Tortured Logic
We need to stop abusing migrants, now
Editor’s Note: Have a loaded question? Unload it on Matt at askmattlabash@gmail.com.
Dear Matt,
Could sending illegal immigrants to war-ravaged, inhospitable countries be anything other than torture?
Brian M.
I see what’s going on here. You’re trying to bait me into moralizing again, aren’t you? (Don’t answer — that’s why we call this feature “Ask Matt” and not “Ask Brian.”) Throughout most of my life, I’ve tried to resist moralizing. I’m an ironist by nature, and also a fly fisherman, which practically requires you to believe that remaining uncertain is the only certainty one can bank on. (Not to mention, spending much of your life standing in cold water, waving a graphite stick at fish, only to let them go once you catch them, demands an appreciation of both absurdity and life’s inherent contradictions.) And besides, moralizing tends to make people self-serious. It’s always advisable not to take yourself too seriously. Because if you’re unable to laugh at yourself, most of your friends will laugh behind your back anyway. So better to stay ahead of the curve.
But one of the things I hate about this current administration — and as regular readers know, there is never a shortage of things that tick that box — is that they are so amoral, or immoral as we state-it-plainly-types prefer, that they leave you little choice but to moralize. For which I do not apologize. Because if they represent us, and they do evil, then am sorry to break it to you, but evil is being done in our name. And if you’re okay with that……well, the question you should be asking yourself isn’t, “Why are there so many whiny moralizers?” But rather, “Why am I not the least bit tempted to become one of them?”
And though I’ve always been against illegal immigration — and still am — that brings us to our immoral torture of these people whose “crime” against America is mostly trying to make a better life for themselves and their families. (Often, while they cut your lawns or bus your tables or change your brat’s diapers or pick your produce. Things most of us gringos don’t want to do, if we can help it.) Making a better life being precisely why my European ancestors came here a little over a century ago, and probably many of yours, too. Which, to speak to your question: torturing them doesn’t even require us to deport them to third-world, war-ravaged hellholes, as this administration has proven themselves more than willing to do. Because it’s already happening right here at home, in the gulags our government has set up for them.
As someone who has written about and celebrated Alexei Navalny, I don’t use the word “gulag” lightly. But unlike with Soviet-era or even Putin-era Russia, you thought that couldn’t happen here, right? Guess again. It already has. Or at least a Nerf version of it. No, we’re not executing prisoners just yet. (Though I wouldn’t be surprised if 20 percent or so of our population would find a way to rationalize that, too. Because that’s how far we’ve fallen.) But just this week, the Drudge Report was littered with headlines about such activities. Here’s a sampling:
Migrants Forced To “Eat Like Dogs”
“Caged Like Chickens”
Camera Over Toilet
FEMA Camp Raises Alarm
Are you okay with that? I’m not. But when you delve deeper, into the 92-page Human Rights Watch report that spurred some of those stories, You Feel Like Your Life Is Over: Abusive Practices At Three Florida Immigration Detention Centers Since January 2025, you might not be okay either. Here are some highlights, quoted directly, concerning the report’s investigation of three Florida facilities: the Krome North Service Processing Center, the Broward Transitional Center (BTC), and the Federal Detention Center (FDC).
This report finds that staff at the three detention facilities researchers examined subjected detained individuals to dangerously substandard medical care, overcrowding, abusive treatment, and restrictions on access to legal and psychosocial support. Officers denied detainees critical medication and detained some incommunicado in solitary confinement as an apparent punishment for seeking mental health care. Facility officers returned some detainees to detention directly from hospital stays with no follow-up treatment. They detained others in solitary confinement or transferred them without notice, disrupting legal representation. They forced them to sleep on cold concrete floors without bedding and gave them food which was sometimes substandard, and in many instances ignored their medical requirements. Some officers treated detainees in dehumanizing ways. These findings match those of an April 2025 submission by Americans for Immigrant Justice (AIJ) to the United Nations Human Rights Council, which documented severe and systemic human rights violations at Krome. Combined with years of investigations by Human Rights Watch and other independent experts and groups in the US, they paint a picture of an immigration detention system that degrades, intimidates, and punishes immigrants
The first week was hellish. I was brought to a room where there were about 60 to 80 other men. The room was extremely crowded, and at night there was barely enough room for everyone to lie down. One man slept sitting on a toilet, and others were sleeping right next to the toilet.
The rooms had no access to showers and contained a single exposed toilet. According to AIJ, in one instance, officers gave detained individuals a bucket in which to relieve themselves in front of each other. When people sleeping on the floor needed to use a toilet at night, they had to “wake up everyone around us to clear a path to the toilets,” a detainee said in his declaration to AIJ. Another said, “The room smelled really bad, and men were lying down right next to the toilet—even as others did their business right next to their heads. It was disgusting.”Rosa was detained in processing for three days. She said the one toilet in her cell was covered in feces. Despite repeated requests for cleaning supplies so that she and her cellmates could clean it, officers told her sarcastically, “Housekeeping will come soon.” No one ever came. Andrea and another woman detained with her, Maria, said they were detained for the first five days in a cell with an exposed toilet that was visible through the windows of adjacent visitation rooms—rooms that, due to overcrowding, were housing men Andrea said, “If the men stood on a chair or on the desk, they could see right into our room and the toilet. And sometimes they got up to look at us.”Andrea said they repeatedly asked officers to be allowed to shower but were told that Krome is a male-only facility and that clearing a section for women to shower was not feasible. Only after protesting by placing signs in the window stating that they were being treated inhumanely, four days into their detention, were they taken—shackled—to the mental health wing to shower and receive clean clothes. That walk was the first time they had been out in the fresh air in four days.
