As someone who studies political violence, here’s what scares me about the new Trump’s bill: It’s not just the resources it gives to ICE which is already a human rights disaster. It’s the signal it sends to ICE supervisors and agents.
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"We're gonna need bigger concentration camps."
jul 3, 2025, 11:57 pm • 0 0 • view
Studies of torture and human rights abuses by state agents—such as Abu Ghraib stanfordmag.org/contents/zim... and the Greek military police during the dictatorship psycnet.apa.org/record/1989-... — show they there doesn’t have to be an order saying: “Go torture!” What matters are the incentives.
jul 3, 2025, 9:49 pm • 10 2 • view
All it takes is: -Pressure to “get the job done” -Demonization of the target group (militants, communists, immigrants) -A culture of impunity That’s when torture and abuse become systemic and escalate.
jul 3, 2025, 9:49 pm • 16 3 • view
ICE agents and supervisors are bureaucrats. Like other bureaucrats they want to please their bosses. And the Trump/Miller signal from this bill makes these goals crystal clear: “Get those arrest numbers up. Be creative.” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
jul 3, 2025, 9:49 pm • 17 4 • view
And you’ll be fooling yourself if you think that the Trump DOJ will ever prosecute any ICE agents for abuses. It’s a sad and dangerous day for human rights in the U.S.
jul 3, 2025, 9:49 pm • 24 1 • view
From studying the treatment of political prisoners and POWs during the U.S. civil war, I can add that detaining people for months who’ve never been adjudicated criminals almost invariably leads jailers to resolve the cognitive dissonance by thinking of them as guilty & treating them accordingly.
jul 3, 2025, 10:12 pm • 6 0 • view
"I fear that we live in a world in which war and racism are ubiquitous, in which the powers of government mobilization and legitimization are powerful and increasing, in which a sense of personal responsibility is increasingly attenuated by specialization and bureaucratization 1/
jul 3, 2025, 10:39 pm • 0 0 • view
and in which the peer group exerts tremendous pressures on behavior and sets moral norms. In such a world, I fear, modern governments that wish to commit mass murder will seldom fail in their efforts for being unable to induce “ordinary men” to become their “willing executioners."- Chris R Brown 2/2
jul 3, 2025, 10:40 pm • 0 0 • view
ICE agents are and will only increasingly be Trump's personal storm troopers. Hitler could never have dreamed of having such resources.
jul 3, 2025, 9:52 pm • 6 0 • view
Who are already so arrogantly gleefully into death.
jul 3, 2025, 10:24 pm • 0 0 • view