The botched UK eVisa scheme needs to be investigated.
The Home Office failed to assess the risks of a digital-only scheme. As a result, migrants have experienced widespread data errors, inaccessible design and technical failures.
"As long as my record stands in federal court, any American citizen can be held in prison or concentration camps without trial or hearing. I would like to see the government admit they were wrong and do something about it, so this will never happen again to any American citizen of any race, creed, or color." - Fred Korematsu
At this point, I think we're probably still a long way from identifying the full web of influence, corruption, and misappropriation of resources behind Governor Ron DeSantis' concentration camp in the Florida Everglades, the obnoxiously named "Alligator Alcatraz." As such I'm going to keep this post pretty brief; more or less to keep the issue on our radar as more information emerges.
With that caveat noted however, this Talking Points Memo article talks about the outlet's extremely nascent investigation into how DeSantis built the concentration camp, who paid for it, and who profits from it. Would it surprise you to learn that Florida's fascist governor is using a fake "emergency" to make this monstrous bullshit happen, the money trail is a hot mess, and Florida taxpayers are going to be the folks footing the bill for Ron's nazi apology to Downmarket Mussolini? Yeah, it didn't surprise me either.
Contracts Show Millions of Dollars and Diverted Disaster Resources Were Used to Build DeSantis’ ‘Alligator Alcatraz’
"TPM has obtained and analyzed over a dozen contracts and invoices related to the construction and operation of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” migrant detention camp in the Everglades. The documents identify eight previously undisclosed companies — including two firms with a Fortune 500 pedigree — involved with the controversial facility. They also show that, in at least one instance, resources allocated for the state’s “disaster preparedness” apparatus were diverted to the site as DeSantis’ office used emergency powers to quickly establish the camp, causing a shortfall that needs to be addressed during the ongoing hurricane season."
I must confess that part of me feels like I'm insulting my readers' intelligence when I remind folks, over and over again, that nightmare concentration camps for migrants, many of whom are guilty of nothing more than a civil violation, would be an unacceptable eliminationist outrage even if nobody was profiteering from it and it cost the public coffers zero dollars. In the grand scheme of things the lies, corruption, and misappropriation of public funds are a side story compared to the fact that we've just opened a real as fuck concentration camp in a remote part of Florida and there are already reports of widespread human rights abuses and unsafe conditions emerging mere weeks after "Alligator Alcratraz" opened. With that having been said, informed observers must know by now that the rich nazis running the larger American fascist movement do have designs on profiting from fascist repression, ethnic cleansing, and the migrant carceral complex - and projects like Alligator Alcatraz demonstrate how that odious business functions.
If you want to know the names of the eleven companies already identified as working with the government of Florida to make this eliminationist bullshit possible, who is getting paid for what, and how many of the folks directly profiting from this are DeSantis donors (there are several) I recommend you just read the article. The short version here however is that like Trump, DeSantis has declared "an alarming number of migrants in Florida" to be a state level crisis, he then used emergency powers to divert a bunch of money, including from disaster prevention and relief funding in a state notorious for having a "hurricane season," to build a fucking concentration camp surrounded by alligators as a make up gift for his ally and former GOP nomination opponent, President Trump. Along the way a bunch of very shitty companies are raking in the money for substandard work, and the entire DeSantis administration is working overtime to keep as much of this as possible a complete secret from anyone who might be in a position to conduct any oversight on this genocidal nazi boondoggle. Think "Halliburton in post-Saddam Iraq" but on a smaller scale.
While Kristi Noem's Department of Homeland Security and the ICE Gestapo are certainly working hard to keep the horrifying conditions inside our concentration camps a secret, the reality is that more evidence supporting the whistleblowers accounts above keeps emerging every day. Take for example this February 10th Guardian piece about an Irish man held for five months in a Texas concentration camp; a story that likely held the national media's interest only because the kidnapped man was white, but is more important to us here because his testimony matches closely enough with the reports of abuses that amounted to intentional torture we've already seen, to suggest this is a systemic atrocity.
Irish man held in ICE detention says he fears for his life and asks Ireland for help
"An Irish man who has been held by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement for five months despite having a valid work permit and no criminal record says he fears for his life and has appealed for help from Ireland’s government.
Seamus Culleton said conditions at his detention centre in Texas were akin to “torture” and that the atmosphere was volatile. “I’m not in fear of the other inmates. I’m afraid of the staff. They’re capable of anything.”
Speaking from the El Paso facility to Ireland’s RTÉ radio, Culleton implored the taoiseach, Micheál Martin, to raise his case with Donald Trump when he visits the White House next month for St Patrick’s Day celebrations."
First of all, virtually no other outlet talking about this right now has included Culleton's quote about not being afraid of other camp inmates, but being terrified of the DHS/ICE monsters running the camp, who he feels are capable of anything - meaning violence. If you read the rest of the story however, you'll discover that Culleton, who is married to an American citizen and had a waiver to work (and thus reside) in the country, was snatched up right before the final hearing that would have resulted in him obtaining a full green card. Which mirrors other evidence and testimony we've seen that strongly implies this is quite intentional - DHS is kidnapping people and torturing them to try and force a deportation (self or otherwise) before they can obtain papers that secure their residency in America.
Furthermore, Cullenton goes on to describe conditions at the El Paso concentration camp, that directly mirror the testimony of the whistleblower who worked at the Baltimore concentration camp I shared with you in the post above this one.
"Culleton told RTÉ he had been locked in the same room with 71 other detainees in squalid conditions and with insufficient food and negligible time outside for fresh air, sunshine or exercise.
“You don’t know what’s going to happen on a day-to-day basis. You don’t know if there’s going to be riots, you don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s a nightmare down here.” Showers and toilets were “filthy” and daily meals were child-sized, he said. “So everybody is hungry.”
So that's again massive overcrowding, dangerously unhygienic conditions, intentional starvation, and warehousing people in cages for long periods of time; all confirmed. Sounds like a concentration camp to me; how about you?
A collection of my Fediverse blog posts about fascism and current events, published from April 13th to 15th, 2025. Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, I wrote a lot about the Trump regime, ICE, and nazi billionaires.
"If they get away with this, or even if they can just successfully use it to justify applying government pressure against an extremely large, well-funded news organization, there’s no limit to how far these nazis will take this. This is how a fascist regime transforms the entire media environment into pro-Trump, state news outlets and it won’t just stop with the Fox-ification of media orgs either."
If the fist 100 days of the Trump 2.0 era have taught us nothing else, it's that DHS, ICE, and the Migrant Carceral Complex, all built by bipartisan hands, represent the tools to create a turnkey dictatorship for any president willing to seize them; and thus they should all go.
"The reality is that a police state and vast carceral complex built to target migrants, can just as easily be repurposed by a fascist government to target the regime’s political opposition. Either we make our stand against fascism here, on the issue of immigration justice, or the rest of us will surely fall under that same machinery of oppression in due time. Both the Department of Homeland Security and ICE were built under false pretenses by governments who were violating our civil rights; they are “solutions” in search of a problem, and under Trump anyone who opposes fascism has become that problem."
While it's certainly true that one week seems to feel very much like another in our Hot Gestapo Summer, fascism continues unabated in American society - and thus The Skinny was there once again. Check out our newsletter featuring the best of my blogging from the past ten days.
"If, as I and others have argued, these mass deportations are clear violations of constitutional and human rights, then ICE lawyers working to ram every brown person they can through via legally dubious methods (like say, declaring that a fake invasion by a Venezuelan gang nobody has ever heard of means you can ship people to foreign gulags without due process) would be legally accountable for their role in perpetuating these crimes. If you know what you’re doing is illegal, because you’re a lawyer, “I was just following orders” has a pretty poor track record as an excuse in court. So you can understand why it might behoove immigration judges, who literally work for Trump’s executive branch, not the judiciary, to hide the names of government attorneys doing the legal legwork for a fascist ethnic-cleansing project; a project that probably represents a real as fuck crime against humanity if several international scholars are to be believed. This isn’t about protecting ICE attorneys, it’s about protecting folks complicit in criminal atrocities."
“Border controls are most severely deployed by those Western regimes that create mass displacement, and are most severely deployed against those whose very recourse to migration results from the ravages of capital and military occupations. . . We are all, therefore, simultaneously separated by and bound together by the violences of border imperialism.”
In an early March announcement that was underreported at the time (but just became a lot more relevant in early April) the Trump regime revealed its intention to collect and presumably monitor social media handles of folks applying to legally work and reside in the United States:
Trump Wants Immigrants on U.S. Soil to Hand Over Social Media Accounts to Apply for Citizenship
"Collecting social media information, according to the USCIS proposal first posted March 5, is necessary “for the enhanced identity verification, vetting and national security screening.”
The proposal specifically cites Trump’s January 20 executive order, which advocates have warned goes well beyond the Muslim travel ban from Trump’s first term, which targeted people living abroad.
The new executive order stated that “the United States must ensure that admitted aliens and aliens otherwise already present in the United States do not bear hostile attitudes toward its citizens, culture, government, institutions, or founding principles, and do not advocate for, aid, or support designated foreign terrorists and other threats to our national security.”
USCIS said the social media handles it collects would be used to determine if people applying for a variety of immigration statuses pose a “security or public-safety threat.”"
Of course, observers immediately noted the connection between this proposed policy and Trump's ideological policing, kidnaping, and attempted deportation of foreign students who participated in anti-Genocide protests and/or oppose the Trump regime:
"In light of Columbia University protester Mahmoud Khalil’s ongoing detention, one official from a Muslim civil rights group said the new policy poses special danger for critics of Israel and the Trump administration.
