Finally, everyone sees it, and everyone is talking about it, whether to decry it or to justify it. But it is not hiding in plain sight any longer…

I speak of the lawless impunity of the entire, rotten Department of Homeland so-called “Security” apparatus and its paramilitary Gestapo forces posing as law-enforcement agencies: ICE and CBP, Customs and Border Protection, which includes the Border Patrol — an early 20th-century rebranding of the pre-Civil War era Slave Patrols and the Ku Klux Klan.

I speak of the racism and deliberate cruelty that were baked into the US immigration system from its earliest incarnation and allowed to take root and fester even before 9/11 gave legislators an excuse to shift the Cold War-era iron-triangle funding obsession that brought us the Military-Industrial Complex armageddon machine to building up the now global Border Industrial Complex, instead.

Today, the Border Industrial Complex encircles the globe like a second equator, cleaving the wealthy, predominantly white world from the less-wealthy, less-white one, creating a global apartheid where borders are becoming deeper, taller, angrier, more militarized, and more violent all the time. Built on the theory that if we make crossing borders as painful and perilous and as dangerous and potentially deadly as possible, the Border Industrial Complex is inherently cruel. And for the last 40-plus years, US Border Industrial Complex adherents have chosen to crank the cruelty, year upon year, rather than seek humane responses to the fact that it is our forever wars, the environment-destroying practices of our transnational extraction corporations, and the climate change fallout from our fossil-fuel addictions that cause the very human displacement and migration the Border Industrial Complex aims to thwart.

Unable to stop the largest human migration in recorded history, the world’s wealthiest nations have spent the last 40-plus years determined to lock up and expel it instead, keeping it out of our sight and therefore out of our minds. I chart the evolution of this detention-to-deportation pipeline in my book, Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands. And nowhere is the cruelty of deterrence applied more ruthlessly and more visciously than within its opaque and now rapidly expanding concentration camp-styled prisons and the transportation network of charter airlines, buses, and armored jails on wheels that connect them, especially in Trump’s USA.

Human rights abuses have gone unchecked inside this abomination of modern enslavement since well before he and his evil minions invaded US groupthink and the White House the first time. But under Trump’s white supremacist cabal, the steadily deteriorating conditions resulting from institutionalized cruelty and misery forced upon folks who’ve largely committed no crime have been unmasked.

Today, February 18, 2026, we mark the seventh recorded death of an imprisoned immigrant just this year, and it could be the eighth as the fate of ICE’s youngest prisoner, 2-month-old Juan Nicolás, remains unknown. It is nearly the 40th death since the Trump regime’s second inauguration. And while I mourn for each life lost, and for every person whose human rights to freedom, safety, and a dignified life have been denied them by this wretched system, it is imperative that we unmask the crimes against humanity committed in our name and with our money by our detention-to- deportation pipeline so that we might abolish it — the sooner the better.

The atrocities taking place inside the 200+ US detention gulag are hard to uncover. The atrocities taking place under Trump & Co’s mass deportation campaign, however, are even harder to perceive and document.

On ICE Air’s Boxcars in the Sky, evidence of Department of Homeland “Security” impunity is whisked away with the individuals its agency operators shackle and return to harm. Indeed, it was purely by accident that I managed to track down and interview nearly five-dozen passengers refouled during Trump & Co’s first mass deportation campaign — the one few people knew about; the one they attempted as practice for the genocide unfolding in our name and with our money.

From Crossing the Line: Finding America in the Borderlands, Chapter 32, “Locked In,” this is what mass deportation looks, feels, sounds, and smells like. And with stakes like these, nobody wins.

Please listen and share. Click the playbutton above ☝🏼☝🏼☝🏼because we all need to know what happens on an ICE Air mass deportation flight, on an in-air Abu Ghraib, on today’s boxcars, though in the sky.

Trump and his evil minions have weaponized immigration to drive democracy into crisis. They have harnessed that weapon to drive the US toward genocide against the stateless. Though they have corrupted the US Department of Homeland so-called “Security” apparatus to unleash the worst of humanity’s worst impulses again, we must understand that the cruelty of the system did not begin with them. We must, therefore, never go back to a previous era in immigration policies and practices, for that will only bring us back to this wretched place again. The only answer is abolition. But first, we must unseat Trump, Miller, Bondi, Noem, Homan, Bovino, Vought, et al., then build a more humane system and world from their ashes.

Stay strong, everyone. The only way through this is…Together.

✊🏼 Sarah

PS: Mark your calendars! I’ll be LIVE on Substack this Saturday, February 21, with a new feature: This Week in Immigration. Notification to follow…

PPS: If you haven’t called your Members of Congress yet, do so today. Tell them, no more money for Trump & Co’s Gestapo:

NOT ONE MORE DOLLAR FOR ICE. NOT ONE MORE DOLLAR FOR CBP.

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This Is What Mass Deportation Looks Like...