Theme: bureaucratic cruelty
Harm inflicted at scale through systems, paperwork, and institutional indifference.
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Hanne Engan, Type 1 Diabetic, Detained
Hanne Engan, a Norwegian woman married to an American citizen, was detained at her green card appointment in San Diego; while in custody at Otay Mesa, the equipment and insulin she needs to manage her Type 1 diabetes were withheld, she was nearly killed multiple times, and after her release she discovered her credit-card information had been stolen while she was in detention.
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Four Out of Five Chemotherapy Sessions
Oudone Lothirath, a Minnesota man with aggressive lymphoma, missed four of five scheduled chemotherapy sessions while in ICE detention in Texas in January; he was returned to Minnesota only after a hospital letter warned he would die without treatment, and he is now in hospice.
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Inside Dilley
Sworn declarations from detained children and parents at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center — the nation's only family detention facility, run by CoreCivic and reopened in 2025 — describe vomit-inducing food, denied medical care, intimidating guards, and a four-year-old who developed a black eye after hitting his head, his potential concussion left untreated.
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Twenty-Three Hours
Mohommad Nazeer Paktyawal, an Afghan father of six who had worked alongside the US military in Afghanistan and was applying for asylum, died less than twenty-four hours after Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained him outside his apartment in suburban Dallas.
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The Pool
An Associated Press investigation, drawn from 911 calls and detainee accounts, reports that staff at the nation's largest ICE detention facility — Camp East Montana on Fort Bliss in Texas — placed bets on which detainee would next die by suicide; Camp East Montana sits on the site of a World War II Japanese American internment camp.
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Not Accidental
Deaths in immigration detention now match the patterns recorded in the early phases of past regimes' concentration camps: poor conditions, untreated disease, abuse — not random misfortune but the predictable output of a custodial system designed for harm.
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After the Letters Were Published
Letters from children imprisoned in the Dilley, Texas family detention camp — including a seven-year-old held for seventy days, a five-year-old, and a nine-year-old held for one hundred thirteen days — reached ProPublica. The day the resulting story was published, federal personnel raided the dormitories to confiscate further letters.
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She Has Not Gone Outside
Thi Dua Vang, a Hmong asylum-seeker in St. Paul who fled religious persecution in Vietnam and has legal status in the U.S., was detained by ICE in January, transferred to Texas, and ordered released by a judge after two weeks; since her return, she has been unable to leave her home because ICE agents continue to come to the door.
2026
2025
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Seventy Years, A Refugee Camp, Alligator Alcatraz
Paul Bojerski, seventy-nine, was born to Polish parents in a German refugee camp after World War II and emigrated legally to the United States with his family in 1952; in July of 2025 he was detained at a routine ICE check-in and sent to the Everglades detention camp known as Alligator Alcatraz on a decades-old removal order that had previously gone unenforced.
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Deported in a Vegetative State
Randall Alberto Gamboa Esquivel, a fifty-two-year-old Costa Rican man held in ICE custody in Texas since February, was put on an air ambulance to Costa Rica in September while in a vegetative state with encephalopathy and rhabdomyolysis; he died in a hospital in his hometown in October.