Behold, your tax dollars at work
I appropriated Bad Bunny’s message from his celebratory Super Bowl performance for a little overpass work on Monday: THE ONLY THING MORE POWERFUL THAN HATE IS LOVE. The response from commuters was joyful. Except for the guy who flipped two middle fingers from the top of his steering wheel. There’s always at least one.
That suggests that the majority of Americans would find this upsetting:
For the first time, someone who worked inside the Baltimore ICE detention facility at the center of a viral video showing severe overcrowding is speaking out publicly — and exclusively to WUSA9.
The former worker whose identity WUSA9 is disguising at his request because they signed a non-disclosure agreement and could face legal action, provided internal documents and described conditions they say went far beyond what appeared in January’s viral video.
“I worked there for several months and it was probably day one, day two that I saw the abuse,” the worker said. “I saw people laying in feces. People throwing up, people laying in urine.”
The former worker provided WUSA9 with what they claim are internal head count sheets from December showing conditions worse than the viral video: 47, 50 and 56 detainees in the same cell — more than the worker counted in the video itself — and as many as 50 in an even smaller cell.
Non-disclosure agreements. For keeping trade secrets, sure. For concealing crimes or criminal treatment of human beings, no. Why does Donald Trump demand them? Make them a campaign issue.
Maryland Representative April McClain Delaney (D) visited the Baltimore facility after being delayed for months:
She called conditions “heartbreaking” and “horrendous.”
“This whole detention center is really only meant to hold people for 12 hours and is being used to hold people for 24, 48, 72 hours or longer, depending on if they’ve asked for habeas corpus or if they have medical conditions or the transport planes are full,” the congresswoman said.
She said detainees sleep on thin mats with foil blankets placed directly on concrete floors, and she reported that some of those being detained in the facility told her they were hungry and thirsty.
McClain Delaney described one room “with probably 50 people, concrete floors, a bench around the perimeter, and a makeshift bathroom in the middle that has minimal privacy.”
The men who flip me off likely celebrate their country treating other people like this. The decent, civilized, compassionate America recoils.
There are more of us than there are of them. And more of us than Megyn Kellys.