Profiting Off Immigrant Illness, Abuse, and Terror
There are 60,000 immigrants languishing in Trump’s immigration concentration camps. The vast majority have no criminal conviction. Hundreds are children. These are the people on my mind heading into the winter holidays amid the regime’s ongoing immigration terror campaign, and whose stories and situations I want to highlight. Throughout 2025, The American Prospect has covered the regime’s ongoing campaign against immigrants, and I was proud to contribute the following pieces.
There’s No Safe Place for Legal Immigrants in Trump’s America
Trump claims his racist immigration raids are rounding up “the worst of the worst” and only punishing people for failing to follow the rules. All of that is a lie, and this story is one piece of evidence. It describes the catch-22 that immigrants face if they comply with the rules and show up to their mandated court dates. If they do that, if they show up at court, they risk federal agents violently forcing them into detention. So the decision becomes: follow the rules, show up to court, and risk abduction now. Or don’t, and risk abduction later when ICE shows up at their door. Read the story.
Tuberculosis Spawning in Crowded, Dirty ICE Detention Centers
The conditions within Trump’s immigration gulag are deadly, as the more than two dozen immigration prisoners who have died inside them this year demonstrate. This poorly maintained system is run primarily by the two biggest private prison companies in the world, CoreCivic and GEO Group, which put profit so far above people that they’re helping tuberculosis make a comeback. Read the story.
Private Prisons Cash In on Trump’s Mass Deportations
When I say CoreCivic and GEO Group put profit above people, I mean record-breaking profit thanks to the “unprecedented growth opportunities in front of our company,” as GEO Group’s founder and executive chairman put it during a second-quarter earnings call. Read the story.
For-Profit School Opening in For-Profit ICE Family Prison
All of this misery will grow in 2026. Under the GOP’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the mass deportation campaign is getting $150 billion in tax money, including $45 billion to expand immigration prison facilities. The regime is planning to round up and imprison entire families; they’re even planning to open a school in one family detention center to sanitize the fact that they’re imprisoning children. Read the story.
Down and Out on the Crypto Frontier
I’ll end with a story that I hope will make you laugh here and there, though it’s also a grim one, ultimately. I went to Anthony Scaramucci’s Bitcoin conference in Wyoming, a state so breathtakingly beautiful that it reminds me of my home state of Alaska, which is the highest compliment I can give. The conference was also breathtaking, in a very different way. It put on display the collusion between lawmakers and the digital asset cabal, both of which showed themselves to be empty, rapacious, and socially weird. Read the story.
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