“This policy would disparately impact Muslim and Arab applicants seeking U.S. citizenship that have voiced support for Palestinian human rights,” said Robert McCaw, director of government affairs at the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “Collecting the social media identifiers of any potential green card applicants or citizens is the means to silencing their lawful speech.”
Furthermore, as a representative of the EFF presciently observed, there are few if any limits on the scope of what the government can do with this data if they get it, and modern AI technology allows for the regime to ideologically police and target a terrifying number of people who oppose our fascist overlords. It's also, strictly speaking, a violation of Constitutional rights:
"The policy proposal does not sketch out limits on how USCIS can use its newly acquired data, according to Saira Hussain, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Hussain said she was particularly concerned that the government might use artificial intelligence or other automated tools to punish speech it dislikes, pointing to a news report that the State Department is using AI to revoke the visas of people who allegedly express “pro-Hamas” sentiments.
Hussain said she feared a chilling effect, where people applying for a change in status refrain from speaking about potentially controversial issues.
“Anybody who is within the bounds of the United States has First Amendment rights,” she said. “The Constitution applies whether you are somebody who is a citizen or somebody who is a green card holder who is here in the United States. I think that this administration is trying to chip away at that notion, but that is very much what First Amendment jurisprudence has been under the courts.”
Finally, it should be pointed out that the regime's proposal gives no indication whatsoever of when the government would stop recording and monitory the social media activities of the people its targeting:
"CAIR’s McCaw said he worried that the policy could be used to continue tracking people’s activity on social media even after they become naturalized citizens.
“There’s no clear sign on when this intrusion into our electronics and communications will end,” he said."
I've spent much of the past eight and a half years avoiding unproductive arguments with people who insist that "you can't compare Trumpism to Hitler and the Nazis" despite knowing that those people rarely, if ever, have much understanding of what made the Nazis the definitive genocidal fascist movement in human history. At some point however, you have to stop relying on Godwin's Law to avoid naming the beast when the Trump administration continues to actively borrow policies and methods of operation from the actual Nazi Party; particularly when those policies ended in the literal fucking Holocaust last time.
To understand what I'm talking about, let's take a look at what Trump's Gestapo (ICE) Director had to say at a recent "border security" conference about his hopes to logistically optimize the process of snatching up migrants for deportation in the streets of America:
Trump's ICE Chief Craves Deportation Process Like Amazon Prime, 'But With Human Beings'
"While speaking a 2025 Border Security Expo in Phoenix, Arizona on Tuesday, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting Director Todd Lyons outlined a chilling vision for how deportations in the United States ought to be carried out: with the swift efficiency of Amazon Prime.
"We need to get better at treating this like a business," said Lyons, explaining that he wants to see a deportation process that is "like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings." His comments citing the e-commerce giant's subscription servicewere first reported by the Arizona Mirror.
"This is a chilling example of drawing inspiration from Nazi Germany to deploy logistics for mass deportation and ethnic cleansing," wrote journalist Luis Feliz Leon in response to Lyons' statement."
Although this article doesn't mention it, other sources online (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/09/ice-todd-lyons-deporation-amazon) have revealed that part of what Lyons is talking about here is a plan to "implement a system of trucks that rounds up immigrants for deportation in a system similar to how Amazon delivers packages around the US."
First of all, this is nightmare dystopian fascist shit that absolutely mirrors the process of rounding up Jewish people in Nazi Germany. Additionally Lyons is implying that the US government intends to deport so many people, that it would make sense logistically, to requisition a fleet of trucks for that ongoing purpose. Finally, don't sleep on the fact that Lyons is talking about running ICE like a business and modeling its operations on Amazon, because for the people who own or invest in a private prison sector getting filthy stinking rich on anti-migrant policies and ICE detention contracts, this absolutely is a business; it might be costing the American taxpayer public money, but it's making a whole lot of nazis huge bank.
Ultimately however, I think the most important part of the story is what Common Dreams alluded to in its short article above; the employment of the government's extensive logistical abilities to streamline and optimize the mass deportation process and speed up the establishment of a white nationalist ethnostate, is more or less how the Nazis ultimately facilitated the Holocaust using the punch card computing system IBM helped them build for that purpose. Speaking frankly, what separates the Nazis and the Holocaust from other eliminationist campaigns by fascist governments in human history is the creation of an optimized system to apprehend, detain, and eventually exterminate whole classes of people; this was systemic fascist murder, and it ended in the deaths of millions of people, most notably but not exclusively over six million Jewish people from all over Europe.
If you look at the overarching theme of the Trump regime's employment of AI technology, mass surveillance, and the integration of data from all government sources into ICE databases, it becomes very clear that we're looking at systemic, logistically organized fascist repression that sure looks an awful lot like the Nazis under Hitler. You might say to me that I can't prove the administration is working itself towards an eliminationist program targeting migrants, but I'd respond by reminding you that mass deportations have historically been part of the process of genocide, bullets in the head are cheaper than airplane flights, and the very same systemic fascism this regime is now admitting is necessary for its mass deportations to function, can just as easily be purposed for mass executions when the time comes.
In what must be understood as a tightening of the digital panopticon the fascist Trump regime is deploying to target migrants, the administration has negotiated an agreement between ICE and the IRS to share tax data with the American Gestapo for the purpose of facilitating mass deportations, without the consent of the IRS's acting commissioner - who has since resigned in protest:
IRS agrees to share tax information of undocumented immigrants with Ice
"A memorandum of understanding between the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the IRS was filed late on Monday in a case brought by immigrants’ rights groups Centro de Trabajadores Unidos and Immigrant Solidarity DuPage, represented by Public Citizen and other lawyers. The memo says Ice can request information from the IRS for its investigations into undocumented immigrants who have not left the country after receiving a final order of removal from a judge. It is signed by the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, and the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem.
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday evening that the acting IRS commissioner, Melanie Krause, is planning to resign, in part over being bypassed in the decision.
The lawsuit over the plans to share IRS information, filed in March, says Internal Revenue Code makes clear that tax records for all taxpayers must be confidential, disclosed only in ways authorized by statute.
“Taxpayer privacy is a cornerstone of the US tax system,” said Lisa Gilbert, co-president of Public Citizen. “This movement by the IRS is an unprecedented breach of taxpayer privacy laws – confidentiality which has been respected by both political parties for decades.”
Although every expansion of the regime's ability to hunt down and target migrants is an important stepping stone to a white nationalist dictatorship, this policy is particularly cruel and nonsensical. For starters, it deprives the US government of tax revenue because an overwhelming number of undocumented people do in fact pay their taxes. More importantly however, the US government and the IRS have been encouraging migrants to do so for decades, under the promise that this information won't be used to target and deport them. In one single agreement signed by two members of the Trumpenreich, the US government has simultaneously harmed the American people, and forced more migrants further underground, to break our collective promise to folks who otherwise would have stayed below the radar:
"The Trump administration has been working to get the IRS and Ice to agree on some information sharing for weeks, a way to use tax filings to aid in his mass deportations. The Washington Post reported on a draft of the agreement in March, citing current and former IRS workers who said the move would be an unprecedented change in access to tax records and upend immigrants’ willingness to file taxes.
“It is a complete betrayal of 30 years of the government telling immigrants to file their taxes,” one former IRS official told the Washington Post."
Thanks to a Trump-appointed judge once again playing legal Simon Says, the Trumpenreich has taken yet another step towards a type of apartheid system and the mass deportation of migrants who overwhelmingly represent no threat to America. Ruling that the rights groups opposing the move have no standing to challenge it, Judge Trevor Neil McFadden has allowed the Trump regime to move forward with a requirement that all noncitizens register with a government hell bent on enacting mass deportations, and carry documentary proof of registration or suffer criminal consequences.
Judge allows requirement that everyone in the US illegally must register to move forward
"While questions remain about how the registration requirement will function, its impact is potentially far-reaching. The Trump administration — which has worked to make good on campaign promises of mass deportations — has said between 2.2 million and 3.2 million people could be affected.
One of the groups that sued, the National Immigration Law Center, called the Thursday ruling “disappointing” in a statement.
“This disappointing ruling unfortunately means that, for now, Trump’s scheme to force people into an impossible choice moves forward. As we weigh next steps in our case, we urge affected community members to consult with an immigration attorney to better understand the consequences of registering or not,” said Nicholas Espíritu, deputy legal director at National Immigration Law Center.
Homeland Security officials announced Feb. 25 that it was mandating that all people in the United States illegally register with the federal government, and said those who didn’t self-report could face fines or prosecution. Failure to register is considered a crime, and people will be required to carry registration documents with them or risk prison time and fines.
Registration will be mandatory for everyone 14 and older without legal status. People registering have to provide their fingerprints and address, and parents and guardians of anyone under age 14 must ensure they registered."
This one is a little complicated because the Trump administration has argued that this requirement has existed for decades, but just wasn't being enforced. As the article notes, there's some truth to that line of (motivated) reasoning, but the reality is that these rules haven't been enforced since almost immediately after they were introduced in the 1940's because by and large, migrants are not a criminal threat to the United States. Furthermore the requirement to provide fingerprints and carry documentation of registration or face criminal penalties is as far as I know, a new and disturbing wrinkle the regime has thrown in to make their arguments that they're only deporting "criminals" a de facto reality in retrospect. As any student of history can tell you, if law enforcement can demand "papers, please" and then lock you up for not producing them, what you're talking about is the criminalization of human beings in something akin to an apartheid system, and a racialized legal pretext to arbitrarily detain anyone who looks like (this is crucial) they might be a foreign national; since after all, the authorities won't know if you have "papers" until they ask, and not having papers will be treated as a crime until such a time as you can prove that you (even US citizens of the wrong complexion) aren't legally obligated to carry them.
