ICE Detainees

"Whatever you do to the least of my people...that you do unto me."

Jun 26, 2025

We keep hearing about immigration raids and deportations—but we’re not hearing about the people. The fathers, the students, the laborers, the mothers and children. The asylum-seekers who fled violence, only to vanish again inside America’s immigration machine.

We are watching compassion get legislated out of existence. While the headlines blare about “security” and “enforcement,” what’s really happening is the quiet conversion of lives into logistics. Trauma is scheduled, outsourced, and documented in triplicate. The policies behind it are not crafted—they’re calculated. Written by deskbound architects who’ve never stared into the eyes of someone who fled gunfire, they treat desperation like a clerical error. This suffering isn’t overlooked. It’s institutionalized.

In today’s America, basic humanity isn’t just overlooked. It’s paywalled. It’s reserved. It’s considered a privilege—not a right.

If you are poor, brown, displaced, or dissenting, you’re not given protection—you’re given a cell. Or worse: a transfer to nowhere. A van without windows. A name struck from the log.

And let’s be honest—if this were happening in another country, we’d call it what it is: authoritarian repression.

What we’re witnessing isn’t enforcement. It’s a blueprint for how to strip people of rights until they barely register as human. It’s rationed. It’s conditional. It’s political.

If you are poor, brown, displaced, or dissenting, you’re not given protection—you’re given a cell.

What we’re witnessing isn’t enforcement. It’s a blueprint for how to strip people of rights until they barely register as human.

So the question is: How much further are we willing to let this go before we admit what it really is? Because this isn’t just a story about broken immigration policy—it’s about how our government has come to view suffering as strategy. And if humanity is now considered a luxury, then what happens when they decide you can’t afford it either?

🧠 History Doesn’t Repeat—It Evolves

The United States has a nasty habit of putting a fresh coat of paint on repression and calling it patriotism. Every few decades, it finds a new scapegoat, wraps fear in a flag, and sells the public a police state disguised as justice.

During the Red Scare, the FBI stalked union halls and blacklisted professors.
During WWII, Japanese Americans were thrown into camps because of their last names.
After 9/11, Muslims were surveilled en masse, detained without charge, and banned from entering the country.
And now in 2025, ICE is detaining visa-holding students and green card holders for speaking out against war crimes. They're also sweeping up brown men, women, and teenagers off the street for no crime other than 'looking' undocumented—whatever that means to the agents doing the grabbing. It doesn’t matter if you're Iranian, Guatemalan, or just tan in the wrong neighborhood—if your face doesn’t match their fantasy of America, you’re fair game.

This is the American cycle: paranoia creates policy, and policy becomes persecution.

And every time, the excuse is the same: “We’re protecting freedom.”

But when the powerful define freedom as the right to silence, detain, or deport dissent—what they’re really protecting is control.

We don’t have to wait to feel shame this time. We can see the pattern. It’s in front of us. We are living in it and working through it. We can be the reason it stops this time as well.

🚨 The Blueprint: How Abuse Became Policy

📊 2025 ICE Deaths and Hospitalizations (So Far)

Cruelty is traceable. Here are the confirmed ICE detainee deaths for the first half of 2025:

Each of these deaths follows a grimly familiar pattern: neglect, delay, and denial. And this is just what we know. Hospitalizations—many unreported—are stacking up too:
- Detainees experiencing overdoses, untreated illness, and mental breakdowns are often left to deteriorate before care is offered.
- As of mid-2025, ICE detention has surged to nearly 59,000 people in custody—a 50% spike since the start of the year. That’s not just growth. That’s a feeding frenzy.
If seven confirmed deaths can happen in just six months—while FOIA requests and public scrutiny are still active—imagine what’s happening in the shadows. ICE’s system of detention has generated a relentless stream of death records, abuse complaints, and firsthand testimonies that point to one chilling reality:

