Directive 11003.6, narrowed which deaths get investigated and reported. Under the new language, ICE only automatically reviews deaths that happen in custody. If someone dies within 30 days after release or deportation, a review is only done “if directed by the ICE Director.”

One line in the directive makes the intent painfully clear:

“For post-release deaths, the ICE Director may direct that a Detainee Death Review be completed on a case-by-case basis” (Directive 11003.6, Section 3.1.4).

Heartbreakingly, my research found many cases just like Randall’s. One man, Martin Vargas Arellano, had a stroke in detention. ICE released him while he was still unconscious in a hospital, and he died days later.

His lawyer only found out by calling the coroner. Another case involved Johana Medina Leon, a transgender woman who died shortly after ICE let her go without proper medical care. This is a pattern that repeats over and over again.

ICE even has policies for handling end-of-life care inside its facilities, but they often get ignored. Instead of treating people, the agency finds ways to get rid of them before anything has to be reported. It’s a system designed not to care, but to cover itself.

Deaths That Don’t Count, and a System That Doesn’t Care

ICE officially reported 19 in-custody deaths in 2025. But Randall Gamboa’s name is not on that list. Neither is the name of the man reportedly killed inside the Lone Star Lockup — an off-the-books ICE facility buried inside Fort Bliss Army Base in Texas.

According to a social worker with contacts on the inside, detainees reported that the man died after allegedly being served spoiled food and contaminated water. Others inside the camp said they were quietly warned not to eat. They believe that food killed him. No official statement has been released.

I reached out for comment, and ICE never even acknowledged my request to confirm or deny that anyone had died at the facility.

Not shockingly, congressional visits have been blocked to this “detention center.” Even Rep. Veronica Escobar, who tried to inspect Lone Star Lockup in person, was turned away at the gate. ICE doesn’t hide what it’s proud of. It hides what it knows the public wouldn’t accept if they saw it.

This is the “immigration” system Randall died under. This is the system that continues to disappear people, erase deaths, and silence families. And unless someone holds it accountable, it will keep doing exactly what it was designed to do.

This is exactly how ICE keeps deaths from being counted. By deporting detainees like Randall while they are unconscious or dying, or detaining people in hidden, inaccessible facilities, the agency avoids having to report deaths publicly or undergo mandatory reviews. It is a loophole ICE has used for years.

Advocacy groups who track immigration detention deaths more aggressively report much higher numbers. As of late October, the American Immigration Council counted at least 23 deaths in fiscal year 2025, while CASA, during a press conference on October 31, said there have been at least 25 deaths in ICE custody this year, calling 2025 the deadliest year in decades.

Somewhere right now, another family is waiting by a phone that won’t ring. Somewhere, another detainee is sick, vanishing behind a locked door, their name already fading from the record. ICE will say it didn’t happen in their custody. There will be no press release or investigation. Just a plane ticket, a hospital bed, a death certificate written in silence.

And if we let that continue — if we keep letting these lives slip through the cracks — then Randall Gamboa won’t be the last name missing from the list. He’ll just be one more in a growing line of people this country disappeared before anyone could count them. I am going to keep holding ICE and the rest of them accountable. Will you join me?

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ICE does not simply take people; it leaves behind the wreckage of entire worlds. Toys stay where children last played, food spoils unfinished, cars idle in driveways, and phones, wallets, and IDs vanish into agency custody and often never return. ICE policy even requires officers to hold a person’s original identification documents, adding another blow to families already torn apart.

This investigation lays bare what happens to everything left behind when someone is taken. Cars are dragged to impound lots and auctioned before families can react, homes slide toward foreclosure or are snapped up by landlords, and pets are dropped at packed shelters with no one left to claim them.

And when you follow the trail of what disappears, the beneficiaries become impossible to ignore. Towing companies profit off every seizure, landlords make money from every forced vacancy, and state agencies rack up fees from the fallout. There is profit threaded through every missing person, from the detention centers to the foreclosures.

Note: Source links are either highlighted in color, or underlined depending on your service.

Where Do the Homes, Pets, Cars, and Lives They Left Behind Actually Go?

The moment ICE takes a person, everything they love is stranded in the wreckage. The government does not secure their belongings. No one bothers to notify a neighbor or a relative who could rush to help. The door is often left hanging wide open behind the agents, sometimes unable to close at all because the door handle was ripped off in the raid. Inside, the life that person built sits exposed to strangers, weather, and silence, waiting for someone who is not coming home.

Many of these pets end up in animal shelters. In Barstow, a man was taken during a Home Depot sweep and his dog — Chuco — wandered near his unattended car until a friend intervened and took the dog home until he could figure out where to take him. Sadly, the landlord dumped him at a shelter before he had the chance to figure it out.

And for those that don’t?

A dog waits by it until the sun goes down, then curls up on a pile of clothes that still smell like the person who never comes back. A cat cries at the window until its voice gives out. Bowls sit empty. Water dries up. No one from the government stops to warn a neighbor or call a relative who would have run there in minutes.

What happens when the good Samaritans who race to secure pets and homes after raids never hear a word because it happened in the dead of night? Or in some rural stretch of road where no one saw the lights?

Sometimes neighbors find out the next morning, when they notice a car idling in a driveway with the keys still inside. Or a lawnmower buzzing in circles in an empty yard. Or a stroller tipped over on a porch.

They look around for the person who should be there, but the only thing left is the absence. And by then the window to save anything is already closing.

Cars become the first casualties.

ICE does not secure them, impound them, or notify anyone. They simply walk away. In Ontario, two landscapers were arrested mid job, leaving a lawnmower still running and their truck unlocked with phones and keys tossed inside.

In communities with heavy ICE activity, other opportunists may appear: there are reports of scavengers or thieves watching ICE raids and then swooping in to steal vehicles or valuables left at the scene. The FBI has even come out to warn the public that there are people pretending to be ICE agents to attempt to kidnap or rob individuals. And when agents are refusing to identify themselves, and wearing face masks, how do you know who is legitimate or not?

In one video, you can see an agent take a person’s car from the scene of the arrest. And in different video we can see another illegal seizure of someone’s car in Oregon. Something that is a direct violation of their own policies.

ICE is not allowed to just take your car when they detain you. Not unless the car is being seized under asset-forfeiture law, with a clearly documented criminal nexus. And 99 percent of ICE arrests do not meet that threshold. They can only do it if they can prove the car was used in a crime.

Almost none of their arrests meet that bar because immigration issues are civil, not criminal.

DHS’ own handbook says a car can only be taken if it was part of a crime, bought with money from a crime, or holds evidence of a crime.

Agents also have to get a warrant, fill out seizure paperwork, log the chain of custody, and move the car to an official evidence site. If those things don’t happen, taking the car breaks their own rules, and is felony theft.

In Eastvale, agents detained four people and abandoned their van in the middle of the street with the keys in the ignition until neighbors pushed it to safety.

Scenes like this now happen across Southern California. Cars idle until they die. Wallets and phones sit visible on seats. ICE leaves work trucks, vending carts, and equipment scattered in public spaces.

Tow companies usually get there first. Families who locate the car face storage fees they cannot pay, and the vehicle is lost. California alone has made more than eight million dollars from auctioning unclaimed cars since 2016, including over one million in 2023.

By the time relatives reach the tow yard, the car is already gone. Towed. Auctioned. Stripped. Another piece of a life turned into state revenue.

The homes are next.

The moment a person is taken, the clock on their housing starts ticking. Rent goes unpaid because the one who paid it is gone. Calls go unanswered because no one is left to pick up. And landlords, especially in cities where ICE raids and evictions already run together, move fast.

Some states let landlords call a unit “abandoned” after seven days of silence. Delaware, Maine, New Hampshire, and Nebraska require only one week of storage before everything inside can be tossed or sold.

Other states give thirty or sixty days, but without a designated person or the money to intervene, that timeline becomes a countdown to erasure.

This is where a life begins to disappear.

Family photos go first, then clothes, keepsakes, birthday cards, baby blankets, medical records, graduation certificates. Everything that proved a life was lived is treated as trash because it cannot be resold.

And this collapse does not only happen when whole families are detained.

It happens when one person goes missing, because ICE often arrests the breadwinner. You have documented this again and again. The father walking to work. The mother leaving a shift. The young adult supporting everyone at home.

ICE takes them, and suddenly the family inside that house cannot cover rent, food, utilities, or school supplies. They turn to GoFundMes asking strangers to help them survive the month. Without those donations, they lose everything. And not everyone gets a GoFundMe. I’ve shared many of those stories on this platform here.

Not everyone has a community that can mobilize overnight. Many families slip through the cracks quietly, invisibly.

In Oklahoma City, 20 agents raided the wrong home. And stole their entire life savings as “evidence” one family reported, and I can’t help but wonder how many other valuables are being stolen in the name of evidence?

Especially when ICE is known for using ruses to gain illegal entry into someone’s home because a civil warrant does NOT give them the right to enter your home.

ICE was even sued for stealing bond payments back in 2024. Clearly this shows they are thieves, and always have been.

For some, the housing loss happens faster than anyone outside the family realizes. A single missed paycheck turns into two. The car sits unused. Eviction notices go unanswered. Landlords, especially the predatory ones, move quickly.

Chicago’s South Shore raid showed how low this can go. Ahead of the raid, certain unit doors were marked with white duct tape labeled “PC” or an “X” and others with duct tape that contained how many tenants. A map was even found outlining what homes were occupied by gun owners.

Information ICE would not have access to without an inside source.

ICE targeted the units marked “PC”.

After the raid, only about 35 out of 130 tenants remained. Many former tenants were Venezuelan asylum seekers caught in a web of foreclosure threats, dozens of eviction filings, and a landlord who had every financial incentive to clear the building. Whether coordinated or convenient, the raid cleared more bodies in one sweep than eviction court ever could.

And in states where landlords are legally allowed to keep or sell “abandoned” belongings to recover supposed losses, anything with value often disappears into their pockets.

