Yes, They Are Prison Camps -- Digby

[erronis]

https://digbysblog.net/2026/05/04/yes-they-are-prison-camps/

The White House says they have to close the watchdog office because of lack of funds. I'm not kidding.

Here's an excerpt from the Washington Post story (gift link)

Like many of the immigrant men held in a cramped Alaska jail last summer, Cantu Rios, then 68, had grown frustrated and restless, locked in a small cell with no windows and no access to his personal belongings, he recalled in an interview conducted in Spanish.

As he ate in the communal room, he overheard some detainees complaining to a guard about needing their things.Minutes later, according to documents and interviews, a throng of guards arrived wielding gun-like weapons. They fired plastic spheres the size of gumballs into the room, which burst into orange clouds of chemical dust.

Cantu Rios, who suffers from a lung condition, said he was left gasping for air. He stumbled to his cell and put a towel over his face.

"I thought I was going to die," he said.

[...]

The incident was one of at least 780 in which staff members at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities used physical force or chemical agents to control immigrant detainees during the first year of the Trump administration, a Washington Post investigation has found, based on a trove of ICE records obtained from a government employee. They shared the records on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the disclosures.

We already know that ICE and CBP are out of control. But I think what's public is just the tip of the iceberg. Between this and the Kafkaesque horror of dumping people off in countries they've never been, without money and where they don't speak the language this country is already reaching crimes against humanity levels. What else are they doing?

There has to be a reckoning for this or we will be lost forever.