Of course, none of this is happening in a vacuum, and the reality is that no matter what the rules say, this is an openly white nationalist government that has falsely argued migrants don't have any Constitutionally protected rights, and have already begun the process of revoking legal status for hundreds if not thousands of people lawfully residing in the United States, while openly deploying deportation to engage in fascist ideological policing to target its perceived enemies. This is a regime that hates migrants, does not care if they "follow the rules," is willing to play legal Calvinball to deport literally anyone who isn't white and a natural born citizen, and has overwhelmingly targeted immigrants following the legal process to remain in the US as a sort of "low hanging fruit" to easily generate big numbers of deportations to brag about to its deeply racist base of support. They are going to use this registration system to locate and detain migrants for mass deportation, and they know full well you'd have to be some kind of crazy to willingly turn over your location and identity to a nativist regime dead set on bleaching the American population demographics through the force of law. What the administration is doing here is purposely criminalizing migrants to justify more and more repressive crackdowns on folks it has now effectively made truly "illegal."
So, how ominous of a sign is it when the white nationalist government that's openly violating the US Constitution to facilitate fascist mass deportations, decides to declare thousands of immigrants legally dead for all intents and purposes? This week Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem (aka Cracker Fascist Barbie) and acting Social Security commissioner (and gammon-y human thumb) Leland Dudek, got together and "terminated" the "financial lives" of 6,000 immigrants the regime claims are "convicted criminals and 'suspected terrorists,'" by moving their Social Security numbers into the agency's "death master file."
'Outrageous Abuse of Power': Trump Weaponizes Social Security for Deportation Spree
"The Trump administration this week reportedly classified thousands of immigrants living in the United States as dead in a Social Security database in an effort to force them out of the country, a scheme that was met with furious uproar from advocates and lawmakers.
By entering the names and Social Security numbers of roughly 6,000 immigrants into Social Security's "death master file," the administration has revoked their ability to legally work in the U.S. and receive benefits in a bid to get them to "self-deport," several news outlets reported Thursday.
"This is an outrageous abuse of power," Nancy Altman, president of the advocacy group Social Security Works, said in a statement. "It will not only create extreme hardship, but kill people. Imagine, in one Trump administration keystroke, losing your income, your health insurance, access to your bank account, your credit cards, your home, and more."
"If they get away with this, it would be no surprise if they then move on to marking their perceived enemies as dead—citizens and non-citizens alike," Altman added. "This is a total misuse of the dedicated revenue that workers contribute to Social Security, with every paycheck. Though Trump claimed he wouldn't cut benefits, he essentially is by diverting dedicated monies from their intended purpose of paying Social Security benefits to the immoral purpose of maliciously ruining lives."
First off let me start by noting that some, if not the majority of folks targeted by the Trump regime for financial termination are people with valid social security numbers, and while undocumented immigrants can pay into Social Security, they can't collect even when they reach retirement age anyway; so this has nothing to do with migrants stealing benefits, or preventing fraud. Additionally it should be pointed out that while we're being assured that those targeted are all "convicted criminals and "suspected terrorists," our source for that is the very same administration trying to deport student visa holders for traffic tickets and telling you anti-Tesla protestors are "domestic terrorists," so who the fuck knows what that assertion even means anyway; it appears that at least some of the targets are simply people "who were allowed to enter and remain temporarily in the United States under programs instituted by the US president’s predecessor Joe Biden" according to The Guardian.
Finally, it should be understood that this is about a lot more than collecting Social Security benefits in your late 60's; in modern American society you typically need a Social Security number to open a bank account, get a credit card, rent an apartment, obtain health insurance, access car loans, and so forth, so when Dudek says they're trying to "exterminate" the "financial lives" of targeted immigrants, he's only partially employing a metaphor here; the opponents of the plan calling this "digital murder" are absolutely right to do so. This is definitely going to destroy lives and get people killed, and as the article notes the regime is reserving the right to expand the list of targets to "others in the country without authorization," which sounds rather ominous when we're talking about a government that's taken to having Marco Rubio instantly revoke visas and legal status for student protestors before ICE kidnaps them.
All of which means that even if the regime's actions are taken in the best possible light, this is fascist bullshit designed to push a nativist, white nationalist agenda while harming folks the administration deems illegal primarily for their skin tone and place of birth. As both a target of the regime's ongoing anti-trans pogrom, and a student of history however, I can't help but notice an ominous déjà vu quality in all of this. Historically speaking, mass deportations have always lead to mass graves, and when a fascist regime declares you and folks like you legally dead, it's usually because they mean to eventually make that a literal reality.
Throughout the entire decade or so I've been writing about the migrant carceral complex, I've tried to help people understand apparent contradiction this vast federal apparatus represents. Hunting down and caging migrants, particularly on the scale the Trump regime is attempting to do, is a mind-fuckingly expensive operation that provides literally no benefit whatsoever to the vaunted "America taxpayer" (so, you) and yet we do it anyway - why? Well part of it is certainly racism and white nationalism, but the reality is that our vast incarceration and deportation machine is actually extremely profitable for some highly influential people; particularly folks that own or invest in private prison companies. How profitable? Well a recent ACLU report reveals that the Trump regime has put $45 billion (with a b) up for grabs in contracts to facilitate a massive expansion of the migrant carceral complex and their white nationalist scheme to bleach America's demographics by (lawless) force.
ACLU Exposes Trump Admin’s Plan for Massive Expansion of ICE Jail System
"The documents, obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request, “signal a massive expansion of ICE detention capacity — including at facilities notorious for misconduct and abuse — which echo reports earlier this week that the Trump administration has sought proposals for up to $45 billion to expand immigrant detention,” ACLU said.
“The discovery also comes on the heels of a ‘strategic sourcing vehicle‘ released by ICE earlier this month, which called for government contractors to submit proposals for immigration detention and related services,” the group added."
The truth here is that there are billions of dollars swimming around in the migrant carceral complex whether the facilities are private or publicly controlled; but Trump's close relationship with donors and lobbyists from the private prison industry ensures that he's going to turn out maximum value for his investors - who are some of the worst human beings on earth, quite frankly. This article in particular singles out three companies (Geo Group, CoreCivic, and Management Training Corporation) that are soliciting big contracts to make the regime's nativist dreams of an upgraded national gulag system for brown people a reality; and the free market is rewarding them in anticipation of the regime's mass deportation agenda:
"The documents received provide important details regarding what we have long feared — a massive expansion of ICE detention facilities nationwide in an effort to further the Trump administration’s dystopian plans to deport our immigrant neighbors and loved ones,” said Eunice Cho, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s National Prison Project.
“This expansion is a disastrous waste of billions of taxpayer dollars that will only line the coffers of the private prison industry,” Cho added.
Indeed, GEO shares have nearly doubled in value since Trump’s election, while CoreCivic stock is up 57% over the same period."
Of course, there are other benefits to expanding a massive private prison complex for migrants for a white nationalist regime bent on creating an ethno-state besides appeasing donors. As the article notes, privately run ICE facilities are not subject to state regulation or inspection; which is both why the reported levels of abuse are so much higher than in publicly run prison facilities, and why they're the preferred destination to send migrants for a cracker fascist regime that has more or less openly admitted "the cruelty, is the point."
Look, as an abolitionist it's not lost on me that all prisons are bad no matter who is running them. But the reality here is that most Americans don't really understand what the migrant carceral complex actually is, and without that realization it's easier for them to fall into the trap of casually believing this monstrous bullshit serves the public interest somehow. The migrant carceral complex is at the end of the day a business, in which billions of dollars in public funds are distributed to rich people for the privilege of having them cage and torture brown people as part of a (shockingly bipartisan) nativist agenda. You don't get healthcare, your kids don't get lunch at school, and your grandma is eating cat food because the wise people running our society would rather make blood ticks running prison companies fat and happy, to appease racists in the body politic. Yeah, it's certainly worse under a white nationalist Trump regime, but the reality is they're just expanding this system in anticipation of conducting mass deportations (which are legally recognized as a crime against humanity by the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court). Trump didn't build the migrant carceral complex; it was handed to him by generations of politicians before him who laid the roads he's running towards a genocide on, as we speak.
In studying media, news, and propaganda, there are moments in time when you realize that if things break the wrong way, you're watching events that will live on in infamy in our collective history; this might be one of those moments.
This morning Trump's FBI arrested a sitting Wisconsin County Judge, Hannah Dugan, at the courthouse where she works; as revealed in an unhinged, since-deleted tweet by FBI Director and noted conspiracy crank Kash Patel. Unfortunately, the arrest has since been confirmed via multiple sources, and was discussed on Fox News earlier today by US Attorney General, Pam Bondi.
The government, which is currently being run by a bunch of Christian Nationalist freaks in a cult of personality who're trying to build a white ethnostate, appears to be accusing Dugan of obstructing federal agents (so ICE) by allowing an undocumented immigrant to hide in her chambers and misdirecting the Gestapo goons coming to seize him. If even half of that turns out to be true, I accuse Justice Dugan of being a goddamn hero.
'Fascism Getting Turned Up' as Trump FBI Arrests Wisconsin County Judge
"Wisconsin state Rep. Ryan Clancy (D-19) said in a statement Wednesday that "several witnesses report that [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] did not present a warrant before entering the courtroom and it is not clear whether ICE ever possessed or presented a judicial warrant, generally required for agents to access nonpublic spaces like Judge Dugan's chambers."
Clancy continued:
I commend Judge Hannah Dugan's defense of due process by preventing ICE from shamefully using her courtroom as an ad hoc holding area for deportations. We cannot have a functional legal system if people are justifiably afraid to show up for legal proceedings, especially when ICE agents have already repeatedly grabbed people off the street in retaliation for speech and free association, without even obtaining the proper warrants.