Electronics. Jewelry. Cash in drawers. Tools. Items that could have helped a deported person rebuild their life in the country they were sent to. There is rarely anyone left who has the legal authority, time, or money to stop them.

If a family did want to fight for the home, they would need a lawyer. Most detained immigrants cannot afford one. Most families left behind cannot afford one.

So the home falls next. Not because it is unimportant, but because there is no structural value placed on protecting the people who lived there. And because the system ensures that when ICE takes one person, it can collapse the life of everyone connected to them.

The First Things Taken Are Phones, Wallets, and IDs and ICE Almost Never Returns Them

Before a home is lost. Before a car is towed. Before a pet starves behind a locked door. The first things taken are always the things that prove who a person is. Phones. Wallets. Passports. Birth certificates. State IDs. Real IDs. All of it.

And for years, people have said the same thing: once ICE takes these documents, they rarely come back.

In 2023, ICE quietly rewrote its own identification-seizure policy. They framed it as a minor clarification, but it formalized a practice that had already been harming families for years.

The updated Policy 11311 instructs officers to confiscate any government-issued document a person has on them — foreign passports, state IDs, consular cards, birth certificates, Real IDs, driver’s licenses, work permits.

Everything.

In exchange, ICE gives the person a “certified copy,” a stamped sheet of paper saying ICE now holds the original. The copy is often useless. It does nothing for someone who is transferred to another state, cut off from their belongings, or deported before ever seeing that paper again.

And if an officer decides the document “looks fake,” they do not have to give the person a copy at all.

The policy also makes it clear that original IDs are not automatically returned. To get them back, a foreign government has to submit a written request. Not the person, not their family, and not their attorney. And even after that request, ICE only says it may return the documents. Bureaucratically, “may” almost always means no.

One line in the policy reveals the something: “identity documents should not be shredded if the detainee is also facing a criminal prosecution.”

Which tells you exactly what happens in the cases that aren’t tied to criminal court? These documents are shredded and thrown out like trash. So, why do they need to keep them? Just to make things more difficult?

There are countless real stories that show how devastating this is.

• A U.S. citizen in 2025 had his Real ID seized because ICE officers insisted it was “fake,” then tried to detain him anyway. This is concerning because real ID’s are supposed to almost equivocal to passports.

• A Russian asylum-seeking couple in California had their passports taken during intake, and had to fight for their return after they were released.

• Venezuelan families deported this year said officers confiscated their passports and simply kept them.

• Children of immigrants had their school records and legal papers taken in 2022, triggering a lawsuit because some of those documents were the only proof that these kids even existed in government systems. But as we can see by their actions in 2025 this lawsuit changed nothing.

• Many people deported to Guatamala this year had reported items disappearing. The items they did get back came in the form of a white sack, and not everything was there. Some people had no items at all.

None of this is random. Identification is survival. Identification is proof of personhood. When ICE takes it, the person becomes easier to detain, easier to deport, easier to disappear into a system designed to move faster than lawyers or families ever can. Try to imagine how difficult your life would be if you lost your ID today?

Without documents, people become whatever ICE writes on the form.

After deportation, they arrive in another country unable to access services, unable to reconnect with family, unable to legally return, unable to rebuild.

How Did We Get Here?

What we are seeing now is an intensification of a structure that has been quietly eroding people’s lives for years. To understand the brutality of the present moment, we have to look at the older policies and failures that made this escalation possible. And once this era ends, these systems will need to be dismantled from the foundation or the pattern will repeat itself

The receipts show us these conditions were there long before the current surge of cruelty.

In 2016, the American Immigration Council found that forty one percent of migrants never got their belongings back. Phones vanished ninety two percent of the time. Cash disappeared nearly eighty percent. Voter IDs sixty four percent. In Ciudad Juárez almost seventy percent of deported people said nothing was returned. In Nogales it was forty five.

That same year, testimony before Congress made the situation plain. Migrants were being deported with no identification, no money, and no medication because their possessions were lost in the maze of CBP, US Marshals, ICE, and private detention centers. Everyone involved understood that belongings routinely vanished as immigrants were transferred between agencies over and over again.

That’s a practice that has amplified even more today. Detainees are transferred over, and over, and over. With the epi-center being in Louisiana where they’ve built a shadow detention network.

When the GAO (Government Accountability Office) investigated in 2024, their report simply confirmed what communities already knew in their bones. Border Patrol (CBP) had no consistent system at all. Agents were telling people to toss belongings because storage rooms were full or because an item looked “unsanitary.”

The standards were so vague that anything could be kept, lost, or destroyed with no recourse. It made no difference if the item was cash or a photograph tucked into a wallet or the only set of clothes someone owned. The system had been built without guardrails.

CBP tried again to sanitize the problem with Directive 5240-010.

On paper it sounded good. Here’s what the directive actually says should be done:

• It explicitly names “essential” Items: It names a wide range of items as “essential personal property” that cannot be stripped from migrants and must be safeguarded.

  • This includes legal and identity documents, medical items/medication, religious items, money, phones, and items of significant monetary or sentimental value.

  • But these people do not stay in CBP custody. They are transferred to ICE detention, and ICE has a policy in effect that states original identity documents will be kept. Another way they’ve found a ‘workaround’ here.

• Property Custodians: It establishes “property custodians” at all CBP short-term holding facilities to oversee the property management programs, aiming for better accountability.

• Written Instructions: It mandates that individuals be given written instructions on how to retrieve their stored belongings upon release. This recommendation came into effect because of the GAO report showing that the lack of communication was a major problem.

But like most things DHS does, it falls short, and is looks better on paper than it actually is. It’s vague enough and provides more than one work around for their typical DHS cruelty.

The ACLU saw the trap immediately. If belongings are stored in a facility someone cannot physically reach, especially after deportation, those belongings automatically become “abandoned.”

After thirty days they can be destroyed or “donated.” It’s not clear who these items are being donated to. The wording softened the blow, but the harm remained exactly the same. A person’s life could still be erased in the fine print.

This is the path that delivered us to this moment. Not a sudden collapse but a long, slow erosion. A system that normalized loss until loss became the standard. A structure that hid its cruelty in procedures until the cruelty became invisible.

And sadly, filing a complaint about lost property after you’ve been deported is exceedingly difficult, and in the rare cases a complaint is lodged, U.S. authorities seldom take action — almost 88% of such complaints led to “no action” against the officer responsible for the property. It’s all bullshit.

In effect, money, IDs, and valuables taken at arrest often disappear, and a detained immigrant has little recourse to recover them once they’re out of the country.

Where This Leaves Us

This investigation makes one truth impossible to ignore. None of this is accidental. When ICE takes a person, the system around them is built to swallow everything they ever touched.

Homes fall into eviction, cars vanish into auctions, pets starve or end up in overcrowded shelters, and the documents that prove identity are shredded or locked away until the person becomes unrecognizable even to the state. Families lose the breadwinner and turn to GoFundMes just to eat. Landlords profit.

Towing companies profit. State agencies profit. And the people who once lived in these homes and drove these cars and held these IDs are left with nothing but the clothes on their backs. This is not a broken system.

It is a system functioning exactly as it was designed. And unless it is dismantled from the roots, it will continue to erase lives long after this moment in history has passed.

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One was found in a shower with his hands and feet tied behind his back, his death stamped a suicide. The other collapsed in solitary confinement after two days of being perfectly stable, his autopsy rewritten to fit a timeline that medicine can’t explain.

Each time, the same MAGA coroner signed off. Each time, GEO Group (the private prison giant who owns the facility) kept getting paid.

And each time, ICE buried the records behind FOIA stonewalls so thick that families had to sue just to learn how their loved ones died.

When news broke of the the latest death? That’s when I started digging. I needed to understand how a man could die like that inside an ICE facility with cameras, guards, and supposed protocols.

What I found was a pattern of silence, a trail of impossible explanations, and a system engineered to protect itself. And Kilmar Abrego Garcia — whose fate is already hanging by a thread — is being held in that very same place right now.

The more I looked at the latest death inside Moshannon, the faster the official story fell apart.

This is Chaofeng Ge, a 32-year-old legal permanent resident from Queens. He immigrated from China years earlier and had built a life in New York. In July 2025, he pleaded guilty in Pennsylvania to a non-violent fraud-related charge involving the unlawful use of communication devices. After sentencing, he was turned over to ICE for deportation processing.

But none of that explains, excuses, or even remotely justifies what happened next. A fraud conviction does not make someone disposable.

It was only five days after entering ICE custody, that Ge was found dead in a shower. According to his family’s lawsuit, he was discovered hanging by the neck, with his hands and feet tied behind his back. ICE labeled it a suicide. The coroner’s autopsy report did, too.

His family filed a FOIA request for information about his case, because they were being given none. And ICE repeatedly failed to meet the deadline. So, they are suing. Because the only way to get the truth out of DHS is to drag them into federal court.

I am not a person who jumps to conclusions, but the idea that a man tied at the wrists and ankles had killed himself inside a supervised ICE facility is impossible. So, I looked into the facility’s history, and I found out that Ge was not the first person to die under suspicious circumstances.

In 2023, a man named Frankline Okpu died in Moshannon, and the story ICE gave the public was just as impossible as the one they told about Ge.

His family also had to sue under FOIA to get information about his death, and court dockets show that ICE has dragged its feet at every single stage of the case. Status report after status report. But in time, more and more of the truth came out. As I hope it does for Mr. Ge’s case.

In the case of Frankline Okpu, the man should never have been in detention at all.

He had already won protection under the Convention Against Torture, which means the United States legally acknowledged that sending him home could get him killed. He should have walked out of that facility alive. Instead, ICE kept him locked inside Moshannon, pushed him into solitary, and in a bleak twist of irony he died in the one place that was supposed to keep him safe.

