Men forced to kneel with their hands shackled behind their backs, eating from styrofoam trays like dogs. Women denied privacy, care, even dignity as they urinated in front of men. Migrants left to defecate in the clogged toilet of a prison bus they weren’t allowed to leave for over 24 hours. These are not accounts from some dark corner of global dictatorship. This is Florida. This is America. July 2025.
We should be clear: this is not a breakdown of the system. This is the system. It is designed to dehumanise. To humiliate. To break people. There is no mistake or aberration here, only the cold, calculated logic of carceral power working as intended under Trump’s second presidency and its fascist-tinged obsession with “control.”
ICE doesn’t see migrants as people. It sees them as problems to be contained, statistics to be improved, enemies to be punished. With overcrowded jails, militarised border agents, and now a new 5,000-bed monstrosity rising from the Everglades in “Alligator Alcatraz” the message couldn’t be clearer: this regime is not content with walls. It wants cages. It wants submission.
“We had to eat like animals,” one detainee named Pedro said.
The cruelty is the point.
In Miami, guards turned off surveillance cameras so they could brutalise detainees protesting the neglect of a man coughing up blood. In Krome, women were denied access to showers and forced to use the toilet in front of male detainees. In Pompano Beach, a 44-year-old Haitian woman, Marie Ange Blaise, died in custody after being denied adequate medical care. That is not “law enforcement.” That is torture.
It is no accident that immigration detention numbers have surged to over 56,000 per day, despite nearly three-quarters having no criminal history. The Trump administration doesn’t care about legality, it cares about spectacle. This is racialised mass incarceration as political theatre. It is red meat to the base. The migrant forced to kneel becomes a symbol, a warning, a flex of state power. Too many in the media and political class continue to look away.
Where is the moral outrage from the Democrats? Where is the walkout in Congress? Where is the national day of protest? Biden’s (who is the replacement?) party, now in shambles and retreat, helped construct the architecture of ICE, expanded deportations, and fortified the border. Now Trump’s gang is using that very infrastructure for a campaign of terror. The liberals built the jail. The fascists are filling it.
This is not about “bad apples.” This is about a rotting barrel, politically and institutionally. A human rights crisis is unfolding on US soil with full federal backing. The echoes of Abu Ghraib are not just metaphorical. They are method. Strip the prisoner. Break their body. Steal their dignity. Then say it was all for security.
Make no mistake: these are crimes.
One day, those responsible must be held to account.
