Cuban man’s death at El Paso tent camp ruled a homicide

Welcome to our news segment: TL;DR of Immigration News, for when the news is Too Long and you Didn’t Read it.

This is a weekly collection of immigration-related news stories. These bite-size summaries will keep you up to date without overwhelming your inbox.
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Cuban man’s death at El Paso tent camp ruled a homicide

Ignoring the long and bloody history of abuse in ICE detention facilities, the brownshirts are now claiming that Geraldo Lunas Campos’s death in a detention facility in El Paso was the result of the staff’s “spontaneous use of force” to “prevent him from harming himself.” The government changed its story only after the local medical examiner ruled that this death was a homicide due to asphyxia.

Before that report, ICE claimed Campos’s death was caused by “medical distress,” an Orwellian way to describe having your chest and windpipe crushed. In addition to the ME’s report, the Texas Tribune notes that six other El Paso detainees testified that Lunas Campos begged for days to receive his asthma medication, but detention staff refused. We continue to pray that brave documentation like this will lead to those responsible being held accountable soon.
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Letters From the Children Detained at ICE’s Dilley Facility

ProPublica has published a truly heartbreaking trove of letters from children detained at Dilley Detention Center in Texas. While DHS and the private company who runs the facility, CoreCivic, both use words like "sufficient" and talk about “oversight” to ensure “proper medical care,” the letters from children held in the facility unanimously tell a different story.

The children range in age from 9 to 17. Their letters describe constant feelings of misery, fear, and depression, receiving poor medical care in the face of constant sickness among detainees, and being subjected to aggressive guards who don’t seem constrained by laws or rules. A 14-year-old girl describes the conditions as “hell like.”

Legally, the longest a child can be held in immigration detention is 20 days. Of the writers of the 8 letters featured, one child was on his 20th day at the time of writing. The others had all been detained well over this amount. A 9-year-old girl writes “I have been 50 days” in Dilley, and “I want to go to my country.” Indeed, another common thread in the letters is children pleading to either be sent back to the home they’ve made in the U.S. or sent to their country of origin--anywhere but Dilley.
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How Trump Will Fill His Gulags

For 45 years, the US has had an orderly process for admitting refugees fleeing persecution. Applicants went through extensive vetting before coming to the US, and, after a year (with no detention) usually obtained a green card .

However, since January, DHS lawyers have newly interpreted a section of the 1980 Refugee Act to mean they have the authority to keep refugees detained for days, months, or even years while assessing their eligibility for a green card. According to this interpretation, some 100,000 refugees could be locked up. It suggests that the government’s plan to fill the warehouses it is buying and converting to detention centers rests on ignoring the laws that control its operations.

In yet another reinterpretation of a decades-long immigration law (this one from 1996), the Trump administration announced in July that anyone who entered the country without permission, no matter how long ago, must be detained without bond for as long as it takes for the government to get their removal order—a process that can take years.

As of early January, some 300 federal judges had found the policy illegal.

The Supreme Court has already stepped in to essentially pause constitutional protections that have gotten in the way of the administration’s immigration crackdown. Last June, it allowed the government to proceed with deporting immigrants with final removal orders to so-called “third countries” even though this is a blatant violation of due process and other laws.

On April 1, the Supreme Court will hear arguments over Trump’s January 2025 executive order that attempts to revoke birthright citizenship. Almost certainly, the Court will be called on to hear arguments about these other novel detention policies. It remains to be seen whether the Court will continue to be complicit in the Trump regime’s attempts at ethnic cleansing.

Political Education Corner

Why ‘Flooding the Zone’ Works for Trump

NOTE: some useful analysis of how we get news. We highly recommend clicking through and reading this whole thing!

Feeling overwhelmed by the news coming across your transom? That’s a deliberate authoritarian strategy, described by white nationalist Steve Bannon as “flooding the zone” with enough outrageous news to confound our collective attention, multiplying disturbing events like many-headed monsters.

Resources at major news outlets have been made scarce by decades of austerity, so few journalists have the resources to cover the news, let alone connect for their readers the reasons that the seemingly endless barrage is taking place. The conventions of the hard-pressed news industry favor clickbait simplicity over complexity.

The resulting confusion gives ample cover to an administration devoid of attention to law or protocol. “And the gap between “what happened” and “what’s happening” is where this administration operates. They’ve been counting on it.

It’s important to remember that things only seem unplanned and chaotic. The current administration remains lock-step with the Project 2025 script, a coherent if dastardly plan to take the US deeper into white nationalist authoritarianism.

If you’re overwhelmed and burnt out, take care of yourself. But keep learning about what’s happening, ideally in dialogue with folks you trust. We need all of us together to maintain our collective sanity so we can understand the flood and brace one another against it!

Abolition Vs. Empire, At Home As It Is Abroad

As the Trump administration drags us into yet another war with Iran, the content team thought it would be important to highlight one piece of writing that connects what our government has chosen to do abroad and the brutal persecution of immigrants (and those who choose to help them) here at home.

In an article for The Nation, Forever Wars blogger Spencer Ackerman excavates the recent history of DHS and ICE’s (recent!) formation in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and what it meant for the American War on Terror to be waged against immigrants on our home soil while troops were sent abroad. And what this all means now that ICE has chosen to attack citizens for protesting its treatment of immigrants. Read the commentary here on the Forever Wars page and read the entire essay on The Nation website.

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Action items:

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