According to ICE’s own documents, staff carried out one of their routine bed sweeps, known by the detainees as, “fire drills.” This facility is known for random searches and tosses of sleeping quarters, beds, and treat any resistance as misconduct.

During that sweep, staff claimed Okpu “assaulted” an officer. That accusation was enough to send him into the Special Management Unit (SMU) aka the, “shu", Moshannon’s unit for solitary confinement.

Once he was inside solitary, the story got even stranger. ICE said he, ”may have ingested contraband K2 (synthetic marijuana) mixed with a tranquilizer,” but ICE claims that he signed a form refusing to go to a hospital, and so instead of sending him out for medical care, they put him on fifteen-minute checks and left him in segregation.

And for the next two days, fifteen minute checks were documented that say he was perfectly stable. He was alert and oriented (meaning no confusion). He was eating meals. He was sitting upright and responsive. The nursing staff and physician noted no signs of clinical deterioration for over 48 hours.

Then, without any warning, he was found dead in solitary confinement on December 6, 2023.

The death certificate says his death was an accident, and claimed he died from “MDMA toxicity.”

ICE also claims he died from “MDMA toxicity.”

MDMA does not take forty-eight hours to kill someone. It causes hyperthermia, hyponatremia, or serotonin syndrome within hours of ingestion, not days later. And if staff truly believed he ingested synthetic marijuana mixed with a tranquilizer, MDMA is not even part of that picture. Nothing about their medical response matches the drug they blamed.

ICE (nor the official death certificate) also never publicly disclosed that the toxicology report for Frankline had found fentanyl in his system, which makes the three doses of naloxone (Narcan) they gave far more telling. And why was this not reported?

Healthcare professionals do not give Narcan for MDMA, tranquilizer, or K2. Especially days later… you give Narcan when you believe someone has been exposed to opioids.

If their own timeline is true — and he really was eating, alert and stable for two days — the fentanyl did not come from the alleged K2 ingestion on December 4. It would have had to enter his system inside solitary.

Fentanyl has an onset of minutes. Not days.

The Missing Connection

At this point, it was clear that the contradictions were not just inside the facility. They were baked into the official paperwork itself. And in both cases, the final voice belonged to one person. The elected MAGA coroner who signed off on both deaths without calling out any of the medical impossibilities.

The name that appears on both death certificates is Kimberlee Shaffer-Snyder, the longtime Clearfield County coroner. Her signature is the final authority on both cases.

She is the official who ruled that Chaofeng Ge, a man found with his hands and feet bound had somehow committed suicide, and that Frankline Okpu died from MDMA toxicity while sitting in solitary confinement after two days of being clinically stable. Neither of which are medically possible.

But these explanations that match ICE’s narrative perfectly. Two rulings that ask the public to believe the unbelievable.

So I asked myself a simple question. Why? Why would anyone look at these facts and decide there is nothing to see here?

That is when I learned who Kim Shaffer-Snyder really is. She is not some neutral medical professional quietly doing her job. She is a committed MAGA loyalist, featured right on the DuBois Republican Committee’s website, her photo sitting beside their mission to “Make America Great Again.”

And that matters here, because MAGA politics has spent years calling immigrants criminals, animals, invaders. It has turned human beings into talking points. It has turned detention into punishment. It has turned cruelty into policy.

So when a MAGA-aligned coroner is the final voice on the deaths of two immigrants inside a county that profits off ICE detention, it is not a footnote. It is context. It is motive. It is the political lens through which these deaths were interpreted and certified.

I found a document for an IGSA between ICE, GEO, and Clearfield County. This is when everything finally made sense.

Clearfield County does not just have the Moshannon Valley ICE facility. It makes money from it. The whole setup works through something called an Intergovernmental Service Agreement, or IGSA. That is a contract where ICE pays the county to hold detained immigrants, and the county then pays the private prison company, GEO, to run the facility. It is basically a legal workaround that lets GEO avoid strict federal rules. This is something that exists nationwide, sadly.

The county is the middleman. GEO gets the contract. ICE gets the beds it wants.

And there is a lot of money involved. GEO pays Clearfield County two hundred thousand dollars a year just to keep the contract in place. GEO also gets a huge guaranteed payment of more than two point eight million dollars every month to operate the facility, even if many beds are empty. Then they get extra money for each person detained per day. With the number of people held there recently, ICE money going into this facility has added up to more than three point four million dollars a month.

Some states like New Jersey, New York, and Maryland looked at this system and said absolutely not. They banned their counties from signing IGSAs because they saw that detention becomes a business. More beds mean more money. More bodies mean more profit.

Clearfield County did not ban anything. It embraced the deal. And the Clearfield County coroner is Kim Snyder. She is the local official who ruled both of these deaths as nothing out of the ordinary. She is also a public MAGA supporter from a movement that calls immigrants criminals and “animals.”

Clearfield County benefits from the detention center. Kim Snyder is the Clearfield County coroner. And her rulings helped protect a facility that her county relies on for money.

Inside the System…

Here is the truth when you strip everything else away. Two immigrants died inside an ICE prison in a county that makes money from every occupied bed. The same MAGA coroner approved both impossible stories. ICE hid the records. GEO kept the checks. And the county kept the contract alive. That is the system. That is how it works. And that is how people disappear.

The cruelty inside Moshannon is not new. Long before Trump came back into power, an ACLU-backed investigation interviewed 77 people held inside the facility, and their stories paint a picture of a place designed to grind people down.

People said the moment you arrive, you are stripped, processed, and thrown into a color-coded jumpsuit that staff assign based on whatever they decide you are that day. Blue, orange, yellow, red. It looks like security. It feels like psychological torture. Your color controls your sleep space, your access to work, and how much fresh air you get. Several people said staff will set you up just to bump you into a harsher color.

Inside the pods, the lights stay on all night. The food is frozen or raw. The water tastes foul. Toilet paper, soap, and razors are rationed, and clothes sent to laundry come back filthier than before. People wait hours for a shared tablet just to call their families, and every minute drains what little money they can earn through voluntary labor that pays one to three dollars a day. That is the only way most people can afford to hear their child’s voice. Many described being terrified to speak up because complaints get punished.

Staff carry out ‘fire drills’, sweeping through pods, tearing apart belongings, and throwing people into solitary without warning. People said they were denied meals for complaining about raw food. Black immigrants described the harshest treatment, with officers calling them violent or dangerous. LGBTQ people were isolated under the guise of safety, which meant more isolation and more fear. Medical care was slow or withheld, with people waiting months for treatment and being brushed off with nothing but ibuprofen.

This was the documented reality. The environment where these people have died. This is the same environment the coroner keeps excusing. This is the place where Kilmar Abrego Garcia is sitting right now. The same environment where two families lost their loved ones forever.

None of this changes unless people file complaints, demand congressional investigations, and push their representatives to end county ICE contracts like this. The only thing that stops a system built on silence is people refusing to look away.

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It could’ve happened many different ways.

Your phone may have connected to one of the fake cell towers they’ve set up. Or maybe you were caught on a traffic camera, or in the background of a photo on social media scanned by AI. Or maybe a DHS agent wearing METAs video-recording sunglasses took one looked at you for just one second.

Or ICE just intentionally scanned your face in with Mobile Fortify — an app on their cellphones. Or Palantir’s ImmigrationOS which also has that capability.

But it doesn’t matter how it happened. It doesn’t matter if you didn’t do anything illegal, or that you are a U.S. citizen. Your face, your personal information, and your digital footprint have already been captured, scanned, and stored by ICE before you could ever say no. Added to decades of information they’ve linked together.

The truth is, they probably already know more about you than you think. I can’t imagine the kind of lists I’m on, or what my file looks like. So, I want to preface this by saying I don’t want you to read this to be afraid. I want you to read to understand that the data is already collected going back years, the file already exists, and fear is the tool they’re counting on. But you still have power.

Once you understand that, the next question is. . . what exactly are they building with all of this? What are these systems for, and how far do they reach? And who is behind all this?

This article is long. But I really suggest you stick around if you can. Because once you understand how deep this goes, you realize it’s not about immigration at all.

They don’t just know who you are. They know who you’re connected to, what you posted, what your face looks like from five different angles, what neighborhood you live in, what kind of car that you drive, where your social media profiles are, where your GPS pings, where your IP address pings, what kind of benefits you’ve received from the state, and even what brand of cereal you buy.

This is not an exaggeration. I have receipts. Highlighted or underlined words in this piece are source links. I encourage you to fact check everything I am saying in this article because I wouldn’t of believed it if I didn’t see it myself, either.

So, on paper, ICE & CBP were created to enforce immigration law. They were even supposed to help people with immigrating into America. That was the premise, at least.

But over the last decade (and especially this year with the extensive amount of DHS funding given to them in the “Big Beautiful Bill”) they’ve been handed the contracts, the software, the money, and permission to create a domestic surveillance infrastructure of Americans with almost no limits. And seemingly no accountability.

ICE, CBP, and HSI all operate under the umbrella of DHS. The Department of Homeland Security. And, in my research, I found layers upon layers of publicly available ICE, CBP, & DHS surveillance contracts. Some dated back to as the early as the birth of the agency itself in 2002 following the fall of the towers in 2001. It feels as if the NSA, CIA, and DoD had a ‘baby,’ and that baby is named DHS.

These services include but aren’t limited to the use of: Palantir, Oracle, Amazon Web Services, Zignal Labs, SOS International LLC (SOSi), L3Harris, SocialNet, Locate X, Mobile Fortify, Paragon, Clearview AI, Carahsoft Technology, LexisNexis, Thompson Reuters, and way, way more. This is not even the tip of iceberg.

The Network of Watchers

• Palantir connects all your data into one big government file. Oracle helps store and manage that data.

• Amazon Web Services (AWS) hosts the systems that keep it all running. They’re infamous for hosting spyware.

• Zignal Labs uses artificial intelligence (AI) to scan social media to find migrants, and flags posts they think are negative against ICE.

