A future Democratic-controlled Congress should take up the job that Obama and the party’s old guard abandoned: put strict limits on the use of drones that won’t simply be alternately loosened and tightened by whichever president comes to power, explicitly outlawing “targeted killing” and any other attempt at finding a loophole for the already existing ban on assassinations; finally repeal the 2001 Authorization of the Use of Military Force that has been serially abused by presidents to fight often secret wars all over the world; end mass surveillance, whether in the form of the National Security Agency’s warrantless backdoor searches that Democrats actually expanded under Joe Biden, or in the warrantless spying that the Department of Homeland Security and other agencies now do through private data brokers; close the Guantanamo Bay prison camp that Trump is now trying to send migrants to; and embark on a twenty-first-century version of the Church Committee to investigate and lay bare national security abuses.
Archiv: booting the camps
Designed To Enact Suffering
The Senate‘s barely-there approval – fuck Shady Vance – of Trump‘s heinous 900-page bill represents the largest transfer of wealth to the rich in U.S. history along with the largest cut to Medicaid and food assistance, all in the obscene name of (partly) funding a $975 billion tax break for the already richest 1%. The bill, „a tipping point between normality and fascism,“ also pours over $170.7 billion into „a campaign of extermination against immigrants that evokes the greatest human rights atrocities of the past,“ funding the hiring of vastly more Nazi thugs to terrorize, humiliate and put in cages millions of brown people who do much of this country‘s work.
It will kick about 16 million people off health insurance by cutting over $1 trillion from Medicaid, because who needs health insurance. It will throw millions of poor families, veterans, the elderly and disabled off SNAP by cutting $285 billion in food assistance, because who needs food. It will cut funding to rural hospitals, nursing homes, student loans, wind and solar energy – electric bills will soar 30% – costing millions of jobs and adding almost $4 trillion to the national debt, to be paid by our children and grandchildren, one of many excellent reasons it‘s said to be the most unpopular legislation since passage of the economically disastrous Embargo Act of 1807.
This Tattoo Could Land You in Guantánamo
Yes, the U.S. government is using tattoos, sometimes nothing more than a name, a date, or even a tribute to a favorite athlete, as justification to label migrants as “gang-affiliated” and ship them off to Guantánamo Bay.
Take Luis Castillo, a 23-year-old Venezuelan asylum-seeker, who was detained at the border and later sent to Guantánamo simply because he had a Michael Jordan tattoo.
Let that sink in.
Re: Urgent Request for Access to and Information Regarding Immigrants Transferred from the United States and Detained at Guantánamo Bay
(February 7, 2025)
Dear Secretary Noem, Secretary Hegseth, and Secretary Rubio:
We write on behalf of the undersigned immigrants‘ rights and civil rights organizations to request immediate access to the noncitizens transferred from immigration detention facilities in the United States and currently detained at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
Since February 4, 2025, the government has transferred nearly two dozen noncitizens to Guantánamo, without providing any information about their circumstances or the government’s legal authority for these unprecedented actions. The government has also announced that it is planning to send tens of thousands of additional immigration detainees to Guantánamo in the near future.
The Constitution, and federal and international law prohibit the government from using Guantánamo as a legal black hole. We therefore request that the government provide our organizations access to the noncitizens detained at Guantánamo so that those individuals will have access to legal counsel, and so advocates and the public can understand the conditions
under which the government is detaining them. We also request basic information that the public has a right to know regarding the noncitizens being sent to Guantánamo and the government’s plans for them.
(…)
Sincerely,
American Civil Liberties Union
Americans for Immigrant Justice
Amica Center
American Gateways
Center for Constitutional Rights
Haitian Bridge Alliance
Human Rights First
International Refugee Assistance Project
Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center
Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the SF Bay Area
National Immigrant Justice Center
National Immigration Law Center
Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services
Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights
Texas Civil Rights Project
‚He‘s Building a Concentration Camp‘: Fears Grow as Images Emerge of Offshore Prison at Gitmo
(February 9, 2025)
Fears are growing that the offshore U.S. detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are an ominous sign of what President Donald Trump has in store as he further disregards the rule of law and normalizes actions that previously would have been unthinkable or faces immediate, bipartisan opposition in Congress.
After the first pictures emerged Saturday of still unidentified persons transferred to the island from the U.S. mainland by immigration officials, progressive journalist Nathan Robinson was among those raising the alarm, accusing Trump of „building a concentration camp and deliberately putting it where it is hardest to monitor or enforce the law.“
A Tent City Is Rising at Guantánamo Bay
(February 8, 2025)
On Friday a military cargo plane transported deportees from El Paso, Texas, to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. They are among the latest arrivals in the Trump administration’s week-old migrant relocation operation.
Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, is the first senior member of the Trump administration to visit the migrant mission on the base.
So far, none of the first arrivals have been taken to an emerging tent city that has been set up for migrants. Instead, they have been housed in the military prison.
Trump says he’s ordering Guantanamo Bay to be prepared to host up to 30,000 migrants
“Today, I’m also signing an executive order to instruct the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security to begin preparing the 30,000-person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay,” Trump said from the White House.
“Most people don’t even know about it. We have 30,000 beds in Guantanamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. This will double our capacity immediately.”