There is a Method to Their Maddness

Across the country:
- Detainees in Texas and Florida report being denied soap, clean toilets, and access to basic medical care.
- In Miami’s Krome facility, overcrowding has forced people to sleep on concrete floors next to roaches and rats.
- ICE officers have physically assaulted detainees—including one guard criminally charged for choking a handcuffed person.
- Women continue to report being coerced into invasive gynecological procedures they did not understand or consent to.
And in one devastating case, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a legal U.S. resident and father of three, was deported despite a court order protecting him from removal. According to AP reporting, he is now imprisoned in El Salvador’s Supermax facility.
Even after media attention, legal intervention, and national outcry, U.S. officials say they “can’t get him back.” Not because it’s impossible—but because it’s not a priority. The federal government is pouring time, legal energy, and international leverage into justifying the wrongful deportation of one man. That’s not indifference—it’s intent. They’re waging a bureaucratic war to keep him disappeared.
And that’s the scariest part: if they’ll do this to a high-profile case—someone with headlines, lawyers, and advocacy—what do we think happens to the thousands of others without any digital trace? The ones without reporters, without court orders, without a single voice calling their name?
They vanish quietly. Deliberately. Beneath the surface of a system built to erase them.
If they can disappear someone like Kilmar, they can disappear anyone.
And they are.
ICE, empowered by private contractors and surveillance firms like Palantir, runs a fragmented network of black sites with virtually no accountability. FOIA records and legal cases confirm that detainees are regularly transferred across states without family or legal notice. A 2024 DHS Inspector General report documented transfer chains so opaque that families and attorneys couldn’t locate their loved ones for weeks. Many detainees simply disappear from the system.
And the kicker?
Even children go missing. In 2023, the DHS Office of Inspector General admitted it could not account for hundreds of minors after ICE transfers. These weren’t new cases. They were the lingering wreckage of Trump-era separations—poorly documented, chaotically executed, and never fully repaired.
The 2023 report didn’t reveal a new crisis. It confirmed that the old one never ended.
The same system that “lost” children in 2018 is still operating in 2025—just with a better press team.

🧩 Project 2025

Cruelty isn’t accidental. It’s not a rogue agency. It’s not a bureaucratic oopsie. It’s a test run. And it’s bullshit.

What we’re witnessing; on our streets, in our communities, to our neighbors and family members, isn’t random. From unmarked vans to black-site transfers to media intimidation, it’s all part of a blueprint. A deliberate design. Drafted, bullet-pointed, and indexed by people who fully intend to make this permanent.

Project 2025, spearheaded by the Heritage Foundation, is a policy roadmap for transforming federal agencies into tools of repression. And no one has left more fingerprints on it than Stephen Miller—Senior Advisor to Donald Trump and the architect behind some of the most aggressive immigration policies in modern U.S. history.

He engineered child separation. He championed indefinite detention. And now, through Project 2025, he’s pushing to:

Eliminate DACA and deport Dreamers en masse
Strip birthright citizenship
Supercharge ICE authority while gutting oversight
Place immigration enforcement directly under White House control

This isn’t governance, it’s demolition. Of law, of decency, of due process.

“You don’t need to pass new laws to create fascism. You just need to stop enforcing the ones that protect people.”

So, when you see Project 2025 praised on Fox News, understand what’s really being promised: A country where your rights expire the second your accent, your skin tone, or your politics make someone in power uncomfortable.

📍 Freedom, Tracked

And it’s not just immigrants.

In June 2025, independent presidential candidate RFK Jr. testified before Congress that he wants "every American wearing a health monitor—like a Fitbit or PED—before my first term is over." (Politico, 2025). He framed it as a public health initiative, but the implications are broader: mass biometric surveillance of the entire population. If ICE is already piloting GPS shackles on asylum seekers, and RFK is proposing wearables for the general public, then we’re not watching the system evolve—we’re watching it metastasize.

The line between surveillance of the undocumented and surveillance of everyone is being erased—on purpose.

ICE is no longer just about cages—it’s about chains you can’t see.

In 2023, ICE began piloting GPS wristbands and smartwatches under the ATD and ISAP programs. These aren’t just location trackers—they include facial recognition, biometric scanning, and 24/7 surveillance. What ICE calls an “alternative to detention” is functionally a mobile prison.

Private contractors like GEO Group and its subsidiary BI Inc. currently monitor over 186,000 people, with plans to expand to millions. Meanwhile, the 2025 GOP Homeland Security Appropriations Bill proposes requiring all non-detained migrants—including asylum seekers and international students—to wear GPS tracking devices.

But that’s just the hardware. The software—the algorithmic brain behind it all—is powered by Palantir Technologies.

Palantir provides ICE with the Investigative Case Management (ICM) platform, a tool that aggregates data from GPS trackers, license plate readers, DMV databases, social media, and more into a unified tracking dashboard. Agents use it to map out associations, identify “threat profiles,” and escalate surveillance based on predictive analytics.

Palantir doesn’t put the ankle monitor on you—but it decides whether you stay on one.

It turns humans into datapoints. And movements into evidence. It’s planned mass biometric control on a grand scale.