• SOSi tracks where people are and who they know creating a diagram of a person, their family, and their contacts.

• L3Harris makes fake cell towers called Stingrays that trick your phone into giving up data.

• SocialNet maps your online connections using your posts and profiles.

• Locate X sells your phone’s location history to the government.

• Mobile Fortify and ImmigrationOS allows ICE agents scan your face on the street to run against their database, and to collect more information.

• META provides video and audio recording tech through devices like their Ray-Ban smartglasses, which ICE agents have been seen wearing during operations.

• Paragon makes spyware called Graphite that can break into your phone without you ever clicking a link.

• Clearview AI collects faces and turns them into a searchable database. They’re using it to find people who “assault agents.”

• Carahsoft sells these surveillance tools to DHS and other agencies.

• Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis sell our personal, legal, and financial records to ICE, including addresses, shopping data, court records, family ties, and utility bill data.

  • There’s a bill — The Fourth Amendment Is Not For Sale Act — that was introduced to prevent the government from using this very data. It would kill this entire network, but it’s been sitting in the House for a very long time untouched. Hmm, I wonder why that is?

    ---

And yet, somehow, there are even more. Some haven’t even been uncovered yet. Some are being hidden by our own government.

Right now, 404 Media is suing ICE for ignoring a FOIA request that asked a simple question: who signed the brand new contracts to staff the two buildings set to monitor your social media next year?

ICE plans to run this out of two sites — one in Williston, Vermont, and one in Santa Ana, California. Vermont will operate during the day. California will run 24/7.

You know, these are the contractors that ICE wants to monitor Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, Google, YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, PACER Court Records, the dark web, somehow even MySpace.

Yes — MySpace — the now defunct social media platform that was bought years ago. Is Tom still in your top 10?

And of course, ICE won’t say who they hired. So they’re being sued. And keep in mind, this will be additional. It’s added on top of the several AI systems that are already doing it now. And this is all being paid for with our tax dollars.

I’m going to keep following this court case closely, and when there are updates on who is profiting from monitoring our socials, you can anticipate an update from me here on this Substack.

Outside of the decades worth of contracts, you have to also keep in mind to include their subcontractors — or the subcontractors that their subcontractors hired — or the dozens of shell companies buried in the murky waters of ICE’s contracting web.

One example? The man who owns the tent-city ICE detention facility on a military base in Texas, nicknamed “Lonestar Lockup,” registered the company to what is quite literally his personal house. That’s his official business address. That’s the level of oversight we’re talking about.

They Are Using Spyware

But somehow, the social media monitoring isn’t even the worst part. Because even if you manage to live without leaving a trace online, we need to talk about spyware. Yes, spyware.

Yes, I know. I sound like your uncle in a tinfoil hat.

But this September, ICE bought Graphite, a spyware tool made by an Israeli company called Paragon. It lets them break into phones without you clicking anything. It’s a form of malware, but infecting your phone requires no link, no download, and you have no warning. They can just do it. They just have to send you a message. It’s been used in Italy to stalk and harass journalists and activists already.

You don’t have to be a suspect to be infected. You just have to be connected to someone who is. Or be part of a group chat that gets flagged. Or follow the wrong account. Spyware doesn’t ask questions.

It can open encrypted messaging apps like Signal or WhatsApp, pull your photos, contacts, and location history, and send everything to a third-party cloud run by DHS. Palantir is the one analyzing it. You probably won’t even know it happened. There’s no alert, no pop-up, no way to see it unless the app you were infected from catches it and tells you.

In the past, people found out by chance when Apple or META sent a warning saying they might have been targeted by state-sponsored spyware. It’s not perfect, and it won’t catch everything.

But if you ever get one of those alerts, believe it. It’s not spam. It’s not a scam. Treat it like a fire alarm. Because it is. It means you need to factory reset your phone.

Spyware like Graphite gives ICE something no warrant or wiretap can: instant, invisible access to a person’s entire digital life. Phones are gold because they hold decrypted messages, contacts, GPS history, photos, and social networks that other tools can’t reach as quickly. With Graphite, ICE can infect a phone remotely, collect data in real time, and do it all without the target ever knowing.

There is no pop-up, no warning, and no need for cooperation from platforms like WhatsApp or Signal. The agency can gather intelligence across borders, map family ties, track communication networks, and monitor encrypted conversations that would normally require judicial approval.

It is not hard to see why this appeals to them. Spyware like Graphite lets ICE move fast, quietly, and without oversight. It can identify networks, trace contacts, and flag people for further surveillance long before any actual crime is proven.

When this data feeds into Palantir’s systems, it starts to look less like immigration enforcement and more like pre-crime monitoring, where being connected to the wrong person or saying the wrong thing online is enough to make you a target. ICE is already actively monitoring for people speaking out against them online.

And they’ve been using Stingrays for years. These are produced by the “L3 Harris” company we talked about above. These are fake cell towers that trick your phone into connecting. Once you’re hooked, they can track your location, intercept your calls, and pull identifying data from your device — without a warrant, without your consent, and often without you ever knowing.

You don’t need to break the law. You just need to be near one. And they can be in buildings or cars. All it takes is being at the wrong traffic stop.

How It All Ties Together

This is not just a story about ICE or immigration. It is a story about power, surveillance, and a government that quietly built the infrastructure to track nearly everyone inside its borders. What started as immigration enforcement has grown into a nationwide dragnet. Every data point, every app, every facial recognition scan, every photo, every protest, every location ping — it all feeds into one massive system, held together by cloud servers, spyware, and billion-dollar contracts. When Trump signed the executive order to merge government databases, he didn’t invent this system. He simply flipped the switch on something that had been quietly built over two decades, and handed it the funding and legal cover to run full speed.

What you need to understand is that you don’t have to be undocumented to be caught in it. You don’t even have to be political. You just need to be nearby. Maybe you passed a protest. Maybe you were tagged in a photo. Maybe you followed the wrong account, or shared the wrong post. That’s how wide the net is now.

But this doesn’t mean you’re powerless. It means you’re aware. And awareness is the first step toward resistance. That’s why they tried to keep this hidden. Because once people know what’s really happening — what’s already been done — they start asking the right questions. They start organizing. They start pulling the thread. And those threads lead to real accountability, real resistance, and real change.

So here’s what I’m asking you to do. Read the sources I linked in this piece. Talk to your people. Share this article. Especially with those who still think ICE is just about immigration. Support the journalists and researchers tracking these contracts. Support the lawsuits forcing this system into the light. And if you’re able, consider subscribing to Dissent in Bloom so I can keep digging and publishing these findings. You can subscribe for free, or you have the option of a paid subscription to help me continue doing this work.

We can’t fight what we don’t know. But now you know. And there’s more to know. This will be a multi-part series. I just couldn’t fit all I discovered in one article. Stay tuned.

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Her body still healing. Swollen. Eyes heavy from the sleeplessness that comes with a newborn’s cries. This was their third boy, and though her hands were going to be full, her heart had never felt fuller.

It was fall in Oregon. The red, orange and yellow leaves fell outside. Children were preparing for Halloween. Her apartment smelt of coffee, milk, and baby lotion. Her husband, lovingly called Yomi, was heading back to work today. He didn’t want to leave her side yet, not while she was still sore, still between the beauty of their new child and ache of recovery.

But rent was due in a few days, and the bills don’t pause for love or birth.

In America, the landlord and the light company do not care if you’ve just brought life into the world and, evidently, neither does ICE.

See, when Yomi left, it was just another morning. Two rambunctious little boys excited for their new brother. The new baby’s soft breath on her chest. The unsaid feeling that everything was going to be okay.

But by afternoon, everything they’d built — ten years of home, family, safety — collapsed in the space between a knock at the door and the click of handcuffs.

During the arrest, Sara said one of the agents barely looked at her. He just muttered that her husband was being taken. There was no explanation, and no mercy. Then they were gone.

He didn’t even have a chance to show them he was legal. They didn’t seem to care either way. See, Yomi had lived here for ten years. He came from Nigeria, built a life, earned his green card, followed every rule this country told him would keep him safe. He wasn’t hiding. He wasn’t “illegal.” He belonged here. ICE coming for their family was likely the last thing on their mind.

And yet, in that moment, none of it mattered. Sara was left standing in the doorway, holding their baby, watching the only world she knew collapse. A father taken before his newborn could even recognize his face. And taken from two little boys who have never known life without their daddy.

Where is Yomi Now?

On November third, an advocate posted an update to the family’s GoFundMe. In the span of just three days, Yomi was moved between four different detention centers. Every transfer meant new chains on his wrists and ankles, new officers, new walls that smelled of bleach and metal.

He reported being shackled the entire time. Wrists sore where the metal rubbed against his skin, his legs stiff from sitting in the same position for hours. They wouldn’t let him shower. They wouldn’t even let him use a bathroom. For more than seventy-two hours, he sat in chains, sweating, aching, humiliated. The air was thick and sour. His clothes clung to him. Every mile of that journey stripped away another layer of his dignity.

He tried not to think about home — about Sara, the baby, the boys — because the thought of them made the walls feel smaller. This was a man who had done ‘everything right,’ who had followed every rule. And yet here he was, treated like something less than human.

But there is beauty even in the darkest of times. And in the days since Yomi’s arrest, the community has rallied around Sara.

Thousands of dollars have been donated to her GoFundMe, enough for her to pay the rent and secure a short period of postpartum doula care to help her through the long, sleepless evenings with her children. For now, she and the kids have a place to stay, a little stability in the chaos ICE left behind.

But here is the part that hurts to even write.

By early November, the average person in ICE detention was being held for roughly seven weeks, but people who fight their cases like Yomi is, they are often locked up far longer, sometimes many months or even a year or more. The people who get out earlier are the ones who “self-deport” to get away from the horrible conditions inside of ICE detention centers.

Which is the goal, by the way.

