Straining At Gnats

 So, this happened:

Sakeik said she was transferred between three different detention centers, and at various points faced harrowing conditions. During her first transfer, she was on a bus for 16 hours. “We were not given any water or food, and we could smell the driver eating Chick-fil-A,” she said. “We would ask for water, bang on the door for food, and he would just turn up the radio and act like he wasn’t listening to us.”

Sakeik said she did not eat because she was fasting for Ramadan. Eventually, she said: “I broke my fast next to a toilet in the intake room.”

At the Prairieland detention center, Sakeik said there was so much dust that “women are getting sick left and right”.

“The restrooms are also very, very, very much unhygienic. The beds have rust everywhere. They’re not properly maintained. And cockroaches, grasshoppers, spiders, you name it, all over the facility. Girls would get bit.”

Throughout, Sakeik was preoccupied with the worry that she would be deported. Had she been sent to Israel without documents proving her nationality, she worried she would be arrested.

“I was criminalized for being stateless, something that I absolutely have no control over,” she said. “I didn’t choose to be stateless … I had no choice.”

The Department of Homeland Security has claimed Sakeik was flagged because she “chose to fly over international waters and outside the US customs zone and was then flagged by CBP [Customs and Border Protection] trying to re-enter the continental US”.

But the Virgin Islands are a US territory – and no passport is required to visit there.

And, quite separately, this happened:

After she was arrested by ICE in Lenoir City, she ended up at the Richwood Correctional Center in Louisiana, where she experienced the unimaginable. After pleading for medical help for days, she lost her mid-term pregnancy.

“I had him inside here for three days, in this Louisiana facility, my baby dead in my stomach, inside my stomach for three days, dead,” she said.

Monterroso-Lemus’s experience in detention comes amid the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigrants and the mounting claims of abuse and discrimination tied to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrests across the country. In Nashville, ICE and the Tennessee Highway Patrol officials recently made 588 traffic stops in predominantly Latino neighborhoods as part of a joint operation that led to the arrests of 196 undocumented residents. Despite claims that ICE was only targeting criminals, fewer than half had prior criminal records. As the Banner reported, in the overnight operation between May 3 and 4, THP made more than twice as many traffic stops as Metro Nashville police did during both days combined, fueling allegations of racial profiling.

Questions remain about the identities of those arrested and what conditions they face once detained. On May 14, ICE Acting Director Todd M. Lyons announced that nine detainees have died in custody since Trump took office, reigniting concerns about the quality of medical care in immigration detention centers. The deaths have drawn attention to the treatment of immigrants while in ICE custody, including pregnant women, who, under recent Democratic administrations, had been largely shielded from detention.

With little to no outcry. Meanwhile, outrage continues that Jeffrey Epstein was able to kill himself in prison. People who’ve never known anyone in prison and probably couldn’t find the closest one to them with Google Maps, are sure such a thing is impossible, and Mr. Epstein must have been murdered.

I wrote about Epstein’s suicide and how the disbelief about it shows a lack of familiarity with how inhuman America’s prison’s are. It remains one of the things that made people maddest (not saying jail is bad, disbelieving he was murdered).

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/thirty-two-stories-jeffrey-epstein-prison-death/596029/

Mostly because that’s what they want to believe. This may, or may not, be true as well:

There was never an “Epstein List.”

Every single person who is deeply familiar with the case has always known that.

Attorneys representing Epstein victims told me that.

But here’s the issue: on Fox News earlier this year, Attorney General Pam Bondi said she had the list on her desk to review.

There’s not going to be any nationwide conversation about what those two (among many) women reported about ICE custody. There’s barely a conversation about masked men dragging people off the streets into vans, never to be seen again. That’s the stuff of dystopian nightmares, yet when it happens IRL…

But conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein thrive. He was rich so he must have been able to get away with it until someone finally killed him, at the behest of other rich men.

“But he was a billionaire!”

All they saw was another subhuman inmate in prisoner’s clothes. They didn’t care.

“He had dirt on powerful figures!”

The feds already grabbed everything. If he had a bargaining chip, he would’ve used it. All he had left was life in prison as a convicted child-abuser.

He had nothing to get him out, no-one was coming to his rescue, and all he had to look forward to was either living in solitary 24/7 or getting shanked to death by other inmates.

That he took the quick way out to avoid that makes a helluva lot more sense than some conspiracy to assassinate him.

Sometimes, even money doesn’t matter. But the people in ICE custody? Eh; they aren’t rich, they aren’t scandalous they aren’t associated with the rich and famous. Sure, our government is being cruel, even savage in our name, but these people are virtually anonymous. Who’s ever heard of them? Who cares?

Aye, there’s the rub…