While the facts in this case are still unfolding, it's clear that actions like Judge Dugan's are what is required for democracy to survive the Trump regime. She used her position of power and privilege to protect someone from an agency that has repeatedly, flagrantly abused its own power. If enough of us act similarly, and strategically, we can stand with our neighbors and build a better world together."
I quoted the part with Rep. Clancy's statement both because I agree with every word of his defense of, and praise for Dugan's actions, but also because I wanted to highlight the part about ICE not having a judicial warrant when they entered Dugan's court. This is an extremely sore point for the fascist right and their mass deportation scheme and they've argued that all branches of the government, including the independent judiciary, should allow them to snatch up migrants with only immigration orders that are much easier to obtain for the Gestapo than judicial warrants are. Obviously many government officials and lawmakers with a conscience refuse to do so, Dugan is clearly one of those that isn't willing to collaborate with a fascist regime's mass deportation scheme, and that's why they're charging her.
Furthermore, I think it's safe to say the Trumpenreich is actively trying to intimidate judges who defy their mass deportation plans, while gearing up for a propaganda war about how courts that won't let them do whatever they like to create a white ethnostate are somehow illegitimate, because of the extremely public show they've made of all this. Patel didn't gleefully tweet the news out by accident, Bondi wasn't just bumming around a Fox News camera when the news broke, and as the article notes standard procedure for charging a judge with obstruction would involve inviting her to "to show up and accept process" - not a highly public FBI arrest at the courthouse. This is another example of the Trump regime employing fascist theater to justify the enforcement of unreality; in this case their supposed right to arrest a Judge for stopping the American Gestapo from caging another undocumented immigrant because they didn't have the paperwork to allow them to do so.
The perverse part here is that in an American legal logic twisted towards the needs of a reactionary ruling class and authoritarian principles, it's entirely possible Dugan has committed a crime of some kind here. Be that as it may, the truth is that even if she has, nobody has any right to say Justice Hannah Dugan is guilty. She's not guilty, she might be the only one in the whole damn government who isn't guilty. The guilty people are the fascists hunting down migrants and the greedbag "bipartisan" consensus that built them the fascist police state they're using to do it. If you tell me that Hannah Dugan is guilty, then let me just say now that I don't want to be innocent.
Over the course of both Trump administrations so far, I've always felt that one of the easiest ways to spot the odious fascist inclinations of the regime is to observe the Trumpenreich's malevolent disdain for, and gleeful desire to harshly police, migrant children. No matter how wrong a person is about immigration policy, there's a demarcation of human decency line that should come into play before you decide to take out your nativist authoritarian fantasies on innocent children who're in the United States through no real fault of their own; yet in Trumpworld that line simply doesn't seem to exist.
Take for example the news that Trump's DHS and the ICE Gestapo have been tracking "unaccompanied alien children" with an eye towards deporting or prosecuting them, under the guise of benevolent "wellness checks" and yet another far right conspiracy theory about child trafficking.
Ice seeking out unaccompanied immigrant children to deport or prosecute them
"Although DHS is characterizing the welfare visits as benevolent, an internal Ice document accessed by the National Immigration Project advocacy group and then shared shows Ice is also seeking out children who came into the US alone as immigrants – and their US-based sponsors – for immigration enforcement purposes and/or to pursue criminal prosecutions. The recent operations and document confirm a February report from Reuters, that the Trump administration has directed Ice to track down and deport this group.
Meanwhile, in Donald Trump’s second term, legal services provided to unaccompanied minors have been slashed and funds are not flowing despite court intervention. And the federal agency monitoring unaccompanied immigrant children has begun sharing sensitive data with Ice.
The Ice document shows “ it’s not just about checking in on kids, making sure that they can account for them and that they’re not being exploited”, said Michelle Méndez, the director of legal resources and training for the National Immigration Project. “It shows they have other goals, and the goals are criminalization of the kid or criminalization of the sponsor. It’s backdoor family separation.”
Look, I don't know about you but I definitely remember a time when Americans were up in arms because Trump was separating migrant families in detention and essentially trafficking children to Christian American foster families. So for the Trump regime to be working on a backdoor way to deport unaccompanied migrant children under the guise of fighting a made up reactionary moral panic about stopping "child trafficking" under Joe Biden, is both nauseating and outrageous. I can think of dozens of more appropriate government agencies than DHS and ICE to monitor the welfare of what amount to child refugees, but it's irrelevant because the Trump regime's own internal documents say they picked the Gestapo because they want to deport literal children. I don't know who needs to be told that a government pretending it cares about helping and protecting migrant children while simultaneously slashing all the programs that would actually do that is lying, but clearly that's what's going on here. These people are fucking heartless animals; and I don't mean the kids.
It should also be noted that here again we can observe the same "inversion of purpose" the regime has been using to justify enacting other aspects of its authoritarian Christian Nationalist agenda; for example transforming the Department of Justice's civil rights division into a vehicle for state prosecution of white grievance, or arguing that illegally kidnapping anti-genocide protestors on behalf of our bloodthirsty client state Israel is actually "fighting antisemitism on college campuses," and so forth. I'm sure it amuses Stephen Miller, Trump's unofficial Secretary of Nazi Shit, to no end that he's able to weaponize the language of tolerance and equality to straight up do state-sanctioned white supremacist dictator shit and enforce mass acceptance of the regime's fascist "unreality."
Finally I would encourage folks not to sleep on the fact that ICE's own internal documents are instructing agents to target, um, children with “gang or terrorist ties/activities.” Even setting aside the fact that the regime is implying literal children might be a national security threat or in a nacro-terrorist organization, we already know the Trumpenreich is prepared to accuse anyone they don't particularly like of being in a terrorist gang so they can traffic them to a torture prison in El Salvador without due process. I can't say why the regime wants to mark again, literal children, as narco-terrorists but given the fascist bullshit they're already using that designation to accomplish, I can pretty much guarantee you it won't be anything good.
This outrageous story didn't generate a ton of national attention last week, but as someone from the area where it occurred I think it speaks both to the cruelty of DHS's mass deportation campaign and the inhumane lengths the regime will go to solve the logistical problem presented by trying to detain millions of people in order to deport them.
Rashida Tlaib (D-MI12) is reporting that Customs and Border Protection is snatching people on the Ambassador Bridge and detaining them at a holding facility there that is not designed to be used as a long term jail. As this report indicates, conditions are brutal, several American citizens have been detained for days at a time, and most of the families detained there simply made a wrong turn onto a poorly labeled road.
Tlaib: CBP Has Detained 200 in Michigan Where People Took Wrong Turn to Canada
"Last month, Tlaib visited an immigrant jail where Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) is holding and “disappearing” people who cross the Ambassador Bridge, in Detroit, a one-way toll road.
Between January 20 and March 21, CBP has detained at least 210 people this way, Tlaib discovered, with over 90 percent of them having crossed the bridge by accident, taking the wrong turn on the road — a mistake frequently made by people living in the area, locals say. Tlaib said in a press conference that advocates in Michigan have long called for better signage and directions around the bridge.
Immigration advocates say that the immigrant jail is not built to hold people long term, and that officers have denied detainees proper medical care, food, and access to legal counsel."
Folks, as someone who has driven in the area and almost ended up on that very same bridge, because of that very same road multiple times, I have no problem at all believing ICE snatched up 210 people in two months at that crossing. The important issue here however is that our white nationalist regime is so desperate to meet Trump's fundamentally racist deportation quotas that they're lying in ambush for migrants who are almost certainly not a danger to public safety, just people who struggle with Detroit's byzantine network of roads.
Furthermore, the fact that CBP is shoving entire families into a small facility designed to temporarily hold people trying to cross the border, speaks to the sheer scale of this ongoing ethnic cleansing operation. The United States already has what most believe to be the largest migrant carceral system in the world, and we're repurposing border jails to lock up whole families in horrifying conditions for as long as twelve days? As the article notes, there's already been one suicide attempt at the jail and while I'd argue that caging brown people for being born on the wrong side of an imaginary line was already a crime against human decency, locking people up in a makeshift dungeon without adequate provisions to hold them is an internationally recognized violation of human rights. The fact that we're basically torturing families for making a wrong turn onto the bridge is just the fascist cherry on top of this cruel and repugnant sundae.
With the heat rising on the Pork Reich because of their migrant trafficking scheme with noted fascist and torture prison operator Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, the regime is apparently looking for new foreign torture gulags to traffic migrants to. Multiple reports have emerged that the Trump regime is on the verge of a deal with Libya to accept "deported" migrants from the United States; this despite, or perhaps because of, the fact that both UN and the US government's own investigations label Libya as one of the most dangerous places on earth for migrant detainees.
US planning to deport migrants to Libya despite ‘hellish’ conditions – reports
"Human rights groups condemned the reported plans, noting the country’s poor record on human rights practices and harsh treatment of detainees.
“Migrants have long been trafficked, tortured and ransomed in Libya. The country is in a civil war. It is not a safe place to send anyone,” Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of Democracy for the Arab World Now (Dawn), wrote on X.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, wrote on the platform alongside a picture of a Libyan detention facility: “Don’t look away. This is what Libya’s migrant detention facilities look like. This is what Trump is doing.”
Reichlin-Melnick added: “Amnesty International called these places a ‘hellscape’ where beatings are common and sexual violence are rampant. There are reports of human trafficking and even slavery.”
Claudia Lodesani, head of programs for Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), said the group was “very concerned” about the possible consequences of such a plan, saying reports by media outlets and human rights organisations showed that “Libya is not a safe country for migrants”
Lodesani pointed to a 2023 United Nations report which documented “widespread practices of arbitrary detention, torture, rape and slavery and concluding there were grounds to believe a wide array of crimes against humanity have been committed against migrants in Libya.”