Kristi Noem has said on record — several times — that the goal is to make ICE detention to cruel, so inhumane and so tortuous that immigrants would rather go back to places where they risk life and limb than stay and be abused.

Because he is from Nigeria (and despite being a permanent resident with a green card) Yomi is going to miss the small, irreplaceable things that mark a baby’s second month of life: the first real social smiles, the soft coos, the way a newborn tracks a parent’s face and starts to hold their head a little steadier on your chest.

These are the ordinary miracles that teach a child safety and bonding, and they are happening without him.

And if this drags on, as it so often does.. his baby could grow up not knowing his voice, his scent, his touch. When he finally walks through the door, he won’t be “Daddy.”

He’ll be a stranger with familiar eyes, trying to bond with a child who’s already learned the world without him.

The damage does not stop at with the baby. Research is blunt about what happens to kids when a parent is detained or deported. Anxiety, depression, aggression, and even suicidal thoughts climb in children and teens who experience a parent’s arrest or disappearance. The longer the separation, the worse the outcomes.

Sara’s older boys are all under ten. They need routine, touch, reassurance, and a parent who is not up all night calculating rent, legal bills, and how to answer the question “When is Daddy coming home?”

That psychological load lands on them too.

And Yomi will not leave this untouched. Prolonged detention is consistently linked to anxiety, depression, and PTSD in adults, with symptoms that persist after release. And this study is from before they upped the cruelty. Add in the documented conditions of ICE custody (transfers, isolation, heat risks in Southern facilities, the basic indignities of being denied showers or bathrooms) and you have the blueprint for lifelong trauma.

This is the math Sara is forced to do while she feeds her baby and bargains with landlords. Every extra day in detention is not just a court date on a docket. It is a missed smile, a stalled bond, a frightened child, and a father pushed deeper into harm. The fight goes on because it has to. It should not have to at all.

ICE Separates Families

As of June, the Brennan Center for Justice reported 57,861 people held in ICE detention centers. It’s a 51% increase from the year before. These facilities are operating nearly 45% over capacity.

But behind those numbers are the questions no one in power seems willing or wants to answer.

How many of those 57,000 people were mothers or fathers? How many children came home from school to empty houses, backpacks still slung over their shoulders, wondering where their parents went? How many were left crying in the backseat of a car after ICE took their mom or dad during a traffic stop?

According to the American Immigration Council, more than 16.7 million children in the U.S. live with at least one undocumented family member, meaning the scale of risk for separation is huge.

And Stephen Miller — the man behind the ICE curtain — he also knows this. Which is why he shared similar statistics and a cryptic message on social media the night Mamdani, an immigrant, won the mayoral election in NYC. A threat wrapped in numbers.

And that’s not an exaggeration. It’s reality, and it’s getting worse. ICE has been documented leaving children alone in cars, on the side of the road, and in parking lots after detaining their parents.

In Oxnard, California, two young children were found crying inside a truck after their father was taken at a gas station. In Massachusetts, a 12-year-old boy was left wandering the street after ICE arrested the adult he was with. These are not isolated incidents. They are routine acts of cruelty dressed up as “enforcement.”

Children have started documenting it themselves. On TikTok, videos circulate of kids coming home from school to empty houses, their parents’ belongings scattered where they left them that morning.

One girl only learned that her mother had been taken when she saw a video filmed by a bystander showing agents forcing her into their vehicle as she walked to the grocery store.

This is not a hypothetical future or a dystopian warning.

It is a growing reality, unfolding in neighborhoods across America. Children are being stranded, terrified, and forced to grow up in the aftermath of government-sanctioned disappearances. People are putting up posters to show where ICE kidnapped someone because these families only find out their loved ones are gone when they never come home.

So What Can We Do?

This story is heavy because it has to be. It’s a mirror held up to a country that keeps pretending not to see. It may feel draining, dark, and hopeless — but that exhaustion is a privilege Sara and Yomi don’t have.

Yomi doesn’t get to give up; he’s chained in a cell hundreds of miles from home. Sara doesn’t get to look away; she’s feeding a newborn with one arm and fighting for her husband with the other.

The least we can do is stand beside them. Because every time we stop paying attention, another family disappears. Every time we lose hope, ICE wins. We don’t get to turn our backs. Not when love like theirs is still fighting to survive inside the machine built to destroy it.

You can donate to Sara’s GoFundMe linked here. You can search online to find & donate to immigrant rights groups in your own community. You can donate to the ACLU who is fighting. You can share this story so other people know too. Restack it here on Substack. Share it elsewhere.

And if you can’t give money, give time.

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The only way we get out of this is together. We can’t sit around and wait for someone else to fix it. There is always something you can do. Get creative. The goal is simple: raise awareness, raise funds, and stop this before more children are traumatized and more fathers like Yomi are taken.

And if you want to keep up with stories like this, you can subscribe to my newsletter here. You can subscribe for free to stay in the loop. To see the human aspect of it all. I cover cases like Sara and Yomi’s from all over the country. I hold the Trump administration, ICE, Noem, and Miller accountable. I write about the human side and the statistics behind it, and I will keep doing it. I don’t care if they call me “ANTIFA” for being human and sharing these stories. This is what journalism should be.

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Their hearings are delayed for months, their transfers never end, and their families are left to search for them through a maze of phone numbers that don’t work and closed doors. Louisiana was built to make people vanish, and for years it has done exactly that.

In Louisiana, the cruelty is written into law. Immigrants are branded on their driver’s licenses, hunted by “fugitive task forces,” and denied justice if a driver hits them. It’s a prototype. The version of America the Trump administration dreams of.

But this system of abuse in Louisiana did not begin with Trump.

It was born out of silence, nurtured by profit, and finally expanded into an growing empire of cruelty under this administration.

The Black Hole

Louisiana is called an black hole because it holds ten ICE detention facilities — more than any other state — and those facilities have turned immigration into a weapon of disappearance. Behind its barbed wire and paperwork, abuse thrives in silence while the system swallows people whole.

Most of these ‘detention centers’ are operated by private prison companies such as GEO Group and LaSalle Corrections or by parish sheriffs under federal contracts.

Louisiana’s detention network includes: Alexandria Staging Facility, Allen Parish Public Safety Complex, Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Jena, Jackson Parish Correctional Center, Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center, Richwood Correctional Center, River Correctional Center, South Louisiana ICE Processing Center in Basile, and Winn Correctional Center in Winnfield. And now Angola Prison.

In 2025, a tenth site was added inside Angola Prison (aka Louisiana State Penitentiary) — one of the most violent and abusive prisons in America — where dozens of immigrants are now held in isolation, neglect, and fear.

Angola Prison stands on an 18,000-acre former slave plantation, its name taken from the homeland of the people once forced to labor there. After the Civil War, Louisiana turned Angola into a prison-plantation, keeping the same chain of exploitation alive. A place so abusive that prisoners slit their Achilles to protest the abuse and being forced to perform slave labor in the fields.

Since the 60s, Louisiana’s Angola Prison has run a rodeo where inmates — not cowboys — face charging bulls for the amusement of the free world. A rodeo you can still buy tickets to today.

A prison for everyone: U.S. Citizens, Immigrants, and, yes, even children.

A place where children are maced & beaten, the sick are denied care, and men without legs are locked in solitary as “escape risks.” One man repeatedly begged for help until a stroke left him blind and paralyzed.

It’s a prison long condemned for abuse and failure. But Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem called its “legendary” violent past part of the appeal, and Governor Jeff Landry bragged that it sits beside a lake “full of alligators” and a “forest full of bears.”

This is where they chose to cage immigrants. Many of which had fled to America in a desperate attempt to save their lives.

The story doesn’t end at Angola.

What the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center is Doing to Pregnant Women

In America, even pregnant women aren’t safe from ICE. The so-called “pro-life” party cries over embryos but looks away when immigrant women miscarry from abuse.

They don’t see immigrants as human — that’s why their cruelty never counts as murder to them. And knowing the administration wants to revoke birthright citizenship, this almost feels like it’s by design.

A woman named Alicia was taken to the detention center in Basile, Louisiana (South Louisiana ICE Processing Center), where she learned she was pregnant. The food made her sick. The water was dirty. When she started bleeding, guards ignored her until she collapsed.

At the hospital, she said doctors performed an invasive test on her without consent, and she miscarried. Instead of releasing her, ICE kept her locked up for two more months — feverish, bleeding, and terrified.

Another woman, Lucia, was left bleeding alone in a small room after guards refused to take her to a doctor for weeks. When they finally did, she was shackled hand and foot in the ambulance.

Another, Marie, was thrown into solitary confinement and denied prenatal vitamins. She watched another woman lose her baby in the bathroom.

And in Alexandria, Louisiana, there’s a place where people disappear.

It looks like an airport with a warehouse, but inside, it’s filled with men in shackles, sleeping shoulder to shoulder in rooms that smell like sweat and rust. The showers run brown when they work at all.

Guards laugh through the glass as people beg for medicine, food, or a chance to call their families.

The system’s core — its black box — is the Alexandria Staging Facility, where transfers never stop and oversight doesn’t exist. A staging facility is supposed to be temporary. It’s not allowed to hold people for more than 72 hours, but this one often does.

It’s a place that “just isn’t for human beings” according to former detainees. Local 911 records reveal a growing number of medical emergencies inside the facility — more calls for help than ever before.

The Stories of Alexandria Staging Facility in Louisiana

Amilcar Lisser-Posadas, a father of two little girls who are U.S. citizens, was brought there shackled at his wrists and ankles. He’d been arrested in Tennessee for driving with an expired license. He had no criminal record. When he arrived, he was sick with a fever and chest congestion.

He said the guards ignored him. The water was filthy.

He was given no medicine until the last two days before he was deported. “They laughed,” he said, “when I asked why I was being held.”

On the flight that sent him away from his family, he saw children still in their school uniforms, women clutching their stomachs in late pregnancy, whole families crying quietly as the plane filled with the sound of shackles.

