We Had Whistles, They Had Guns

Yes.

And I know you touched a bit on profitability.

How much does ICE make off of this detention, off of long-term detention, off of people being held or moved around? And is there any form of accountability that we've seen at all for these types of releases where people are just released into the woods or in a random spot or, or with nothing?

Yeah.

So I think we have to talk about, um, how much money this Congress has invested into immigration enforcement.

So since twenty twenty-five, Congress has, um, given nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars to ICE, to Border Patrol, to the Department of Justice for immigration enforcement.

That money is our taxpayer dollars.

Much of that money is coming from cuts to social service, social services.

So we've seen Medicaid cut, we've seen NAP-- SNAP, we've seen other types of social service programs that help all of our communities thrive gutted in order to pay for this mass deportation and mass detention machine being implemented by the Trump administration.

In addition, many, many of the detention centers where people will be transferred to are operated by private prison companies, and there are dozens of other contractors that are making money off of the cruelty of the system.

And that is so dangerous because if you have a private company that is operating a detention center, they are more concerned with their profit margins than the humanity and the human rights of the people they are detaining inside.

And that is so often the reason why we see conditions in detention so cruel and so outside the bounds of US human rights, um, obligations, because instead of an obligation to, um, civil standards, there is an obligation to making money.

So when we see people that are released from detention into the community, um, there's rarely any accountability.

There's rarely, rarely ever, you know, accountability for even unjustly detaining someone in the first place.

This is an administration that has repeatedly violated the law.

So many of these short-term processing centers, um, the treatment of people inside have been litigated.

Um, and yet, like if you think of Baltimore holding, right? So American University is in DC.

Right next to Maryland.

People that are detained in Maryland will oftentimes go to the Baltimore holding facility in Baltimore, and that is a facility where we have consistently seen these harsh conditions and there has been repeated litigation despite the fact that judges have said time and time again that people cannot be held there under these conditions.

ICE continues to do so because they don't feel the need to follow the law anymore.

And it's, you know, a very similar thing in that in detention system, um, run by ICE, there is very, very little accountability.

For years, ICE has had in the law the obligation to shut down any facility that fails an inspection two years or more, and yet there has never been a facility that has been shut down for that reason.

And so when we're talking about the abuse and the cruelty that exists in immigration detention centers, these are detention facilities that have been existing for decades without real accountability.

So detention facilities have been abusive and deadly and cruel and illegal for years and years, and what we're seeing now is a purposeful worsening of conditions.

The Trump administration has really adopted a policy by which they want to make the experience of immigration detention, like, so cruel, so painful that it forces people to, like, sign their own deportations as a mechanism to get out of detention instead of actually having standards that are upheld that have teeth to make it such that anybody who is in detention can have their rights upheld.