More than 170 US citizens have been detained by immigration agents against their will since President Donald Trump returned to office in January, according to a new investigation by ProPublica.
The reporters examined every publicly available case they could find in which citizens were detained by immigration officers.
“Americans have been dragged, tackled, beaten, tased, and shot by immigration agents,” they wrote in the report published Thursday. “They’ve had their necks kneeled on. They’ve been held outside in the rain while in their underwear. At least three citizens were pregnant when agents detained them. One of those women had already had the door of her home blown off while Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem watched.”
“About two dozen Americans have said they were held for more than a day without being able to phone lawyers or loved ones,” continued the report.
The findings fly in the face of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s recent assertion, in a ruling that allowed the Trump administration to use racial profiling to carry out its mass deportation agenda in Los Angeles, that “if the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a US citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go.”
Video evidence from Los Angeles has shown immigration officials carrying out what appear to be large, indiscriminate roundups of random groups of Latino people.
Meanwhile, Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, who has been at the helm of Trump’s “Operation Midway Blitz” in Chicago, has acknowledged in an interview with a local news station that immigration enforcement decides whether to detain people based on “how they look,” and suggested that the white reporter interviewing him would be less likely to be detained.
Won’t read the following on Main Street Media;
In Texas, state troopers are pulling over vehicles near construction sites. Hispanic workers with commercial driver’s licenses, decades of clean driving records, are being held for “verification.” The surveillance infrastructure in modern vehicles – every F-150 built after 2018 has cellular and GPS built in – wasn’t designed for this. Fleet tracking was for insurance and logistics. But infrastructure doesn’t care about original intent.
E-Verify is down during the government shutdown. Some smart guy at our local ICE office realized they could detain legal workers indefinitely because they “couldn’t verify” status. Now he looks good, and four documented workers from a New York construction site, all with valid paperwork, are in Buffalo detention – indefinitely – right now. Not because they’re undocumented, but because a computer system is offline.
In my opinion, the goal of Trump and his goons is to instill fear, not just in people who are not citizens, but also in all Americans who don’t fit into their concept of beauty and smart, which is a white male. They want to take us back when just being a white male guaranteed most of them a decent living and the ability to treat others like shit. I was here when that was America.
More on what is happening, don’t think it is not coming if they get the chance.
One message read, “Everyone who votes no is going to the gas chamber … Great, I love Hitler.”
Another sneered, “Can we fix the showers? Gas chambers don’t fit the Hitler aesthetic.”
These weren’t anonymous trolls lurking on the margins of the internet. They included elected officers of Republican youth organizations, embedded in party structures, cultivating power now.
If this is how the next generation of GOP leaders talks when they think nobody is listening, then the “jokes” about gas chambers today are warnings about the police state tomorrow.
And if you think that’s alarmist, look around. Nearly 60,000 human beings are currently locked away in ICE detention centers across the United States. Seven out of 10 have never been convicted of a crime.
Many were here legally, waiting for hearings, their status still pending. But under Trump, they are rounded up by masked agents, hustled into vans, and shipped off to secretive detention centers where families and lawyers can lose track of them for weeks, months, or altogether.
This year, hundreds of Venezuelans were quietly disappeared from ICE custody into El Salvador’s massive CECOT prison, a facility known internationally for torture and incommunicado confinement. No charges. No courts. No transparency. That is the textbook definition of enforced disappearance.
And Americans, by and large, are looking away.
History has seen this before. In 1933, long before Hitler launched the extermination camps, the Nazis established hundreds of smaller detention camps scattered across Germany. They called it “protective custody.” It sounded bureaucratic, even benign.
But what it meant was the creation of a parallel system where anyone could be taken, indefinitely, outside the reach of the courts.
At first it was communists and social democrats, then Jews and “asocials,” and eventually anyone who got in the regime’s way. People disappeared into those camps, and good Germans told themselves it wasn’t their business, that “the state must have its reasons.”
By the time they realized what they had normalized, it was too late.
That is the exact pattern we see unfolding here today. Trump’s enforcers don’t call it Schutzhaft. They call it “civil detention.”
And ICE has a $45 billion budget to build hundreds of these “ detention centers” all across America. Do you really think they’re just gonna stop at Brown people?