Baldomero Orozco-Juarez, a community leader and father, was taken next. ICE agents drove him 250 miles through the night from Mississippi to Alexandria — the only person in the back of a government SUV.

He was deported less than 24 hours later, before his lawyer could find him. “They made us walk slowly,” he said. “They laughed at the way we walked. The way we got on the plane. They treated us so badly.” His attorney called it a “targeted kidnapping.”

And then there was Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral scholar at Georgetown University with a valid visa. He was flown in from Virginia for allegedly criticizing Israel. In Alexandria, he was marched off a plane in shackles and locked in a windowless cell under constant lockdown.

He could hear his wife and children on the phone, but they couldn’t hear him. “Who is there?” they asked. “Can you hear me?”

He thought maybe they had been taken, too. He later said, “At that time, I realized there is nothing called rights. It was a real black hole. A real disgrace.”

These men never met each other. But their stories are the same.

Each was taken from a different part of the country, dropped in this warehouse by a runway, stripped of their dignity, and sent away before anyone could help them.

What It All Adds Up To

These stories are not isolated incidents. They are the architecture of a system designed to function without witnesses, without mercy, and without accountability. And nowhere is that system more complete than in Louisiana.

A quiet empire of disappearance has been built, not by accident but by design. Behind barbed wire and bureaucratic fog, ICE has turned this state into America’s most efficient eraser of lives, where immigrants vanish into a maze of remote detention centers, sham hearings, and endless transfers.

From pregnant women miscarrying in solitary confinement to scholars jailed for their words, the cruelty is no glitch; it is the system functioning exactly as intended. Private prison profits, government tours through sites of historic brutality like Angola, and the silence of a nation enable a machine that does not just detain, it devours.

And at its center, the Alexandria Staging Facility stands like a modern-day gallows, not just processing deportations but extinguishing identities before anyone can intervene.

They came here for safety and found a graveyard that pretends to be a country. Behind every locked door is someone who still believes their name matters. Behind every plane that leaves the runway is a family who will never know what happened. The cruelty keeps time with the heartbeat of the nation. It grows because we let it.

But it can stop when we refuse to look away. When we demand light in the places built for silence. When we start saying their names out loud again. When we do not normalize the cruelty and hold DHS accountable even after Trump is out of office.

A Quick Note From the Author:

I’ve been covering these stories all year — and I’m not done yet.

In my next article, I’ll be digging into the Venezuelan men killed in the illegal airstrikes on their bokes, and continuing to cover what the U.S. is really doing in Latin America. Because apparently, harming folks here isn’t enough for the sadists in office.

If you’ve made it this far, you already know: this isn’t about clicks, it’s about truth. If you want to stay ahead of the the legacy medias sanitized headlines and empty government statements from DHS, make sure you’re subscribed.

Free or paid — either way, I’ll never put this work behind a paywall. A free subscription helps me grow this page and reach more people. And it keeps you in the loop.

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But if you’re in a position to help, paid subscriptions and small donations help keep this going. I’m not a corporation. I’m a nurse, a mom, and someone who believes the truth deserves oxygen.

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Most of all: thank you for reading. Now — restack & share this information like someone’s life depends on it. Because honestly? It could. The more people know, the more people can fight back against places like the black hole of Louisiana.

When asked for proof that Liberia had agreed to this, they cited an unverified news article. Not an agreement between DHS & Liberia. Not a letter. Just a vague story that never mentioned the U.S., never referenced a deal, and somehow was supposed to justify removing him again. No formal documentation. No signatories.

For those not caught up, Kilmar Abrego Garcia has been back in DHS custody since late August.

He showed up for a routine ICE check-in in Baltimore and never walked out. The government locked him back up, and they’ve been scrambling ever since to find a legal pathway to finish what they started.

So far, they’ve tried removing him to Ghana, Uganda, and Eswatini without success.

The court told DHS two weeks ago that the record was closed. End of story. Stop trying to send him places. There were to be no new filings. No last-minute twists. But DHS didn’t care. Instead of stepping back, they doubled down.

And just minutes before today’s hearing, ICE quietly scheduled Kilmar’s credible fear interview — a very important part of his asylum case — for the exact same time as the hearing itself.

Judge Xinis called it what it was — “completely unacceptable.”

She said there was no way ICE or DHS didn’t know about the hearing. She accused them of procedural sabotage and told them straight up it wasn’t going to fly in her courtroom.

Is Kilmar Being Sent to Liberia?

Xinis asked for proof of this deal. DHS first claimed Liberia agreed to take Kilmar by citing a news article that didn’t mention the U.S. or any deal.

Later, they submitted four sealed documents to the court, but Judge Xinis said the filings lacked signatures, names, or clear proof and called the evidence too thin to rely on. The government then admitted they still don’t have a formal agreement with Liberia. They’re still “trying to confirm” it.

And made it clear she’s not making decisions based on press releases or midnight file dumps done right before the weekend.

Kilmar’s legal team warned that the move looks like a setup. Liberia, they said, could be a temporary stop — a way to move Kilmar out of reach so DHS can quietly send him back to El Salvador once court scrutiny fades.

This is something the Trump Administration infamously likes to do. Just like with Alligator Alcatraz and Guantanamo Bay. They back down just long enough to get it out the public eye, Trump says some egregious shit, and people are so focused on his theatrics while they quietly move assuming any new headlines are old news.

Judge Xinis agreed that possibility of them doing just that is real. She said it’s not enough for a country to take him for a short time if the goal is to deport him again the moment no one’s looking.

She also called the fact that Kilmar is facing a criminal trial next week. He still has an active asylum appeal. And now DHS says they want him gone by Friday. Xinis said that if the government deports him now, it guts the criminal case.

They want him gone, because they know their case has no legal standing and will fall apart on the stand.

A Court Order Is The Only Thing Stopping His Deportation

Xinis reminded everyone that her injunction still stands.

The injunction is a court order that prevents DHS from deporting Kilmar Abrego Garcia until Judge Xinis reviews all legal issues and gives explicit permission for his removal.

This means DHS cannot deport Kilmar unless they file a formal motion to lift it. If they try, she said, they’ll need to come with real evidence and full legal arguments. No back doors. No shortcuts.

The government says it wants to deport Abrego Garcia to a third country, pointing to this memo as part of its reason — even though he still has an open asylum case and a criminal trial coming up.

She also asked DHS directly if Liberia is the final destination or if they’re still eyeing Costa Rica. The irony here is thick — Costa Rica already agreed to take him months ago.

So, if she did dissolve the injunction, why not there? Why Liberia?

DHS keeps reaching for new countries, and Liberia is the fourth one after Uganda, Eswatini, and Ghana all fell through.

Because the entire reason they’re trying to deport him is to ‘punish’ him for making them look back. These are all countries rampant with humans rights abuses according to Secretary of State reports.

Click the names to see the reports for yourself — Ghana, Liberia, Uganda, Eswatini.

She also pressed on something deeper. One agency is trying to deport Kilmar. Another is trying to prosecute him. The government claims they’re not coordinating. She made it clear that doesn’t add up.

“It doesn’t pass the sniff test,” she said.

She ended it by letting DHS know she is watching both dockets, and she’s not chasing a moving target. He needs to stay in the country. End of story.

What Happens Next?

This simply means both Kilmar’s lawyers and the government have to send the judge a written plan that lays out what happens next. This includes the next court dates and when they’ll each file their legal arguments.

This filing must also include written arguments about whether Trump’s expedited removal memo is legal. DHS is citing this memo as their justification to remove Kilmar before he can ever appear in court.

This is the memo from earlier this year that says if an immigrant has been here less than 2 years, they are to be removed through “expedited removal” without ever having their day in immigration court.

They feel that because he was wrongfully deported once and reentered the U.S., he now counts as a new arrival — even though he was returning to his home, his family, and his active legal cases.

It’s a strategy to keep him from ever having his day in court. Criminal or immigration.

If Judge Xinis finds the memo unconstitutional or unlawful, it could set the precedent to DHS from using expedited removal in Kilmar’s case and other cases entirely.

Judge Xinis closed with a quiet warning. She said she’s available whenever they are. She will not let this case be buried.

The government walked into court with nothing but secret files, vague claims, and a plan to vanish a man they already disappeared once. Judge Xinis walked in with receipts and a long memory. She is not letting go.

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I’ve been reporting on Kilmar’s case since the start, and I’m not stopping. If you want to follow what happens next — and understand what’s really going on behind these court filings and policy shifts — hit subscribe.

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Not protecting Americans. There was never an invasion. Just a storyline. A scare tactic. Some of us called it what it was from the start. Others are now starting to open their eyes.

We were told it was about safety. That this years billions of dollars handed to DHS, the Palantir contracts, and the nonstop executive orders — all being done in the name of protecting us.

We were even told that it was all a matter of national security.

And while they repeated that phrase over and over, they built something else entirely. A surveillance system that monitors your social media, tracks your bank transactions, and uses artificial intelligence (AI) to decide who should be investigated, detained, or quietly removed.

What We’ve Seen So Far

The pattern is older than any of us reading this today. Start with a scapegoat. Build the system. Then turn it on the people. That moment has arrived.

As a result, we’ve seen teachers and school children get caught in tear gas thrown by DHS agents in front of elementary schools in Chicago. Kids disappeared into hotel rooms & office buildings that double as secret detention sites. One man was wrongly imprisoned for 40 years, and when he was released he was targeted for deportation.

Autistic migrant children like Emmanuel are being kidnapped from their parents. Human beings — including unclothed children — are loaded like cargo into U-Haul trucks in Nacht und Nebel style ICE raids. Men are being killed in front of their child’s daycare. People are being boxed in, approached with guns, and glass from car windows is being broken over newborn babies.

These aren’t hypotheticals. They’re real stories. They’re clickable links. Read them.

After Nazi Germany, survivors reported they would only go home in the day because night meant raids. The darkness wasn’t rest; it was when names disappeared from the registry and neighbors pretended not to hear.