Reports on exactly how this objectively fascist scheme would work are current sketchy, but given that the Trump regime's modus operandi has been to willfully break the law to violate the rights of migrants before anyone can tell them not to, and then claim what's done is done after the fact, this particular rumor and the lack of denial by the White House is pretty alarming. At this point it seems abundantly clear that the regime considers human rights violations and potentially lethal confinement conditions to be a feature, not a bug, in the places they're trying to send migrants; which tracks with the Pork Reich's discredited and debunked rhetoric about the effectiveness of intentional cruelty towards migrants as a "deterrent" across both of the Klepto Kaiser's administrations.
Unfortunately, we as a society that presumably doesn't want the government to traffic folks guilty of nothing more than a civil immigration violation to foreign torture prisons don't really have time to wait around for the regime to confirm their plans. As the article indicates, some sources claimed the first flights might occur as early as yesterday, so the time for the media and Trump's political opposition to pressure the regime on why it's even considering sending undocumented migrants and asylum seekers to a carceral state where murder, violence, and slavery reportedly awaits them, is right now. Given the response from the media, the judiciary, and society at large to the regime's El Salvador scheme, Trump and DHS officials have to know that they're not legally allowed to traffic abducted migrants to torture prisons in Libya either, so clearly the plan here is to do it fast and let the chips fall where they may; it makes no sense whatsoever to wait around until they actually do it before anyone tries to do anything about it.
The story about the Trump regime's (apparently not so) secret plans to traffic migrants to torture prisons in Libya has taken a dramatic turn for darkly comic reasons. A federal judge has ordered the US government to halt plans to "deport" migrants to Libya and hand over any information related to planning to do so, after detainees reported being told by ICE agents that they would soon be shipped to that country.
Federal Judge Blocks Trump Administration From Deporting Immigrants to Libya
"The injunction placed by U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy states that the Trump administration’s actions would “clearly violate” a previous order he made, violating immigrants’ right to challenge their expulsion to countries other than their homelands.
Murphy also ordered that the U.S. government — which hasn’t formally acknowledged whether or not it is planning to deport people to Libya — hand over any details relating to claims that they are planning such a move, if such details exist.
The immigrants in question are reportedly from the Philippines, Vietnam and Laos, among other countries, according to a report from NBC News. In the legal motion seeking the injunction, lawyers claimed that their clients are being targeted for deportation “without any reasonable fear screening, let alone a fifteen-day window to file a motion to reopen with the immigration court to contest any negative reasonable fear determination.”
I know this is hardly the point of the story, but I remain periodically thankful that all these nazis are such assclowns because the Trump regime would be so much more dangerous if they weren't. Snitched-out by racist braggarts in your own Gestapo is the most "Trump" possible twist to this story, and it'd be grand if for once these peoples' malevolent white supremacy and crass authoritarianism worked on the side of justice and human rights.
Of course the Trump regime continues to neither confirm, nor deny the existence of a plan to traffic migrants illegally and unconstitutionally to torture prisons in Libya, and there's always the possibility that these nazis just ignore the judge's order and dare the courts to do something about it. What they aren't going to be able to do now is replicate their operation to traffic undocumented migrants to a torture prison in El Salvador under the cover of darkness and then claim they had no idea they were breaking the law and violating the constitution. At the end of the day the judge's order is just a slip of paper, but now the scheme is out in the open; Trump's opposition in the media and political classes have no excuse not to go after the regime for this fascist bullshit and demand answers about this clearly criminal plan.
One of the ways I repeatedly rat myself out as a product of the Reaganite 80's in the Pig Empire is my insistence on comparing modern fascist America to Gen Xer hit films like Robocop, or Starship Troopers. This is of course basic bitch behavior, but I can't help myself and one of the frequent film references I've made to contextualize fascism in the Trump era(s) has been the Arnold Schwarzenegger action movie "The Running Man." It's a delightfully subversive, albeit not particularly intellectually challenging film, and the important detail to our discussion here is that involves forcing a framed military officer to compete for his life in a rigged Gladiator-style gameshow that's the biggest TV hit in a dystopian, near future America. The film has all kinds of messages about class warfare, covert fascism, and collusion between the government and the private sector to suppress the poor and extract wealth from the marginalized; so it's basically confirmed prophecy today. Okay, I kid, but the gamified aspect of the fascist propaganda the regime deployed in the film has been remarkably prescient in our modern, algorithmically-driven fascist society. I'm a big fan of this movie.
And apparently so is Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, America's own "fascist Barbie." Or at least I assume she would be if she ever saw the film after reports have leaked out that DHS is considering, I shit you not, teaming up with a reality TV show producer to create a televised gameshow in which contestants would compete for U.S. citizenship. You must know by now that I couldn't make unhinged nazi shit like this up if I tried; DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin recently confirmed to Huffpost that the show was at least in "the “very beginning stages” of the department’s vetting process and has not been approved or denied."
“The Department of Homeland Security receives hundreds of television show pitches a year,” read a statement from DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, noting that many of the pitches are for documentaries.
Notably, McLaughlin’s statement doesn’t say the pitch has been denied yet, and she has said that she personally thinks the show is “a good idea.”
Citing its own sources, The Daily Mail reported that it “has confirmed that Noem supports the project and wants to proceed” with it.
Several users on social media have described the proposal as being similar to the competition in the “Hunger Games,” the dystopian young adult novel where oppressed children compete in a battle royale to the death for the chance at income for life and special status within society."
Frankly, I've never seen the Hunger Games but there is literally so much horrifying shit about this proposal that is morally, ethically, and I should hope legally wrong that I don't even know where to start. DHS has denied that Noem is even aware of the project, but the Daily Mail contradicts that with their own sources and given that the DHS Secretary has already spent several months turning her own role at the department into a kind of nazi reality TV experiment, I'm inclined to believe the Mail here. Trump is the reality TV president, his administration is stuffed to the gills will television "stars" and right wing extremist "influencers" and transforming the regime's war on migrants into an "entertaining" game show would undoubtedly be an effective, if disgusting and surreal, bit of white nationalist propaganda. I think they're serious about this dystopian racist bullshit, but the regime isn't sure whether or not they can actually get away with such a crass fascist display yet, so they're proceeding with caution.
Of course it goes without saying that it says a lot about your positions on the humanity of migrants and asylum seekers, if you're willing to even consider transforming their struggles with an American immigration system that was white nationalist in nature long before Trump became president, into entertainment and propaganda for the presumably cracker reactionary masses. It also objectively undermines the Trump regime's stated arguments that American citizenship is a precious commodity that must be protected from "undesirables" having access; but this is a government already importing white South African nazis it claims are refugees, and selling off $5M "gold card" visas to any rich prick who wants to pony up the cheddar, so that's basically par for the course at this point. Finally of course, the fact that the Trump regime and its DHS Secretary are actively exploring this deeply unserious, but objectively fascist bullshit, speaks directly to the fact that these nazi assclowns have no fucking business serving in the US government and this regime has repurposed (in so much as it was even required) the American state to promote Christian Nationalism at any and all costs.
While even veteran observers of Trump's atrocious fascist agenda in action can become numb to the raw amount of violence, criminality, and repression this regime engages in, sometimes a Trump 2.0 era headline will punch you in the mouth with a raw, and visceral reminder of precisely how horrifying and evil America has become during the Kelpto Kaiser's second act. Words cannot begin to describe how uncomfortable it makes me to see the Trump regime's cracker nationalist mass deportation scheme so interwoven into our everyday lives that the government is proudly keeping score on the number of migrants detained by the American Gestapo.
Ice makes record number of immigration arrests on single day
"Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) made a record high number of arrests on Tuesday, detaining more than 2,200 people as Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policy continues.
NBC News reported that the figure represents the most people ever arrested by Ice in a single day.
Hundreds of the people arrested were enrolled in Ice’s alternative to detention program, under which migrants who are awaiting legal status are given background checks to determine they are not a safety risk, then tracked by the government using ankle monitors or smartphone apps.
The record total comes after senior officials over the weekend instructed rank-and-file Ice officers to arrest more people, even without warrants. In May, the White House demanded that Ice arrest 3,000 people a day."
To put it blunting this shit is racist, dystopian, and if it isn't illegal it absolutely fucking should be. If this doesn't make you want to see ghouls like Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem punished for crimes against human rights and a supposedly free society, you're probably reading the wrong blog. I'm not sharing this story to make you angry however; I have a greater purpose here.
The backdrop behind this repugnant milestone in what amounts to a type of ethnic cleansing, is the same broader discussion we've been having about ethno-nationalism, regime propaganda about violent migrant criminals, and how the gap between who Trump says he's targeting, and who the Gestapo detains debunks every reason the Trumpenreich has offered for its mass deportation program. Ratcheting up ICE's arrest quota by 300% has made it impossible for even a credulous American establishment to pretend this is about public safety, or removing violent criminals from the country; and the nazi chucklefucks running this cracker nationalist shitshow have admitted as much internally.
"Some of the arrests “appear to be the result of a new Ice tactic”, NBC News reported, in which Ice officials arrest migrants who are enrolled in the alternative to detention program when they arrive at pre-scheduled check-in meetings at Ice offices.
“[With] mass arresting of people on alternatives to detention or at their Ice check-ins or at immigration court hearings, the dragnet is so wide that there’s no possible valid argument that could be made that these individuals are all dangerous,” Atenas Burrola Estrada, an attorney with the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights, told NBC News.
The Guardian reported that on Saturday senior Ice officials urged officers to “turn the creative knob up to 11” when it comes to enforcement, including by arresting undocumented people whom officials may happen to encounter – here termed “collaterals” – while serving arrest warrants for others."
