Somewhere else has arrived…. first published on my Substack
A descent into this hell – on the road to endless suffering, death – or deportation: Those who enter describe being swallowed into a system where they effectively disappear from their families, confined in overcrowded, filthy tents, denied adequate medical care, deprived of sunlight, beaten by masked guards, threatened into abandoning legal claims, and left to choose between indefinite suffering, ending it themselves, or deportation to places they fled for fear of death.
In a new report released July 15, Human Rights Watch and the ACLU document allegations of detainees screaming, “I can’t breathe,” before dying in custody, of people living in conditions so degrading they described them as torture, and of coercive removals to unfamiliar third countries.
This is a place that when one awakens from the nightmare of the night, the morning brings more darkness that strips away all hope.
This is Fort Bliss El Paso Texas … Camp East Montana…
No, this is not about some third world country we gloss over in our annual U.S. State Department Human Rights Report.
This THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.
Fort Bliss is a modern antechamber to hell, a place where human beings are warehoused as if already in the afterlife life. Made worse by the betrayal of a dream and promise of liberty.
Fort Bliss is one of several bricks forged from the architecture of human degradation. We were supposed to be that welcoming place – protection – asylum – restoration -life – where personhood could reclaim the humanity lost elsewhere.. not here too!
Instead Fort Bliss is a pitstop for a host of Trump-led crimes against humanity, committed in a climate where the checks and balances we once took for granted are fried to a crisp in the cauldrons and calculus of a Congress gone complicit.
For more than four decades, I have worked in the field of international human rights. I have documented persecution under dictatorships, military regimes, theocracies, and failed states. I have written expert reports about torture, arbitrary detention, disappearances, refoulement,* and governments that treat human beings as disposable. Through it all, I carried one enduring assumption: that however imperfect the United States might be, it remained a vital guardrail against humanity’s darkest instincts, a nation always capable of correcting itself, of holding others to account, and of offering refuge when the rest of the world failed.
I never imagined I would one day find myself bearing witness to the United States and reporting in the same language that I have long reserved for countries I have criticized before international tribunals. Never did I imagine that America would become a pariah in the human rights community, not because of isolated misconduct, but because of policies that inflict profound suffering on vulnerable people under the color of law. That realization is one of the greatest heartbreaks of my professional life. It is not simply that America has stumbled. It is that it risks becoming a perpetrator of the very abuses it once challenged abroad.
PLEASE I Implore you to read and share the Human Rights Watch and ACLU report on Fort Bliss. Read every page. Then ask yourself whether this is the country we are and will continue to become. Is this what our silence normalizes? (See Report link at end.)
Do not allow the endless cycle of political distractions, manufactured outrage, and daily red herrings to pull your eyes away from this. While we argue over headlines designed to divide us, people are suffering and, in some cases dying, or wanting to die in immigration detention. This demands more than outrage on social media. It demands action:
Call your House representative. Call your senators. It does not matter whether they are Republicans or Democrats. Demand independent investigations. Demand accountability. Demand that Congress confront what is happening inside our immigration detention system. Demand that they do it beyond mere performance. They need a plan. Demand that they do not stop at detention gates with a wave to the cameras.
Even if you think your representative is on a side that will do nothing, make your voice heard.
If we remain silent while people are beaten, neglected, disappeared within the system, or coerced toward refoulement, then silence itself becomes part of the machinery that permits it.
We are taught one life is all lives. We know “ubuntu” delivers a deep understanding of humanity, when it reminds “I am because we are.” Yet if this moment were to stop in time – it reflects a shocking assertion, that we have allowed Fort Bliss, for all humankind.
THE REPORT BY ACLU/ HRW – HERE
*Refoulement refers to the expulsion, deportation, extradition, or other transfer of an individual to a state where there are substantial grounds for believing they would face persecution, torture, or other serious harm. International law generally prohibits refoulement through the principle of non-refoulement.
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