Washington, D.C. - In response to Trump’s 100th day in office, Silky Shah, Executive Director of Detention Watch Network, shared the following reflections in Truthout:
“Since taking office in January, Trump and his regime have increasingly weaponized the immigrant detention system for his white supremacist agenda. Suppression of dissent and intimidation have been cornerstones of the MAGA regime, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) forcefully abducting and incarcerating students and scholars for what is essentially a thought crime — expressing solidarity with Palestinians. The Trump administration’s total disdain for basic human rights has been laid bare through its extrajudicial offshoring of detention to CECOT, an abusive mega-prison in El Salvador, where people are being detained indefinitely with no due process. And even as Trump has given Elon Musk free rein to dismantle the federal government, decimating vital programs and services that support the needs of all people in the U.S., the Republican Party is pouring billions into expanding the cruel and harmful immigrant detention system.
The changing infrastructure and scope of immigrant incarceration has become a clear testing ground for this administration’s authoritarianism. But these policies did not emerge overnight. For decades, government leaders from across the political spectrum set the stage for these draconian moves by diminishing immigrants’ due process rights under the pretense of ‘protecting public safety.’ Transferring immigrants to remote immigrant jails is also a familiar tactic intended to impair access to legal counsel while putting cases before more hostile courts. Trump’s deportation machinery is building on what prior administrations, including those of Obama and Biden, had already put in place. An honest stock-taking of the Trump administration’s first 100 days reveals how bipartisan support for detention expansion and criminalization of immigration created the ideal conditions for today’s war on immigrants.”
Read the full op-ed here.
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Detention Watch Network (DWN) is a national coalition building power through collective advocacy, grassroots organizing, and strategic communications to abolish immigration detention in the United States.