While signing Laken Riley Act, Trump says he’ll send ‘worst’ criminal migrants to Guantanamo
“Some of them are so bad that we don’t even trust the countries to hold them because we don’t want them coming back, so we’re gonna send ’em out to Guantanamo,” Trump said. He said that he would soon sign an executive order directing federal officials to get facilities in Cuba ready to receive migrant criminals.
White House backs Stephen Miller amid white nationalist allegations
“I work with Stephen. I know Stephen. He loves this country and hates bigotry in all forms – and it deeply concerns me as to why so many on the left consistently attack Jewish members of this Administration,” deputy White House press secretary Hogan Gidley said in a statement.
Stephen Miller Must Go
Leaked emails show Stephen Miller peddling white nationalist conspiracy theories, ranting about “white genocide” and obsessing over the loss of Confederate monuments in the wake of Dylann Roof’s South Carolina terror attack. Now he’s in the White House directing mass human rights abuses against immigrants at the border, from family separations to child detentions.
We cannot allow white nationalists in the White House. Sign below to call for Stephen Miller’s immediate resignation.
“If we have a white nationalist at the helm of US immigration policy, policy will become increasingly more fascistic,” @AOC tells @chrislhayes. “So long as Stephen Miller is in charge… hundreds of thousands of people‘s lives are going to be in danger.“
On the 1st day of school in Mississippi, kindergarteners were begging ICE agents to see their parents. This cruel raid had one purpose: to terrorize and torment. If you aren’t outraged, you aren’t paying attention #defundhate #defundICE #AbolishICE #FamiliesBelongTogether
The notion of dismantling ICE is nowhere near as radical as the destructive 2003 decision to establish ICE – an extrajudicial enforcement agency that controls a black-box network of for-profit detention centers accountable to no one, even when people die – in the first place.
One of the reasons they did that is because the children would cry, and the older kids figured out that when they cried the guards got angry. So the best thing they could do was to protect these children. It was protecting all of them.
CBP is detaining American citizens. How would you feel trapped in a border camp, where guards wear face masks because the human odor is so strong? When we allow the rights of some to be violated, the rights of all are not far behind.
Looks like all American born residents will have to carry passports and birth certificates well those of color. Shameful.
A Dallas-born citizen picked up by the Border Patrol has been detained for three weeks
Francisco Galicia told his mother, who lives in Edinburg, that he was detained because he didn’t have his U.S. passport. But she said he did present CBP with his Texas ID.
Galicia wasn’t allowed to use the phone for the three weeks he was in CBP custody, Sanjuana said. But he has been able to make collect calls to his mother since since Saturday, when Galicia was transferred to ICE’s custody.
‘You don’t think that having 10,000 officers in a violent, racist group sharing rape memes of members of Congress points to any concern of a dehumanized culture?’ — @AOC pressed DHS Sec. Kevin McAleenan after he denied a dehumanized culture within Border Patrol
AOC to DHS chief: Border agents shared ‚images of my violent rape‘ in secret Facebook group
He was also asked several times about a secret Facebook group of current and former Border Patrol agents that contained more than 10,000 members and included posts mocking migrants and the deaths of children in custody and suggesting harm to Democratic lawmakers. After the group‘s existence was revealed by a ProPublica report, McAleenan announced DHS was investigating the „disturbing“ and „inexcusable“ posts.
‘They Are Human Beings’: Homeland Security Faulted for Treatment of Migrant Children
The hearing came a week after the committee released findings of an analysis of the more than 2,600 migrant children separated from their parents last year under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, which has since been suspended. Democrats grilled Mr. McAleenan over the rollout of the policy, as well as over the discovery of a secret Facebook group for Border Patrol agents that included offensive messages, including obscene images of members of Congress.
Part of the #Squad? Raise your hand and tell this racist Administration to #CloseTheCamps:
Excellent idea. @SenSanders should run with it. Most of DHS is corporate welfare. Those against would have wanted us to keep Japanese internment camps open forever & let DHS run it.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on the 2020 Presidential Race and Why We Should Break Up Homeland Security
It‘s hard to recall a newly elected freshman representative to Congress who has made a bigger impact than Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Her primary victory for New York‘s Fourteenth District seat—as a young woman of color beating out a long-established white male incumbent—was big news, and Ocasio-Cortez has been generating headlines almost daily ever since. Practically the day she took her seat in Congress, Ocasio-Cortez became the hero of the left wing of the Democrats and a favored villain of Fox News and the right.
Ocasio-Cortez wants to ax Homeland Security. Some conservatives didn’t want it to begin with.
The usefulness of a Department of Homeland Security, however, wasn’t always taken for granted. President George W. Bush’s administration initially had “zero interest” in creating a new department to protect against terrorism, The Washington Post previously reported. Vice President Richard B. Cheney thought it would needlessly increase the size of government.
“Creating a Cabinet post doesn’t solve the problem,” White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said in March 2002, according to The Post.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Wants to Dismantle Department of Homeland Security
In an interview with “The New Yorker Radio Hour,” Ocasio-Cortez repeated her call for the abolition of ICE—Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Host David Remnick asked Ocasio-Cortez if she would get rid of the Department of Homeland Security, as well.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez: “I think so. I think so. I think we need to undo a lot of the egregious mistakes that the Bush administration did.