DHS is using AI algorithms to scan social media, search engines, and financial records & flag anyone that the government feels is a “threat” — from those criticizing foreign policy to anyone who criticized Charlie Kirk — three unions are suing for it now.

The result of this? Workers and dissidents with visas are being flagged for deportation by automated systems powered by AI.

The First Amendment is meant to protect everyone within American borders — including visa holders and immigrants — not just citizens.

But even citizens aren’t safe. More than 170 citizens have already been detained by ICE this year, while DHS quietly expands its secret DNA collection programs of Americans. U.S. citizens have been deported already.

They say it’ll never happen to you — until it does.

Leonardo Espartaco Martinez, a U.S. citizen and immigrant rights volunteer, was rammed into by a DHS vehicle TWICE and then detained after filming ICE activity in Oxnard. He could have died. They could have killed him. You can see the footage of them ramming into the side of his truck here and you can see first time they rammed into him on the dashcam footage here if you don’t believe me.

George Retes, a disabled U.S. Army veteran, had his window broken and he was pulled from his car during a raid, gassed, and held in ICE custody for three days without charges or access to a lawyer. Missing his child’s third birthday party.

See, as Americans, we were conditioned to fear what was foreign our entire lives. Trained to see every brown face as a threat. Anyone outside of our borders as someone trying to take away the people & things we love. But take notice that this isn’t foreign occupation. It’s domestic.

ICE is Americans modernized version of the Gestapo — Nazi Germany’s secret police force — militarized, unaccountable, and expanding. All paid for with your tax dollars, my friend. $30,000,000,000.

They’re also the only agency getting paid during the government shutdown. Millions of Americans are set to lose SNAP needed to feed their family next month. Alaska is flooded, homes are destroyed, people are in a crisis, and there are no FEMA funds to help them. FEMA money went to Alligator Alcatraz instead.

But don’t worry guys — Trump made sure that ICE is still getting paid (but not TSA), Argentina is getting $40 BILLION tax payer dollars, and Kristi Noem got two private luxury jets costing nearly $200M tax payer dollars.

Oh, and the U.S. can’t promise they will backpay the furloughed workers, either. So, instead, Trump tried to fire them. Something a judge had to put a stop to. Priorities, am I right?

Gone in The Blink of An Eye

What happens when one of their AI systems incorrectly flags you? Or flags you for posting something they don’t approve of? You’re labeled a threat. And if no human reviews it? No one calls to double-check?

One AI misfire and you’re in a holding cell with no way out. It doesn’t matter if you were born here.

The U.S. is now utilizing the rapid deportation (‘expedited removal’) protocols more than ever. A protocol in which detainees often have no right to challenge their deportation in federal court.

And of course there’s also the “workarounds” we’ve seen this year: like the Aliens Enemy Act being invoked, the U.S. shipping people to third countries that are so unsafe the State Department warns Americans not to travel there, and use of places like Guantanamo Bay, ‘Alligator Alcatraz’, & ‘Lone Star Lockup’.

Guantanamo Bay is not a metaphor. It’s a real black site with a long history of abuse and ICE uses it now. And ‘Lone Star Lockup’? It’s a detention camp made up of plastic tents that is tucked away on a military base in Texas. It is walled off from the public and protected by federal muscle.

Even the air space above it is untouchable. And whistleblower reports from the inside of this camp include raw sewage, rotten food, starvation, no medical care, and even the deaths of detainees that aren’t being reported.

With almost no paperwork being filed correctly, you’re gone before anyone even realizes you’re missing. Hell, 1,200+ men from Alligator Alcatraz are still missing from ICE records.

You’d be disappeared before anyone realizes you’re a U.S. citizen.

This isn’t an “if” — it’s a “when.”

Maybe not for you. But for someone. Soon.

It could be me. It could be you.

And if they’re caught? If someone starts asking questions? They’ll call it an administrative error — just like they did with Kilmar Abrego Garcia. A recent whistleblower came out and said the DOJ tried to force them to lie about Kilmar, and they refused so they were chased out.

Or maybe they won’t backtrack at all. Maybe they’ll double down, and call you an “ANTIFA domestic terrorist” under Trumps latest executive order. You know, the one that defines criticizing the government or capitalism as terrorism?

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem & Attorney General Pam Bondi are already saying Americans targeted by this order are equal to ISIS & MS-13.

Death. Drones. Detention. That’s how America dealt with ISIS. Mass incarceration and terrorism charges are how it dealt with MS‑13. Now they’re saying that you — if you criticize capitalism, if you resist — belong in that same bucket. It’s not just dehumanization. It’s permission. Permission to turn the American war machine inward.

And yes, technically, you still have the right to habeas corpus. But what happens when the government shrugs and says it’s “out of our jurisdiction now” — just like they did when Kilmar and the others were dumped into the El Salvadorian prison CECOT?

A claim that El Salvador later confirmed was never true. Which is exactly why those men were eventually released in a U.S. deal later on.

National Security: The Government’s Favorite Shield

“National security.”

That’s the phrase they used to justify everything after 9/11. It’s how we got here.

It’s how the Department of Homeland Security was born. How ICE was militarized. How Palantir got its start — building predictive policing tools that track your movements, your habits, your beliefs using information from your shopping habits to your medical records.

And this year they’ve gotten more information on us than ever thanks to another executive order by Trump.

It’s also how intelligence fusion centers were formed: shadowy hubs where local cops, federal agents, and corporate contractors trade data in secret, without warrants or accountability.

But the surveillance state didn’t start in 2001 — it just got a budget, a PR campaign, and a blank check.

Long before the towers fell, the FBI was infiltrating and dismantling civil rights movements under COINTELPRO. They bugged hotel rooms. They blackmailed leaders. They sent fake letters to sow paranoia and division.

Through Operation Mockingbird, the CIA planted agents in major newsrooms to shape public opinion and neutralize dissent. The machinery of control was already in place. 9/11 just flipped the switch — and gave them permission to turn it all inward.

And now those same machines are being used on us once again.

And for those who don’t care because it’s not affecting them.. just understand it doesn’t matter if the government isn’t hurting you yet.

The framework being built should still keep you up at night. You might support what’s happening now. But it never ends with the immigrants. Or the dissenters. Or the unhoused. Or the mentally ill. It expands. It always expands.

Eventually it comes for anyone who resists. Anyone who questions. It comes for your guns. Your speech. Your refusal to scan your face. Your land, because someone said the state needs an AI server farm.

Silence doesn’t protect you. It just buys time. And not much of it. You’re trading your rights for a man. But what happens when he’s gone? Trump won’t live forever.

And the next person to inherit this system might not share your values. Or your god. You might think you’ll never be the one who speaks out. But aren’t you at least afraid of losing the right to? What if they ask you to do something you don’t want to? Recently, a man refused to be an FBI informant so the government punished him by trying to deport him.

And repeatedly our President has talked about trying to take away Americans citizenship, and even talked about wanting to to send them to CECOT even though he knows it’s unconstitutional & illegal.

If the government is punishing dissent and looking for excuses to strip you of your citizenship, you should be paying attention. It never stops at one person.

You may say, “I’ll use my Second Amendment.” Sure.

Until they decide on a random day to come door to door, like the Nazis did, and take your weapons. Maybe you’re willing to die in that firefight. But what about your kids? Your partner? The ones left behind?

Where This Leaves Us

It leaves us standing inside a machine that was never about immigration. It was never about safety. It was about building something brutal and obedient. They tested it on the most vulnerable, and now it’s creeping outward. This isn’t foreign policy. It’s domestic infrastructure.

Predictive policing, AI deportation systems, DNA collection, secret detention black sites, and an entire agency that answers to no one but the executive. And if you think you’re safe, you’re not paying attention. They already used it on veterans, whistleblowers, journalists, and citizens. They already lied to deport people who were innocent. They already funded it while letting the rest of the government collapse.

You can’t vote your way out of this. You can’t call a congressperson and hope they fix it. That ship sailed when they let the BBB pass and handed ICE thirty billion dollars. That ship sailed when Democrats & Republicans signed off on expanding Palantir contracts and gave legal cover to surveillance tools that don’t even pretend to follow the Constitution.

What we need now is a general strike. Not one protest, not one viral post. A national refusal to cooperate with our own oppression. Shut down the cities. Shut down the ports. Shut down the schools, the trains, the machines. We saw the power of the streets on No Kings Day. Now we need that same fire to stop the engine for good.

Start in your city. Demand ICE-free zones, body cam mandates, and public oversight boards with real teeth. Chicago passed them. Yours can too.

Watch everything. Film everything. If you see something, do not let it slide. Do not let them lie unchecked. Share it. Write it. Scream it. Make them regret every attempt to erase the evidence.

This machine only runs if we let it. Our silence is its fuel. Our fear is its lubricant. If we stop, it stops. If we stand up together, it breaks. And once it breaks, we build something better.

You Made It! A Brief Message from Dissent in Bloom

When history is told by the oppressors, what you get isn’t truth. It’s a curated museum of lies. I write so we don’t have to settle for that.

I write so that now, and when history looks back, we have the stories of the victims of fascism, not the PR from the fascists.

If you can swing it, paid subscriptions help me keep the lights on, grow this platform, and keep this work alive.

You can also buy me a coffee on Ko-fi by clicking here.

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I will continue to hold Trump, his cabinet, anyone else complicit in this system accountable. Subscribe for free to stay in the loop, get the real stories, and be on the right side of history with me. My articles will never cost money to read & this information is too important to lock up.

I’m not CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News. I’m a person like you.. a mom, a nurse, moonlighting as a journalist, writing by the people, for the people. Either way it goes, thank you for being here and reading this today. Share this information far and wide. Help me hold them accountable. Spread the truth.

This one sits deep inside the Fort Bliss Army base in Texas. Yes, inside a U.S. military installation. A local there reported that most people nearby don’t even know it exists, and outside the state, it’s even worse.