This is of course in addition to unconfirmed reports that Stephen Miller himself yelled at DHS officials last week to demand the Gestapo stop focusing on just "criminal" migrants; which if true, makes it abundantly clear that the regime understands the rhetorical two-step they're playing here as part of a broader project to whiten US population demographics. Folks we're arresting asylum seekers reporting for monitoring, refugees who just lost protected status by Presidential fiat, and migrant mothers with American citizen infants; nothing about this has anything to do with fighting "crime" or keeping anyone "safe." It could not be any clearly that when this regime says "criminal" they mean "undocumented" and when they say they're acting to keep the public safe, they mean "from brown people existing at all."
And given that this is so obvious, why is anyone still pretending otherwise? The Trump regime's mass deportation scheme is very clearly a type of ethnic cleansing project designed to produce a whiter America and it's probably only a matter of time before some nazi figures out bullets are cheaper than airplane rides. At what point are we as a nation going to accept that this is how the Third Reich and the horrors of the Holocaust happened, and collectively stop pretending this is immigration policy? I hope the answer is soon, because it does no good to realize the truth after we're digging up mass graves.
In news from the quivering bowels of Vichy America, a major liberal law firm has agreed to work for fascists and stop hiring so many women, brown people, or members of the LGBTQ community to placate an aggrieved, would-be dictator and keep raking in those sweet government contracts:
Trump-Targeted Law Firm Caves, Vows $40M in Legal Support to Right-Wing Causes
"resident Donald Trump withdrew an executive order targeting a major Democratic-leaning law firm after the firm agreed to provide $40 million in pro bono legal services in support of his administration’s far right initiatives.
“This is unbelievably shameful from Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP,” Molly Coleman, executive director at People’s Parity Project, said on LinkedIn. “I’m embarrassed to have any association with this firm that failed to find the courage the moment requires.”
Recently, the White House has escalated attacks on law firms whose attorneys have been involved in legal efforts opposing Trump. Just last week, Trump signed an executive order attempting to revoke security clearances from Paul, Weiss attorneys, restrict the firm’s access to federal buildings, and terminate any of its government contracts. The order reportedly prompted at least one client to sever ties with the firm.
However, following a meeting between Trump and Brad Karp, the chair of Paul, Weiss, the administration abruptly rescinded the order. “We look forward to an engaged and constructive relationship with the President and his Administration,” Karp said in a statement."
So, let's make sure we all understand what's going on here. Trump is brazenly and almost certainly illegally, shaking down a powerful law firm that has literally worked on cases opposing him in the past, and is known from their commitment to diverse hiring practices, and instead of fighting back, or even just taking the loss of government money on the chin, they've decided to check notes concede that a former partner who worked on cases against Trump was engaged in "wrongdoing," work pro-bono for the fascist regime, and capitulate to the fascist "war on DEI" - an idea whose ever-expanding meaning appears to be "restore mandated white supremacy in America."
Are you kidding me? Does the larger liberal establishment in the United States have anything resembling a spine to share between them? More importantly, if Americans trapped inside the increasingly ominous, fascist nightmare that is Trump 2.0 can't count on a high profile law firm in the business of protecting civil rights and taking on the government, to even stand up for the firm's own rights, how can they have faith that anyone in position to defend their rights in a legal capacity, is going to step up to the plate for them? The answer of course, is that they can't.
Folks, you'll get no argument from me if you say that the greater evil in this story is a fascist president who would be king, using the authority of his office to gain revenge on law firms that helped charge him for real crimes, he absolutely committed. As the extorted settlement proves, this too is part of Trump's plot to take complete control of America as a dictator. This isn't legal, and as a federal judge's restraining order in a similar case involving the Trump-targeted firm Perkins Coie demonstrations, complete surrender was not the only option Paul Weiss and its chair Brad Karp had here. By that same measure you can't win if you don't fight, and when losing means capitulating to fascism, a law firm full of civil rights lawyers has a goddamn responsibility to resist.
“It is a sad day for the legal industry. Paul, Weiss, didn’t just bend a knee, it set a new standard for shameful capitulation. This is a stain on the firm, every one of its partners, and the entire legal profession,” Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket, said on Bluesky."
Folks, I've been talking about and writing about the rise of fascism for over a decade now. And I'm not bragging, because I wish I had been wrong about the signs I was reading around me, but I have largely been right when I insisted we were all heading for a moment like this. Furthermore, I have repeatedly warned that a liberal establishment (no, not you; your leaders, your media, your "liberal" capitalist employers) which would always have the option of simply collaborating with the fascist order, wasn't going to save us from fascist predation. There is no cavalry; the opposition party, the courts, and the lawyers aren't going to stop this. At the rate things are going, I have no idea how long I'll still be able to tell you that we are the cavalry, and the only way this nightmare ends is if we use our bodies en masse to shut down the fascist order and the profits that motivate the guys paying for all this; but it's the truth. If you can do it to Tesla, you can do it to any of them.
If you're wondering why the pundit class and the mainstream media organizations that employ them have been so tepid in their criticism of Trump, so unwilling to name the fascist beast and draw the logical conclusions the regime's actions imply, perhaps it's because they know they've been complicit in this fascist nightmare? As Joan Westenberg notes in this brilliant March 15th drag out piece, the normalization of the fascist ideology the Trump regime is running on now has many fathers in American society, and not all of them are folks who'd want to be known as supporters of MAGA fascism; but that's precisely the role they've served, for personal gain:
The Pundit Class Played Devil’s Advocate. Now the Devil’s at the Door.
"A revolving door of New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post columnists made a career of platforming people who—either blatantly or through implication—argued that transgender people shouldn't exist. That democracy had "gone too far." They raged against "wokeism" because they couldn’t conceive of a world where it wouldn’t prevail. They bemoaned "cancel culture" not because they cared about free speech, but because they mistakenly believed the right-wing ideologues they dined with had been cast out for good.
In their intellectual stupor, they decided that the forces of social change were so overpowering and unstoppable that the world needed a voice to speak up against them in an infernal balancing act. And it felt daring, didn't it? To be the literary equivalent of the Cool Girl—not like those Other Girls who care about freedom, equity, history, and common sense.
They dressed themselves up as the beatniks of cultural commentary. They convinced themselves of their "underground" status. They basked in institutional protection, indulging in a self-congratulatory circle-jerk of mock dissent where the stakes were always someone else's problem. They positioned themselves as lone voices against an imagined tide of unthinking dogma, pretending that they were fighting against orthodoxy when, in reality, they were just reinforcing the status quo with a hipster filter. They weren't holding truth to power. They were selling a brand: rebellion without responsibility, provocation without principle, and the posture of dissent with none of the burden of consequence.
They dined on the aesthetic of courage without ever taking a risk. And why not? The market for disaffected liberals playing footsie with fascists was lucrative and full of opportunities for highbrow grift."
Over the past month and a half, I've encountered a lot of Very Serious PeopleTM in my life, and on my TV, who seem to think that the best way to counteract Trump's fascist regime as it tears everything apart and starts trying to disappear political prisoners, is to "not take the bait" and wait for the courts to handle it. "We are still a nation of laws" these folks have assured me, even though I've spent the past four decades watching US presidents break the law in ways that are more acceptable to Pig Empire society than Trump does. Throughout that time, my question has always been "well what are you gonna do when he just ignores the law? I mean it's not like you can send the local sheriff to evict him from the White House, and the GOP is extremely unlikely to help their inept opposition to impeach him." To the degree that I've been able to actually ask that question in person, I have yet to receive a reasonable reply; which is unfortunate, because completely ignoring the courts appears to be precisely what Downmarket Mussolini and his merry gang of shitposting nazi freaks are doing:
Trump Officials Are Pretending A Judge Didn't Bar His Anti-Diversity Orders
"In at least one case, the senior executive says, a U.S. official told the international organization that they knew about the court injunction and what it meant, but that the senior ranks of the Trump administration had explicitly instructed staff to enforce Trump’s executive orders, to ignore the court’s injunction, and to pressure partner organizations if need be. This official also said that if the nonprofit’s leaders didn’t sign the new paperwork, they’d risk having their funding quickly terminated by the Trump administration, per the senior executive.
“The Trump administration is daring the courts in the United States to do something about this, and thus far, I don’t think most people in America understand that what’s at risk is the fundamental basis that there is fairness and justice and rule of law in the United States,” says the senior executive. “And whatever you think of DEI, we should all agree that running the government based on the rule of law is a requirement. The playbook that is being used in the U.S. is not new; we’ve seen it in country after country where there’s been an increase in authoritarianism. To see it in the modern United States itself is what’s new and disturbing.”
The other two sources, one of whom is a Trump appointee, tell Rolling Stone that the directive to comply with Trump’s DEI orders, despite what the judge said, has gone out to an array of nonprofit organizations and partners around the world."
This is kind of a messy article that spends a lot of words going over the timeline of the Trump administration's attempts to play dumb about what the judge's injunction actually blocks in terms of Trump's anti-diversity executive orders, but the key takeaway isn't that complex. Trump has knowingly, and directly ordered his administration to ignore the injunction and continue enforcing his anti-diversity orders both inside the government and towards outside contractors and partners. This is not speculative, several sources inside the Trump administration have confirmed that the regime knows what the injunction means, and government employees are being ordered to simply ignore the ruling. Borrowing a page from noted genocidal racist U.S. president Andrew Jackson, Trump has effectively declared "Adam Abelson has made his decision; now let him enforce it."
