The Intercept’s and ICIJ’s reporting, which included a groundbreaking review of more than 8,400 reports describing placements of ICE detainees in solitary confinement, found that the immigration agency has used isolation cells to punish immigrants for offenses as minor as consensual kissing, and to segregate hunger strikers, LGBTQ detainees, and people with disabilities.
In nearly a third of the cases, detainees were described as having a mental illness, which made them especially vulnerable to breakdown if locked up alone in a small cell. Records reviewed by ICIJ describe detainees in isolation mutilating their genitals, gouging their eyes, cutting their wrists, and smearing their cells with feces.
(And yes, Solitary Confinement is torture. It is seen as torture by all relevant psychological authorities and the UN.)
Another thing worth noting - the detainees here are not considered “prisoners” under federal law and are not being held for punitive reasons. Despite that, these detainment centers have sent prisoners to be tortured for refusing “voluntary” work (or, to put it less euphemistically, slave labor).
Back in 2015, when the whistleblower behind this story first tried to fix things within the system, DHS did try to take some steps to fix things. It failed - ICE continued to torture its detainees despite the demands of DHS. Since then, the executive branch and DHS have changed hands. Unfortunately, the data stops in the middle of 2017, so it’s hard to say how much worse things have gotten in the two years since then. That said, other reporting from groups such as the ACLU as to the conditions in these concentration camps may help shed some light on this.
The long and short of it: the USA is running concentration camps for migrants near the southern border.
These camps consistently torture people, explicitly targeting the disabled, the mentally ill, and LGBT individuals for said torture.
This is happening under an administration whose president seems to believe we should be shooting immigrants and is pardoning war criminals who are being court-martialed for murdering civilians in Iraq, and where the head of the DHS was fired for being unwilling to break the law on the president’s behalf. What’s going on now is a moral atrocity the likes of which the US hasn’t seen on US soil since at least the Japanese internment camps of World War II, possibly longer. But more importantly, there’s damn good reason to believe that it’s going to get worse.
