The Casual Cruelty Of The GOP’s Migrant Purge

from the inhumane-fucks dept

Yeah, there’s the overt cruelty. There’s the murder of protesters. The chasing of day laborers across Home Depot parking lots. The snatching and separation of children from parents. The day-in, day-out portrayal of migrants as filthy leeches from “shithole” countries by [vomits] the Commander-in-Chief.

Then there’s everything surrounding it. The camping out at immigration courts to kidnap people who are just trying to follow the law by performing their required check-ins. The sweeping up of anyone in the area who looks a little bit foreign any time federal officers are actually engaged in a “targeted” arrest.

There’s so much of it happening every day that it’s easy to lose sight of all the victims of this administration’s cruelty. There’s a human cost that never factors into the administration’s calculations because, well, most of the upper echelon ghouls don’t actually consider these people to be “human.”

Politico’s Kyle Cheney has been tracking thousands of immigration cases since the anti-migrant surge began. What he’s collected — and this is only a small part of it — should make your blood boil. After all, you still have some pumping through your veins, even if the administration seems to be able to function on bile alone.

Consider the case of Sonik Manaserian, a 70-year-old Iranian refugee who fled religious persecution in her country, arriving in the United States in May of 1999. Her asylum request didn’t work out and she was given an order of removal in October 1999. However, she was not deported and has lived here for the past 18 years under an Order of Supervision and Unsupervised Parole (OSUP) after she was picked up by ICE in 2008. In other words, as long as she continued to check in with the immigration court, she could stay indefinitely.

That ended once Trump took office and sent his goon squads out to remove pretty much anyone he felt didn’t belong here. ICE officers arrested her at a check-in last November, without any prior notice or warrant for arrest. The government has already admitted it doesn’t really have any way to deport her to Iran since our government has no diplomatic relationship with the country for obvious reasons. ICE can’t deport her, but it also won’t release her. She’s been stuck in a detention center since this arrest — a place where she can’t receive the medical help she needs. On top of that, ICE lost the medication she had on her when she was arrested and denied her an opportunity to attend a pre-scheduled medical appointment.

Why? Because it can. Even the government can’t explain why it’s doing this to her, instead assuming it can continue to do what it wants as long as it keeps tapping the 26-year-old order of removal. The California judge handling her petition lays this all out in devastating fashion:

Respondents do not contest either of these claims—or, indeed, any of Petitioner’s other claims. Respondents’ Answer to the Petition consists of three sentences, two of which recite the procedural history of this case. The remaining sentence reads, in full, “[a]t this time, Respondents do not have an opposition argument to present.” They have not denied or contested any of the factual allegations in the Petition. They have not offered any additional facts or defenses. They have not argued that different statutes or regulations should govern this case. They have not lodged any relevant documents, despite being ordered to do so.

These are the actions of a government that feels it’s above the law. It can’t even be bothered to fake something up that might be taken as a counterargument. Instead, it hands in three sentences and moves on to address the outcome of another violation of rights in similarly cavalier fashion. Look at these assholes, the court says without actually using any of those words:

Thus, it appears that Respondents arrested a chronically ill, 70-year-old woman, who came to this country to avoid religious persecution and applied for asylum, who has lived here peacefully for 26 years and complied with all check-in requirements and other conditions of release, who has no known criminal record and poses no threat to anyone, without notice or the process required by their own regulations and without any plan for removing her from this country, then kept her in detention for months without sufficient medical care—and they do not have any argument to offer to even try to justify these actions.

Further, having acknowledged that they have no opposition to present to Petitioner’s habeas petition, have they voluntarily released her? No. Thus, Petitioner remains in custody, and her counsel, and the Court, are required to expend resources and effort to address a matter that Respondents either cannot be bothered to defend or realize is indefensible.

That’s the other “fuck you” this administration uses. There’s the overt stuff that makes headlines and whips up the frothy loyalists. Then there’s stuff like this where the government doesn’t even care enough about the people it’s illegally locking up to even toss a few paragraphs of boilerplate into the mix. This is just part of the dehumanization process: the administrative shrug. A collective GOP “so what” when confronted about the violations of the law.

“Worst of the worst” always meant “people the bigots in charge don’t like.” This ruling deals with a Mexican man who has lived here since 2006 with his wife, raising three children and, like most migrants, working hard, paying taxes, and living clean. When asked about this, the administration shrugs again — a shrug that prompts an order for his release:

Respondents make no suggestion that Audberto J. has a criminal history, and the Court concludes he has none.

There’s more in that thread and it’s all awful. There’s the Minnesota man who was arrested and tossed in a detainment center despite having active refugee status. Or how about the mother with a 5-month-old baby and recently discovered heart condition who was arrested and sent to a detention center 1,100 miles away from her child and her primary physician? Are you cool with that, Trump voters? The court certainly isn’t.

Ms. Lah has already lost important bonding and nursing time with her baby. While the Court recognizes that many families are suffering due to Operation PARRIS and other ICE actions in the District of Minnesota, there is something particularly craven about transferring a nursing refugee mother out-of-state.

It is craven. This is the government’s shrug in response to a judge asking why it sent Lah to a detention center in Houston, Texas almost immediately after arresting her.

On January 14, 2026, Respondents filed their one-page Response to Petition For Writ of Habeas Corpus and Motion to Transfer but it did not actually respond to the Petition nor follow Judge Davis’s Order to Show Cause. Respondents assert that Ms. Lah was transferred to Houston, Texas, on January 10, 2026, within hours of Ms. Lah’s arrest, “due to local detention bed space shortage.” Respondents’ Motion asserts that the transfer occurred before the Court’s Order to Show Cause enjoining removal. Respondents submitted the Declaration of Angela Minner in support of their Motion and purportedly attached documents in support. No documents were attached, and no support was otherwise provided.

In any normal world, the people handing in this sloppy work would be reprimanded by their superiors and perhaps even taken off immigration cases. That will never happen here. Not bothering to do the job right is just an easy way to do what you want while providing a minimum amount of lip service to any notions of the federal rules of procedure. If it destroys lives, harms people, or actually deports them to places where they’ll end up dead, so be it. They were never considered people by this administration in the first place.

Filed Under: bigotry, border patrol, cbp, dhs, doj, ice, mass deportation, trump administration