Should this come as a surprise to anyone in the American establishment "opposition?" Well, probably not, because as the article notes Trump and his minions have more or less been actively broadcasting their intentions to ignore court orders designed to block their fascist agenda:
"The episode is part of a broader pattern in which the second Trump administration has operated under the impression that judges’ orders and rulings don’t much matter. Vice President J.D. Vance has publicly argued that Trump can ignore judges’ orders, asserting: “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” Trump, for his part, has threatened to “look at” judges who rule against Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Over Presidents Day weekend, Trump admitted he thinks he can break any law he wants to — so long as he can loosely define doing so as part of his mission to “save” the country."
Folks, like I've been telling you for a while, the cavalry ain't coming. If a GOP-controlled government won't impeach him, and the regime won't obey court orders, nothing short of an uprising is stopping these nazis anytime soon; no matter HOW much that scares an "opposition" establishment that hates people power.
Perhaps consistent with an administration that knows it's breaking the law and violating the constitution under wholly false pretenses, the Trump regime has invoked the “state secrets” privilege to dodge a federal judge's demand for more information about Downmarket Mussolini's fascist clusterfuck operation to ship 250+ migrants it claims, without evidence, are members of a notorious Venezuelan gang, to slave labor prisons in El Salvador:
Trump administration claims details of mass deportations are state secrets
"According to a court filing submitted by justice department officials on Monday evening, “no further information will be provided” to the federal court in Washington DC based on the state secrets privilege. The filing said the case deals with Trump’s complete and absolute authority to remove “designated terrorists participating in a state-sponsored invasion of, and predatory incursion into, the United States”.
In response to the Trump administration’s invocation, the federal judge in the case said that if the administration would like to provide more information about the Alien Enemies Act operation, they should do so by 31 March.
Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act on 15 March to expel Venezuelan immigrants in the US. That day, 238 Venezuelans and 23 Salvadoran men were placed on planes and sent to El Salvador, where they were then quickly detained in a massive “terrorism” prison run by the Salvadoran government. For over a week, a federal judge has attempted to compel the Trump administration to release information about the operation."
This story can be difficult to get a handle on because we're ultimately talking about multiple instances of unlawfully activity by the government, and the contemptuous, often clearly false arguments the fascist Trump regime is deploying to avoid consequences for, or in this case even having to explain, those unlawful, often baldly unconstitutional activities. The first question, whether or not the regime can invoke an 18th-century wartime law to conduct "deportations" without due process (which would include a hearing before a judge, the presentation of evidence, and legal representation for the accused), has already been answered in the short term. US district judge James Boasberg blocked the regime's invocation of the act and ordered the government to turn any planes carrying migrants around immediately.
As you may have heard, the Trump regime did not obey the judge's order, and then proceeded to play a series of nazi word games to justify why they didn't have to, that were so devoid of respect for both the judge and the law, Boasberg may end up holding Trump officials in contempt of court. The judge then ordered the Trump administration to explain why the government's actions didn't represent an open violation of his court order. All of which brings us to today, where after threatening to impeach Boasberg, repeatedly arguing in the media that the regime either didn't, or had the right to, violate the US Constitution, and petulantly dragging their feet in an act of open defiance, the Pork Reich has announced that they don't intend to provide Boasberg with any more details about the operation because it would expose "state secrets" and harm America's national security.
Although the Trump regime's "throw buckets of bullshit at the wall and see what sticks" approach to defending its fascist activities makes it hard to pin down the administration's justification for invoking its "state secrets" privilege, we do have two major clues to work with. First the government's filing continues to push the fact-free idea that they are acting to oppose a state-sponsored (by Venezuela) invasion by gang members who are also terrorists, and thus imply everything they're doing is part of an actual war, which means their actions are not subject to judicial review due to the President's legally-established wartime authority to defend America. The number of things objectively wrong with, or false about this argument is literally too staggering to unpack here, but let's just be clear that this is absolute fascist fuckery and bullshit. Our second clue comes from the mouth of US Secretary of State Marco Rubio:
"The rapid expulsion of nearly 300 immigrants came about via a “nonpublic, sensitive, and high stakes negotiation”, secretary of state Marco Rubio said in a separate Monday declaration. The “sensitive” negotiation was likely with the Salvadoran government headed by President Nayib Bukele."
Of course the regime is legally within its rights to invoke its "state secrets" privilege, but that doesn't mean anyone with two braincells to rub together has to believe Trumpworld when it argues that it's fighting a war that doesn't exist, or that telling a court about its activities will damage US relations with El Salvador. These nazis are full of shit.
Sometimes, a relatively simple story will encompass multiple arguments I've been making about the intentions and actions of the fascist Trumpenreich regime all at once. For example, this piece about a federal judge ruling that the Trump administration violated his court order, in order to punish Democrat states by withholding FEMA funding as part of official regime policy to target Sanctuary Cities for reprisal, is pretty much an encapsulation of why the Trump regime is unquestionably a fascist entity, enacting a fascist agenda.
Federal judge reveals 'undisputed evidence' Trump is deliberately sabotaging blue states
"A federal judge ruled today that the Trump administration, including U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, violated his court order to unfreeze Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) relief to at least 19 states. The judge says the administration appears to be making a “covert” effort to punish states who oppose Trump’s oppressive immigration practices.
The New Republic reports U.S. District Judge John McConnell issued an injunction in March on behalf of 23 states suing the White House after the administration moved to pause FEMA aid to states. The Obama era judge ruled the hold-up “fundamentally undermines the distinct constitutional roles of each branch of our government.”
The federal reluctance applies only to states with Democratic attorneys general, and McConnell found the Trump administration ignored his March court order, with at least 19 states submitting “undisputed evidence” they were not receiving FEMA funds appropriated by Congress. Hawaii reported that FEMA had yet to respond to its $6 million request and subsequent $500k reimbursement for climate-related wildfires. The state of Oregon, meanwhile, reported that FEMA had yet to respond to a request for $129.4 million in federal funds for wildfires, severe winter storms, flooding, and mudslides."
Let me just make sure you understand what you're reading here. These nazi chucklefucks are ignoring the law and direct judicial orders, to illegally target their perceived political enemies, for not complying with their ethno-nationalist targeting of migrants, under the guise of a made up invasion that purportedly gives the president extraordinary dictatorial powers, in precisely the same way they falsely accused the Biden administration of politicizing FEMA aid last hurricane season, before Trump was elected. No, really; that's what a judge just ruled is definitely happening. The is the kinda shit that would make Goebbels himself blush.
I'm posting this infographic as an excuse to (briefly) talk to people who, despite all the evidence, are having a hard time believing that a bunch of rich politicians and billionaire donors really are just hateful fascists willing to spend infinite monies on policing, persecuting, and even eliminating people they don't like for wholly arbitrary (white supremacy, xenophobia, anti-LGBTQ animus, ableism, misogyny, etc), irrational, or conspiratorial reasons.
First of all, let me assure you that they really are just a bunch of fundamentalists, hatemongers, and fascists. This isn't some sort of secret, the larger establishment right in America and the fascist Trump political machine have been caught saying the quiet parts out loud repeatedly when they think nobody is listening or has the courage to hold them to account; this is documented heavily in even mainstream media sources and then instantly memory-holed by the Very Serious PeopleTM in American public discourse. If you're struggling to comprehend how hate could be such a powerful motivating factor even for a class of people with enough "fuck you" money to last for generations, it's probably because you're not a hateful little nazi, and that's objectively a good thing.
Setting that aside however, I need you to understand that operating a militarized fascist police state is a highly-lucrative endeavor - for some people. Naturally, I don't mean its profitable for you, or the larger society you live in; in fact you'll effectively be billed for all this fascist repression in the form of taxes. But someone gets paid to install and operate the mass surveillance panopticon. Someone gets paid to violently disrupt lawfully protected protests. Someone gets paid to arm and train the murderpigs. Someone gets paid to build the prisons and guard the incarcerated. Hell a bunch of besuited minions even get paid to catalogue all of this and write glowing reports about what an effective expenditure it is. There's so much money flowing through the U.S. carceral state that the larger industry that exists to serve it is a whole plank in the modern capitalist economy. Furthermore, the people getting rich off a fascist police state have more than enough money and power to bribe politicians to expand that fascist police state; which is why doing so has largely been a bipartisan position in American politics for decades and decades now. Even though he's using it in horrifying ways, it's important to remember that Trump did not build the already massive fascist police state he inherited when he became president; it was built by generations of American politicians before him, both Republican and Democrat; many of whom were trying to secure donor money, or make a quick buck regardless of who that ultimately harmed.
All of which brings us to Trump and the rapid expansion of the carceral complex necessary to enact his fascist agenda. When Downmarket Mussolini moves to conduct the mass deportation of millions of people, that creates an enormous pot of money that can be looted by his rich donors in various ways. Are these folks motivated by white supremacy? Yes, definitely, but even if they weren't we're talking about billions, if not trillions of dollars worth of government contracts at stake here - a whole lot of people are going to get very rich off Trump's ethno-nationalist policies, regardless of what they believe in their hearts. To varying degrees, the same holds true of surveilling, suppressing, and hunting down anti-genocide protestors, conducting a pogrom against trans people as part of a made up "war on gender ideology," spying on every woman in America to make sure she's not trying to get an abortion, and so forth. Maybe I won't ever be able to convince you that the establishment fascists, doing fascism, have hate in their hearts, but surely you're already familiar with some of the awful, inhumane, and tyrannical shit rich people and the politicians they own are already willing to do for fuckpiles of money in our society, right? As far as the donors behind Trump are concerned, a rapid expansion in the number of state "enemies" and targets for repression, along with the corresponding expansion of the apparatus necessary to conduct that repression, is potentially one of the most profitable business opportunities in American history.
Quite frankly, we could take this discussion a lot further; for example, I could point out that capitalism itself is dependent on the marginalization, otherization, and dehumanization of minority or out groups in our society to create whole classes of people it's legally acceptable to ruthlessly exploit. For now however, just keep in mind that there's potentially trillions of dollars available for folks who want to help transform Trump's fascist vision for America into reality, and for that reason (among many others), it doesn't actually matter what's in their hearts.
