After immigrants are detained by ICE, there are probably records somewhere of who has an attorney, and who is calling family members or an attorney.
For the immigrants who aren’t calling any family or lawyers, the poorest of the poor, people with little to no connection to anyone, who may not even say which country they are from, if the administration were actually trying to kill as many disconnected immigrants as possible in secret, would society know?
For example, if the administration was composed of all types of conservative people, but 30 percent were secretly Nazis or wanted racial genocide, could there be a campaign to not just remove, but kill, immigrants, and the public doesn’t find out?
Deporting people who are then killed in a new county (as part of the process) somehow would count in this tally, dropping people out of a plane into the ocean would count, etc. Could stuff like that be done and the public is just not aware?
Is there any master list of immigrants who are detained and a record of proof of life later or do we just not know?
Part of the reason I am asking this is I am very naive, and gullible, and ignorant. I don’t like ICE, but I don’t know that much about the immigration system.
I don’t know if it would be impossible for 20 percent of immigrants to be diverted to things that will kill them without non-racists (who are mere authoritarian fascists) telling people, or whether the record keeping is so bad anything is possible, or whether such fears are unfounded.
During the holocaust, one thing that happened is many people didn’t know the extent of the horrors until after it happened. I sometimes am worried about things like that, about it being worse than we know.
I was also thinking about immigrants who are disconnected, like not close with family, not many friends, very poor… Is there any way for someone like that to disappear in the system in a way in which those in power are actually killing the person?
I genuinely don’t know the answer. I believe ICE is cruel to people and evil, but I have no idea if there’s some limit we know about (ie, “it’s bad, but we know they aren’t brutally murdering large number of people they’ve abducted because we would know.”) I already know that they deny immigrants needed medical care in custody, resulting in killing immigrants, and I already know they arbitrarily kill some portion of immigrants during the arrest and detainment process through brutality.
A lot of the times our hospital security show up to my deescalation classes after leaving a job in corrections. One of the things we often commiserate on is that they got into corrections and I into the state hospital to try and help other people grow and heal but what happened is that we got caught in a loop of “what am I going to see next that I’m going to have to report?” I’m now working for a psych unit in a regular hospital which still has it’s flaws but none comparable to the state.
First you see a patient spit in the face of a staff member who has to be physically held back from hitting them (they actually told us we’re allowed to restrain our coworkers if that happens), then you see a staff member get called racial slurs and they get up in the patients face and yell at them and you have to get between them and tell your coworker to take a walk but it’s hard to get them to do that because it’s 2am and there’s no other techs on the unit and they know the nurse isn’t gonna come out to help you before it’s too late. And those reactions make sense and you wonder why they’re packing you in with so many patients that your coworker can’t just walk away. And then you see somebody posture and yell at a patient who’s just all around rude but again it’s 2am and you can’t make it to 7 with just one tech.
And you also know that you’re going to need to choose the moment that it’s too much and that’ll be the end. Because if you stay after that you become the “them” in the “us vs them” and one day you’re going to face a violent patient at 2am and the tech who’s with you will leave you alone with that patient because “I don’t want you to report me too.”
And if you’re smart, you get out before it gets that far. One day a nurse asked me what I’d seen happen and I told them (truthfully) that I’d been at lunch and had no idea what they were talking about and they cut the conversation off. And I had no idea what patient or staff member it would’ve been about (as far as I could tell all of the patients were the same as before I’d gone to lunch) so I couldn’t have reported anything anyway. But I had to ask myself if I had seen something what would I have been asked to cover up?
And anybody who’s worked corrections or for the state will tell me something similar happened to them, or worse. And I just… You either get out or something awful happens. I’m so grateful I was able to get out before I personally got pulled into something. You think you’ll be able to be different but that system is just so much bigger than you.
And people who are outside of it living their happy lives will tell you they want a better system, but they will never truly be willing to put in the work needed to change it or even give you the resources to do it yourself. Like I’d been a patient at that state hospital previously and went back as a staff member to try and help and being a staff member was just so much worse somehow. I’m grateful that it gave me the experience to do what I do now and be an authority / teacher in the management of violent patients but it was hell while it was happening. No one who’s never been through that will ever really understand.