See, while the rest of the country is so overwhelmed with the constant “flooding the zone” that’s being done this has gone under the radar.

I am ashamed to admit, I wouldn’t have known either, if not for a single whistleblower’s report that slipped through the cracks. One that detailed a detainee’s death and an ongoing hunger strike that followed — things ICE has chosen not to disclose as of now.

You can watch the video of the whistleblowers report by clicking here.

‘Lone Star Lock Up’

As if a cutesy nickname will hide the raw horror of what is actually happening inside. Moldy food. Undrinkable water. Overcrowding. Detainees report standing in raw sewage from toilets backed up for weeks. Refusal to provide detainees with mandatory medical care. 100 degree weather and sandstorms. Even death.

First a contractor building the tent-city died on site, and then an unnamed detainee weeks later.

This information comes from clients of Social Worker for the People who are currently, or have been inside the camp recently. They reported that one detainee had died, and that an employee quietly warned others not to eat, fearing the spoiled food and contaminated water were to blame.

Fearing for their lives, detainees are now on a hunger strike.

They were already malnourished, and now they can’t bring themselves to eat the spoiled food they believe killed one of their own. Even ICE’s own inspectors said people were starving. The only food they were getting did not have nutrition. ICE actually recommended boosting meal calories by 30%.

That was weeks ago. It still hasn’t been approved. Even the sick with medical diets were all handed the same “medical meal,” a one-size-fits-all tray that could kill the wrong person. DHS denies this all, of course. They always do.

And no one can reach them.

Not lawyers, not lawmakers. There are no phones inside. No lines in or out. The only sound these men hear isn’t their families or their lawyers — it’s the constant thrum of on-going construction, the machines and sand polluting the air they’re forced to breathe.

I guess that’s what happens when you build a place in less than 2 months.

Those who do make it past the gates don’t really see the camp. They’re escorted through what feels like a stage set, shown what they want them to see.

The pattern appears to be that at first they’re turned away, then let in days later but only to witness one dark corner of a much darker place.

ICE had promised Rep. Escobar access to inspect the camp, then pulled the plug at the last second. Wouldn’t give her any information as to why.

As a result of this, Rep. Escobar did send a firmly worded letter. That kind that used to matter. But in these times, words on paper just aren’t doing what humanity need to be done.

Who Owns This Camp?

How does a camp like this even operate? Who’s running it?

You’d think a billion-dollar camp would go to a big contractor or a prison company like GEO Group, which made a fortune after donating millions to Trump. But no.

The deal went to one guy — running his “company” out of a his three bedroom home — who somehow landed a billion-dollar government contract, with $232 million paid upfront.

His name is Ken Wagner. Seventy-seven years old. His company, Acquisition Logistics, took hundreds of millions and funneled it into another government contractor named Disaster Management Group to provide the camp employees.

According to GovTribe, before landing the billion-dollar Fort Bliss contract, Acquisition Logistics LLC was a small veteran-owned firm that mainly provided “logistics consulting, maintenance, and supply chain support” for the U.S. military.

So the question becomes unavoidable: who decided to hand a small ‘logistics’ company the keys to a concentration camp and why?

The U.S. Military is Now Hosting Concentration Camps

He didn’t have to even ask to use a military base. He was invited. Pete Hegseth, Trump’s so-called “Secretary of War,” signed off on using Fort Bliss and plans to build more just like it.

What began as a “temporary” solution has become a permanent fixture of the regime’s machine.

See how every photo is shot from a drone? Well, that’s because military bases are locked-down airspace. No one gets close without clearance. It’s a modern spin on the old black sites — the kind ICE still keeps running in Guantánamo.

Yeah, Guantánamo? Still open, they just sent more people there this week.

The U.S. military is guarding detention camps where people are dying in silence. This isn’t paranoia. It isn’t hysteria. It’s reality — buried in desert sand, hidden behind barbed wire, and paid for with our tax dollars.

A Brief Note From The Author:

When history is told by the oppressors, what you get isn’t truth. It’s a curated museum of lies. I write so we don’t have to settle for that. I write so that now, and when history looks back, we have the stories of the victims of fascism, not the PR from the fascists.

Subscribe now

If you can swing it, paid subscriptions help me keep the lights on, grow this platform, and keep this work alive.

You can also buy me a coffee on Ko-fi by clicking here.

I will continue to hold ICE, DHS, and anyone else complicit in this system accountable. Subscribe for free to stay in the loop, get the real stories, and be on the right side of history with me. My articles will never cost money to read & this information is too important to lock up.

I’m not CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News. I’m a person like you.. a mom, a nurse, moonlighting as a journalist, writing by the people, for the people.

Either way it goes, thank you for being here and reading this today. Share this information far and wide. Help me hold them accountable.

Share

She looked away for just a moment.

When she turned back, he was gone. The sound of traffic filled the air, loud and distant, like the world didn’t notice what had just happened. She called his name again and again, her voice cracking under the weight of fear. The fruit stand stood untouched behind her, the place where he had been only seconds before.

She picked up her phone, and called Houston Police to report her son missing.

The days that followed were a blur of fear and silence.. no answers, no updates, only waiting. Six days passed. Six days of waiting by the phone. Six days of walking the same streets, asking the same questions, handing out the same flyer with his name and face.

Then after almost a week of torture, her phone rang… She found out that Emmanuel had been picked up by police the day after he vanished. He was alive, thank god, but he wasn’t coming home.

He is in immigration custody. Courtesy of the Houston Police Department (HPD).

Emmanuel went missing October 4.

On October 5, Houston Police found him. They did not return him to his mother. They labeled him an unaccompanied immigrant and handed him to ICE, while the missing persons report she had filed sat in their system, untouched.

There was no welfare check. No emergency placement. No effort to match his name or face to the alert already on file. Just silence, paperwork, and disappearance. Maria was not notified until nearly a week later.

By the time she was told, Emmanuel had already been transferred. She still does not know where he is. He is not home.

And Houston Police didn’t just mishandle a missing child case.

They took explicit direction from federal immigration authorities and labeled a 15‑year‑old autistic boy exactly the way ICE needed to take him.

Under federal law, an Unaccompanied Alien Child (UAC) is:

A child under 18 who has no lawful immigration status and no parent or legal guardian in the United States available to provide care and physical custody.

The paperwork filed was done so with ICE telling them how to make his disappearance legal. By calling Emmanuel an “unaccompanied alien child” instead of a “missing child.”

HPD handed him over to the Office of Refugee Resettlement. Which a federal network of facilities that exists to detain UNACCOMPANIED migrant minors, not missing kids with disabilities.

Why? Was it because he was brown? Did you look at a scared, nonverbal teenager and decide he must be illegal? Did you assume he had no mother, no name, no one looking for him? Did you even bother to check the missing persons reports? Or is that a privilege only reserved for white children now?

Because everything about this says you didn’t see a child. You saw a border case. You saw a number to disappear. A line to push through the system. A boy stripped of his humanity by the color of his skin and the silence of his diagnosis.

Houston Police had a choice. They could have looked. They could have called. They could have done their jobs. Instead, they made him disappear.

This wasn’t a mistake. It was a chain of decisions that led exactly where it was meant to. A missing child report became a deportation ticket. ICE told Houston Police how to classify him. They did it.

They erased Emmanuel with a dropdown menu. A child with autism, reported missing by his mother, was labeled an unaccompanied alien and disappeared into federal custody.

HPD had his name. They had the report. They had the facts.

They still went to ICE for help placing him in ORR custody. They still logged him into a system built for detention, not reunification. That was not confusion. That was complicity.

Emmanuel is fifteen, but his mother says his mind works more like that of an elementary school student. He has autism and relies on her for nearly everything.

The routines, the small reassurances, the way she knows how to calm him when words fail. He needs familiar faces and gentle explanations. He needs to know he is safe.

Since the day he went missing, Maria has only seen her son once.. through a thirty‑minute video call arranged by officials. It was the first time she had seen his face in a week.

On the screen, he looked frightened. His voice was small. He told her he was scared. She tried to comfort him, but there was nothing she could do through the glass of a government device.

That call ended, and so did her access to him. She does not know where he is being held. Neither do her lawyers. No one will tell her which facility he has been moved to or who is with him.

Each day that passes without an answer stretches the silence wider. Her son is alive, but unreachable, locked somewhere inside a system that treats missing children as immigration cases and mothers as irrelevant.

She is still waiting. And now, she is asking for help.

FIEL Houston is calling on the public to stand beside her.

If you are located in Texas: They need you at Houston City Hall on Tuesday, October 14 at 1:30 PM. Demand answers from Mayor Whitmire and City Council. Sign up to speak by calling (832) 393-1100 or email speakers@houstontx.gov

If you are outside of Texas, you can still take action: Call Houston Mayor John Whitmire at (713) 837‑0311, email him directly at mayor@houstontx.gov, or contact his communications director at Mary.Benton@HoustonTX.gov.

Ask them why a missing, disabled child was handed to ICE without a single call to his mother. Ask them what happens to the next child who disappears and gets labeled instead of protected.

A Brief Message from Dissent in Bloom:

When history is told by the oppressors, what you get isn’t truth. It’s a curated museum of lies. I write so we don’t have to settle for that. I write so that now, and when history looks back, we have the stories of the victims of fascism, not the PR from the fascists.

I will continue to hold ICE, DHS, and anyone else complicit in this system accountable. Subscribe for free to stay in the loop, get the real stories, and be on the right side of history with me. My articles will never cost money to read & this information is too important to lock up.

Subscribe now

Share

If you can swing it, paid subscriptions help me keep the lights on, grow this platform, and keep this work alive.

You can also buy me a coffee on Ko-fi [click here].

I’m not CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News. I’m a person like you.. a mom, a nurse, moonlighting as a journalist, writing by the people, for the people.

Either way it goes, thank you for being here and reading this today ♥ — Dissent