Chauhan and Pedro described a transfer process in mid-April in which dozens of men were gathered into a single cell early in the morning, their feet shackled, and their hands tied behind their backs. They were then left in the room for hours. Chauhan said: “By then it was 5 p.m. and no one had had lunch. Some had not even had breakfast. We could see the food through the bars of our holding cell in styrofoam containers on a cart. The food was in front of us, but the guards refused to give it to us. At 7 p.m., they finally gave us lunch, but only after another guard protested on our behalf. We were chained though, so we could not reach the plates with our hands. We had to put the plates on chairs and then bend down and eat with our mouths, like dogs.”
Chauhan said that in early February when he was first brought to Krome for processing, he witnessed an ICE officer kick an injured older man during a headcount in the processing cell.
Juan, a 47-year-old man from Colombia who was transferred from Krome to FDC on March 6, 2025, and then back to Krome on March 14, 2025 at roughly 4 p.m., said that when returning to Krome, officers left him and others on the bus, parked outside the entrance, for almost 24 hours. They did not give the detained individuals any food or water or let them use the bathroom, he said. Finally, on Saturday afternoon, they took them out of the bus, gave them some food and water, and let them use the bathroom, but then forced them back onto the bus where they stayed for about 24 hours more until Sunday afternoon, when officers put them into a very cold and overcrowded processing cell. The group was there for eleven days. The man had already spent six days in the cold cell when he was first in Krome between February 11 and February 17, 2025. All eight interviewees said they had been detained for up to 12 days at a time in what they referred to as “la hielera” —a Spanish term meaning “ice box” which is commonly used to describe the frigid processing cell. These rooms lacked any bedding, and people were not provided with proper clothing. Except for one man who received a thermal blanket, they were forced to sleep on cold floors or hard benches without jackets or blankets.“We had on very light clothing, and they would turn up the air conditioning to 500 miles an hour,” said Josué Aguilar Valle, a 27-year-old man from Honduras.“You could not fall asleep because it was so cold. I thought I was going to experience hypothermia.” Those interviewed described severe overcrowding, with Juan reporting over 60 men confined in a single room and Pedro, a 21-year-old man from Guatemala, reporting over 50. Chauhan reported being moved repeatedly over three-and-a-half days between rooms, including to a medical unit, ultimately ending up in a room with 40 other men. He described the processing period as “days in hell.”
This report documents serious violations of medical standards. Detention facility staff routinely denied individuals with diabetes, asthma, kidney conditions, and chronic pain their prescribed medications and access to doctors. In one case at Krome, a woman with gallstones began vomiting and lost consciousness after being denied care for several days. Officers returned her to the same cell after emergency surgery to remove her gallbladder — still without medication.
This is just a partial list of atrocities. You can read the report on your own, along with the other aforementioned stories, for a fuller picture. But I guess my larger question is: “why?” What did these people ever do to deserve this, besides trying to make a better life for themselves, while running afoul of Stephen Miller and his dark, immigrant-related BDSM fantasies?
As a lowly Substack writer, I don’t have a lot of power to stop anything. But I do have the power of my voice. So I’m using it now, as a Christian who is well-acquainted with the Scripture — to say, in rather un-Christian fashion: Stop this fucked-up shit. It’s wrong, and it needs to end. Even if we elect to deport people, which needs to be done in plenty of instances, we can do so mercifully, while treating them respectfully, like fellow human beings. Which is what all deportees are, whether MAGA wants to admit it, or doesn’t.
Don’t kid yourself into thinking that we are better than they are. We’re not. We’re fellow humans, forever yoked to the struggle that entails. And we were just luckier, blessed both geographically and perhaps genetically, by our earlier-adopter ancestors. Many of us won the cosmic lottery, being born American, which the newbies are understandably also trying to become, even if illegally. Can you blame them? Plenty of them will fail, and some will succeed. But we — by which I mean the government that represents us — have no right to torture them for the imagined crime of trying to attain the beauty and security that we take for granted. A security which feels less secure every day, as we show how willing we are to compromise the high standards we once held. For when we are willing to hurt those who many regard as the least among us, we are also willing to do violence to ourselves. Because that is a violation of everything we used to at least pretend to hold dear. Ideals the rest of the world is desperate for us not to forsake, even if they never make it across our border.
Bonus Tracks: I realize it’s not cool to cite early-80s Genesis anymore. But I dug this song when it came out, and I think it hits the nail on the head. Especially now: It’s no fun/Being an illegal alien. That about covers it:
And I’m never sure if this is an immigrant song, unlike his “Across the Border” which definitely is, but it kind of feels like one to me. Bruce Springsteen’s “Land of Hope and Dreams.”