An infographic featuring a quote from Nina Illingworth's writing. On the left side is a posterized image of a long double line of fully armored police holding riot sticks, marching through a large protest on a busy American (presumably in Boston given some of the police iconography) street. Please note that I tortured this image a bit in Photoshop, but it is absolutely *not* computer generated.
On the right side of the infographic is the quote from my writing below:
"Indeed, a "war for profit" model has proven so successful that numerous American administrations have actively applied the concept to domestic activities. Thus mass surveillance becomes the "war on terror," while mass incarceration coupled with the first of a police state is the "war on drugs;" because a "war" is clearly an excuse to expand state agencies while throwing gobs of cash at the private sector. If that money just happens to go to contractors who've been bribing a given politician, well that's just a "random" function of winning the latest "war" against easily-demonized public scapegoats and targets."
And just what does that rapid expansion of the fascist police state look like even in the infancy of the Trump administration? As this March 9th piece published on Truthout notes, it's already a fascist nightmare where migrants are kept in inhumane conditions and their human rights are routinely violated in violent, even lethal ways - and Downmarket Mussolini's regime is only getting started:
As Mass Incarceration of Immigrants Rises, Detention Centers Eye New Contracts
"That crisis is set to grow as detention expansion continues. Last week, ICE signed a $1 billion, 15-year contract with the private prison company GEO Group to reopen an empty jailhouse in Newark to incarcerate up to 1,000 immigration prisoners at a time, the first large detention expansion under Trump’s crackdown.
GEO Group pushed hard for the contract and sued New Jersey in 2024 to successfully overturn a state law originally supported by racial justice activists that banned private companies from contracting with ICE to house immigrants. Now, GEO Group reportedly has plans to increase the facility’s capacity to incarcerate people and potentially generate an additional $500 to $600 million in annual profit. The company has faced multiple lawsuits after immigrants were subjected to what attorneys describe as underpaid and forced labor. Most recently, a federal court upheld a ruling requiring GEO Group to pay $23 million in damages after the company paid ICE detainees $1 a day for labor at a detention center in Tacoma, Washington."
Like most honest reporting about America's horrifying migrant carceral complex, this is a hard story to read for folks who aren't already familiar with the cruelty, depravity, and casual disregard for human life with which Americans conduct their one-sided war on migrants. The testimony from formerly-incarcerated individuals provided in just this single story should be enough for most people to understand that this has nothing to do with so-called responsible policing, or keeping anyone safe, while the dollar figures involved make it clear that broadly speaking the US government is heavily-funding a whole lot of odious people in the business of torturing migrants for profit. Furthermore, as Trump works to expand the hunting, detention, and deportation of migrants, the piles of money, flow of human rights violations, and atrocities committed in the name of keeping Americans safe from the lady who works at your local nail salon, will only expand correspondingly.
Very Serious PeopleTM: "You can't run around pushing alarmist ideas about fascism and saying they're gonna build concentration camps!"
Me: "Are you kidding me? You already live in a fascist police state with a fully-functioning carceral industrial complex that actively profits from racialized warehousing of "undesirables" and nobody even blinks. The camps are already built, they're all around you we just call them prisons!"
Trump: "Lol, no; we're literally gonna build camps and put them in places where there is no law."
'He's Building a Concentration Camp': Fears Grow as Images Emerge of Offshore Prison at Gitmo
"Sending immigrants from the U.S. to Guantánamo and holding them incommunicado without access to counsel or the outside world opens a new shameful chapter in the history of this notorious prison," said ACLU deputy director of immigrant rights Lee Gelernt. "It is unlawful for our government to use Guantánamo as a legal black hole, yet that is exactly what the Trump administration is doing."
Setareh Ghandehari, advocacy director of Detention Watch Network, said Friday that expansion of operations at Guantánamo "is especially alarming given its remote location and the decades-long documented history of abuse and torture there, which will only be exacerbated by the well-documented abuse inherent to the ICE detention system, including abuse, unsanitary conditions, and medical neglect. In no uncertain terms—lives are in jeopardy."
I'd say between this and the Trump administration's brazen deal with El Salvador to jail even U.S. Citizens in their "mega-prison" it's very clear what this government's plan for purging people they don't like is, and yes that plan is every bit as cartoonishly fascist as even Trump's most ardent critics have suggested. Furthermore, I would note that as many observers at the time predicted would happen eventually if we embraced a fascist police state to "fight terrorism" in the wake of 9-11, the Trump administration is clearly borrowing heavily from both a bipartisan migrant carceral complex pattern, and a (again bipartisan) history of using offshore prisons in places where American law doesn't apply to commit human rights violations against "bad hombres" - the major difference here is that Trump is now planning on doing that to your neighbors and the lady who works at the nail salon up the street.
"According to critics like Robinson, "There's no reason to build this in Guantánamo unless you want to do things you don't think you could get away with on the U.S. mainland. It's easy to put tents in Florida. But they're putting them in Cuba. Ask yourself why."
You can't even say Robinson is speaking about a hypothetical situation because the American security state has already done this, for this precise reason, in slightly different circumstances - most people just weren't paying that much attention because "we gotta get Bin Laden." At this point the enter apparatus and justification for that apparatus already exists in "reasonable" American thought along bipartisan lines; the only thing we're missing from the literal Nazi blueprint is organized mass extermination campaigns and are YOU prepared to promise we won't get there? I sure couldn't.
While obviously this must be opposed vigorously, it's going to be pretty hard for a mainstream establishment that embraced the road to concentration camps in the name of national security, and has wholly surrendered to the idea that migrants are a "problem" that must be met with "carceral force" (that happens to make certain people very rich) to argue that this scenario is somehow different than the previous mind-numbingly fascist scenarios our entire state apparatus has supported in the past - both to stop migrants, and to prosecute the so-called "War on Terror."
You can't have a little fascism; and if you try, sooner or later you're going to have a lot more fascism. And boy, we've been trying for a very long time.
Along with DeSantis's Florida, privacy advocates and observers frequently acknowledge GOP-controlled Texas as being on the cutting edge of the installation and operation of an authoritarian, surveillance-based police state in our increasingly Cyberpunk-esque society. This ongoing transformation and installment of surveillance infrastructure has the full-throated support of Governor Gregg Abbot who has argued that it's necessary both to police the border, and stop domestic terrorism (read: protest) by a largely imagined "radical left" - which more or less means anyone who opposes his fascist government and its policies. Now, the Texas Department of Public Safety is planning to spend millions of dollars on contracts with a company offering a surveillance tool that uses commercially-available information on the internet to track the location of mobile devices without the oversight of judges or courts; and if they get away with this, you can guarantee Texas DPS won't be the last government entity to use this data to install a mass surveillance state targeting anyone they don't like.
Texas State Police Gear Up for Massive Expansion of Surveillance Tech
"Tangles is an artificial intelligence-powered web platform that scrapes information from the open, deep, and dark web. Tangles’ premier add-on feature, WebLoc, is controversial among digital privacy advocates. Any client who purchases access to WebLoc can track different mobile devices’ movements in a specific, virtual area selected by the user, through a capability called “geofencing.” Users of software like Tangles can do this without a search warrant or subpoena. (In a high-profile ruling, the Fifth Circuit recently held that police cannot compel companies like Google to hand over data obtained through geofencing.) Device-tracking services rely on location pings and other personal data pulled from smartphones, usually via in-app advertisers. Surveillance tech companies then buy this information from data brokers and sell access to it as part of their products.
WebLoc can even be used to access a device’s mobile ad ID, a string of numbers and letters that acts as a unique identifier for mobile devices in the ad marketing ecosystem, according to a US Office of Naval Intelligence procurement notice."
While some of this may seem like dry technical information, it's important to realize this story sits on a nightmare nexus of important issues in our society; not the least of which is the targeted surveillance of activists and government critics, but also the alliance of private sector companies, exploiting online data collected for marketing purposes, with motivated state actors looking to bypass legal checks and balances on their powers. This is the scenario privacy advocates opposed to online data collection have been talking about for decades now, made manifest under the watchful eye of a fascist government that has already displayed a desire to engage in political repression; namely the State of Texas under Greg Abbott.
As the story goes on to note, the company that Texas DPS is hiring to help them conduct this surveillance (PenLink) using Tangles, is doing so because it acquired another company that developed the technology, an outfit known as "Cobwebs Technologies." That company was founded in Israel, by three former members of Israeli spec-ops, presumably working in military intelligence. If you guessed that Cobwebs Technologies already has a dark track record, you win a gold star; in 2021 Meta accused the company of being a surveillance-for-hire operation, and banned it (and 200 accounts associated with the company) after an investigation revealed it was being used to target activists and government officials in Hong Kong, and Mexico, at a minimum. Naturally, Texas DPS claims that the purpose of contracting to use this software isn't about repressing opposition to the Abbot government, instead it's about preventing mass shootings, but there is no available evidence of Tangles being used for that purpose, and plenty of evidence that it's a popular tool among states and agencies trying to silence dissent.
Perhaps the most frightening aspect of this story however isn't that Texas is spending millions to track migrants and potential dissidents using geofencing, so much as the reality that numerous governments and agencies in America are already using this software themselves.
"Cobwebs Technologies, now part of PenLink, has scored contracts through its Delaware-based subsidiary Cobwebs America Inc. with various federal agencies, including ICE, the Internal Revenue Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Bureau of Indian Education, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. ICE holds Cobwebs America’s highest-dollar federal contract so far, according to usa.spending.gov."
In the modern surveillance state, the Eye of Sauron never sleeps.