This outrageous story didn't generate a ton of national attention last week, but as someone from the area where it occurred I think it speaks both to the cruelty of DHS's mass deportation campaign and the inhumane lengths the regime will go to solve the logistical problem presented by trying to detain millions of people in order to deport them.
Rashida Tlaib (D-MI12) is reporting that Customs and Border Protection is snatching people on the Ambassador Bridge and detaining them at a holding facility there that is not designed to be used as a long term jail. As this report indicates, conditions are brutal, several American citizens have been detained for days at a time, and most of the families detained there simply made a wrong turn onto a poorly labeled road.
https://truthout.org/articles/tlaib-cbp-has-detained-200-in-michigan-where-people-took-wrong-turn-to-canada/
Tlaib: CBP Has Detained 200 in Michigan Where People Took Wrong Turn to Canada
"Last month, Tlaib visited an immigrant jail where Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) is holding and “disappearing” people who cross the Ambassador Bridge, in Detroit, a one-way toll road.
Between January 20 and March 21, CBP has detained at least 210 people this way, Tlaib discovered, with over 90 percent of them having crossed the bridge by accident, taking the wrong turn on the road — a mistake frequently made by people living in the area, locals say. Tlaib said in a press conference that advocates in Michigan have long called for better signage and directions around the bridge.
Immigration advocates say that the immigrant jail is not built to hold people long term, and that officers have denied detainees proper medical care, food, and access to legal counsel."
Folks, as someone who has driven in the area and almost ended up on that very same bridge, because of that very same road multiple times, I have no problem at all believing ICE snatched up 210 people in two months at that crossing. The important issue here however is that our white nationalist regime is so desperate to meet Trump's fundamentally racist deportation quotas that they're lying in ambush for migrants who are almost certainly not a danger to public safety, just people who struggle with Detroit's byzantine network of roads.
Furthermore, the fact that CBP is shoving entire families into a small facility designed to temporarily hold people trying to cross the border, speaks to the sheer scale of this ongoing ethnic cleansing operation. The United States already has what most believe to be the largest migrant carceral system in the world, and we're repurposing border jails to lock up whole families in horrifying conditions for as long as twelve days? As the article notes, there's already been one suicide attempt at the jail and while I'd argue that caging brown people for being born on the wrong side of an imaginary line was already a crime against human decency, locking people up in a makeshift dungeon without adequate provisions to hold them is an internationally recognized violation of human rights. The fact that we're basically torturing families for making a wrong turn onto the bridge is just the fascist cherry on top of this cruel and repugnant sundae.