Malice Is the Agenda — and Here's What It Looks Like

[Content Note: Nativism; concentration camps.]

U.S. Border Patrol has insisted that the appalling conditions in which migrants and refugees are detained at the southern border "are necessary to stem the flow" of people seeking refuge in the United States. The Trump Regime asserts that their nativist malice is a "deterrent," which is abject dishonesty.

Desperate people are fleeing violence, climate change, unemployment, and/or hunger. Parents bringing their children on the terrifying, perilous journey to the U.S. are trying to save their children's lives. And their own. That Trump wants them to fucking die can't be a deterrent when death lies at the other end of their journey, too. Making torture and death possible outcomes of seeking asylum won't end asylum-seeking — it will just make it less safe.

The sadistic architects of the Trump Regime's immigration policy want it both ways: They claim they are harming migrants and refugees as an allegedly effective deterrent, while simultaneously asserting that they can't help but torture people in concentration camps because their numbers are overwhelming the U.S.'s resources.

So, not an effective deterrent then. But we aren't meant to scrutinize the inherent contradiction in their bullshit justifications for their institutional abuse, nor are we meant to talk about how the detentions are unnecessary, as people could (and should be) released with a notice to return for a later court date, nor are we meant to talk about anything else that exposes the Trump Regime's deadly cruelty for the rank fascism that it is.

But let's talk about it, anyway. Let's talk about it with anyone and everyone who will listen, because our silence will be deadly for increasing numbers of people detained in these hells.

Yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General released its final report on overcrowding at several border facilities in the Rio Grande Valley, and it included in the report photographs that reveal the extent of the horror.

This is but one of the images. There are more. Some of them show people lying in cages or rooms packed in so tightly that there is no room to walk. Others show people stuffed into tiny rooms at double the capacity, so that none of them can sit or lie down. They are all forced to stand, packed in like sardines.

At BuzzFeed, Hamed Aleaziz notes of the above photo that "inspectors indicated that 82 men were held in a cell with a maximum capacity of 41."

This is horrific.

You know what to do: MAKE NOISE. Make it any way you can. Just don't be silent. Please.

RESIST.