#baltimore

So I'm up late, watching the news on YouTube when I stumble across this short (14m) Majority Report Segment, about an anonymized ICE employee, testifying to a local news station about the horrifying and inhumane conditions inside a concentration camp located in the Baltimore George H. Fallon federal building. This "detention center" recently made national news when a whistleblower leaked video showing dozens of migrants crammed inside a single cell like sardines in conditions that well, resembled a concentration camp more than even a jail. Look, I'm not going to lie to you; some of the testimony provided is hard to hear, but this is another story that I think probably has more impact when you hear a real, actual person who was in position to know, talk about the dehumanizing and dangerous conditions inside ICE concentration camps - which as we're learning, appear to be both intentional and systemic in nature, and not the result of one or two bad facilities. As an aside, shoutout to the WUSA 9 news guys here for going super old school on this high-quality journalism. They reported that the ex-ICE employee couldn't be identified because they'd signed an NDA (uh, should we be making people who work for the migrant carceral complex sign NDAs? Is there any innocent reason for that practice?) but confirmed that they did work at the Baltimore facility in question through employment records, so this is about as credible as an anonymous whistleblower interview can possibly be. If only every news organization still cared this much about doing the job right. ICE Worker Leaks Concentration Camp Ghoulish Conditions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8fWTFnmH0w As I mentioned above, the leaker's account of the conditions inside the Baltimore concentration camp are difficult to hear, especially considering the fact that he's clearly still an extremely reactionary immigration hardliner himself. This isn't exactly a person sympathetic to the migrants he was paid to help confine. In very broad strokes the former ICE employee describes habitual and horrific overcrowding, people forced to lay in feces and urine, women forced to wear diapers due to lack of sanitary supplies, as well as physical and psychological abuse of detainees. Furthermore, much of this testimony was supported by headcount sheets, and screenshots from group chats with co-workers. This nightmare is real. I think perhaps the most important part of the leakers testimony however, is their articulation of the way running the concentration camps saw the ICE employees themselves to begin to see the confined migrants as less than human, even literal animals. As any historian worth her salt will tell you, this dehumanization is both an ever-present byproduct of locking people up en masse in concentration camps for the crime of their birth, and a necessary precondition for pogroms, genocides, and other mass extermination programs under reactionary fascist governments. After the segment featuring the ICE concentration camp whistleblower, the video then opens into a broader discussion between Sam Seder and Emma Vigeland about the growing evidence that all of this torture and mistreatment is intentional, to force kidnapped migrants to give up their legal attempts to stay in the country "voluntarily." And finally our hosts close by noting that the secrecy behind all of this dehumanization, torture, and abuse is rooted in the way DHS and ICE function as part of the specially empowered national security state that grew out of US political class reaction to 9/11 and the War on Terror. The chickens of racialized American imperial adventurism have indeed, come home to roost. #ICE #Fascism #TMR #DHS #ConcentrationCamps #Baltimore #FallonBuilding #EthnicCleansing #PoliceState #WhiteSupremacy