ICE Agents And Detainees Living In Diseased Djibouti Shipping Container
It's ICE times, not nice times.
ICE kidnappings have now reached the art house film phase of ironic cruelty, with eight immigrants from Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, Cuba, Mexico, and South Sudan, and 11 ICE agents living together in a shipping container at the US Navy base, Camp Lemonnier, in broiling-hot, malaria-choked Djibouti, the African country right across the gulf from Yemen.
PREVIOUSLY!
Any violence-prone GED-havers considering signing up for an ICE job, dig if you will a picture: The detainees and agents are living together in a shipping-container space that was meant to be a conference room, furnished with bunk beds. Because the space was never designed to be a prison, the lighting in the container is “limited,” and the detainees are being guarded by six agents working two shifts in there with them 24/7, and the agents have to accompany them to the bathroom and the medical suite.
And there’s surely been a lot of trips to both places. Within 72 hours of arrival the agents and detainees came down with fevers, and Kristi Noem or whoever’s decision to send them to Djibouti was so rushed and half-assed, no medication was sent along with them. None of them got any of the vaccinations or anti-malarial drugs that the WHO recommends for travel to Africa either, and two weeks later, the detainees and agents still don’t have adequate medications, according to a declaration from the Acting Deputy Executive Associate Director for DHS, ICE and ERO (Enforcement and Removal Operations), Mellissa (two Ls) Harper.
Welcome to Satan’s summer camp! It gets worse! Right by the base is a burn pit that gets fired up every night to incinerate all the poop and trash of the 4,000-plus people who live and work there. And because the average temperature of Djibouti in June is 103 during the day and 90 at night with few breezes, the toxic poop-trash smoke hangs over the base all the time. In spite of wearing K95 masks even to sleep, some of the officers have needed medical attention for their poop-particle-choked respiratory systems.
More hellishly still, the base is also under constant threat of attack from the Houthis across the gulf in Yemen, and they are extra angry because Pete Hegseth has been bombing residential buildings there, *HIC*, as he detailed in that group chat.
That’s just how hellbent DHS apparently is to hurry up and break that law before a judge can stop them, as part of a larger rushed and blundering program to send detainees to third countries where they are not from, and then claim no-take-backsies.
Apparently DHS was so frantic to find somewhere to send these detainess, it didn’t even give a day’s notice to the base that they were coming; having the detainees foisted on the base as unexpected guests has distracted from military readiness with disruption and less resources for the base, too.
This trip from hell embarked on May 22, with the administration defying a court order from federal Judge Brian Murphy to give the eight detained migrants “meaningful opportunity” to argue that sending them to a country they’ve never been to would threaten their safety. But some of the countries would not take them back, and with the guy from Mexico, the administration appears to have not even asked.
First, DHS was going to send them to civil-war-torn Libya, or Rwanda, as they did with one Iraqi detainee. Then it was supposed to be South Sudan, but South Sudan would not take them, and Judge Murphy blocked their removal to there too. And South Africa was also mentioned.
The outraged judge demanded that DHS,
“maintain custody and control of class members currently being removed to South Sudan or to any other third country, to ensure the practical feasibility of return if the Court finds that such removals were unlawful.”
And then they popped up in Djibouti, surprise! By having them on a military base, at least they are doing that, and not just kicking them out of the plane over the sea, like Pinochet?
DHS spokesghoul Tricia McLaughlin knows who to blame for this horror: the judge, of course, for “putting the lives of our ICE law enforcement in danger by stranding them in Djibouti without proper resources, lack of medical care, and terrorists who hate Americans running rampant.”
Every day is opposite day! So what’s the plan now, just going to leave them there forever? So it would seem.
ICE has been struggling to figure out what to do with all that human chattel. Even though they are out of space in their detention-jails, and running out of money, Kristi Noem says they have bumped up arrest quotas from 1,800 to 3,000 a day, faster than the GEO Group can build its for-profit private prisons.
And protests have been erupting all over:
San Diego, after ICE raided an Italian restaurant based on a tip from 2020 that somebody there might not have papers.
SHAME! SHAME! SHAME! SHAME! That’s right, back up, you masked pussies dressed up like the invasion of Fallujah to arrest some pasta chefs! San Diego isn’t scared of you!
Minneapolis, where protestors mistook DEA agents for ICE agents, which is what happens when ICE agents play dress-up all the time and nobody can tell who anybody is any more.
Boston, where agents dragged off 18-year-old Marcelo Gomes Da Silva, a Brazilian national who entered the US in 2012 when he was a small child, on a student visa that’s lapsed. He was about to graduate high school with honors and was on his way to volleyball practice. Students staged a walkout and protest. And guess what, IT WORKED. Da Silva has been released!
And Chicago. Last word to Chicago alderperson for the 26th ward Jessie Fuentes, who fucking BROUGHT IT and gives us so much energy. Watch it again and again, and send it to your friends!
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Is this still a winning issue for Trump? No! More Americans disapprove of this disgusting spectacle than not, 49 percent, though 47 percent approve, somehow.
One nicer thing, the administration has brought back a different wrongfully deported detainee, as Judge Brian Murphy had demanded. A gay Guatemalan asylum seeker, identified as OCG, was sent to Mexico, with no due process, in violation of a direct court order, with the administration lying to the judge that OCG said he was not afraid for his safety in Mexico, when in fact OCG had claimed that he had previously been kidnapped and raped in Mexico. Now OCG is back in the US, the first example yet of the administration doing what we all knew all along it could and following a court order to facilitate his return.
Will there be more of that? Let’s hope so! We shall see.
[NYT / Guardian / The Atlantic]
My sympathy for the ICE agents does not exist.
I'll just drop this off:
Uncovered The Human Hat
@kenwhite.bsky.social
We don’t need to back off the American Gestapo and we don’t need to respect its agents. People exercising state violence are not entitled to anonymity. Nor are the people directing the state violence.
Aaron Rupar
@atrupar.com
1h
MIKE JOHNSON: From the people who mandated mask wearing for years, it's absurd. They need to back off ICE & respect our agents
Q: So you're ok w/agents not identifying themselves when they're arresting migrants?
J: Why, so they can target them? So they can put names and faces online and dox them?
https://bsky.app/profile/kenwhite.bsky.social/post/3lqx6njcfxc26