One of the most underexamined, perhaps even actively avoided topics of discussion in the larger discourse about the Trump regime's fascist ethnic cleaning project, is the administration's efforts to establish what Nick Turse has dubbed a "global gulag" of dangerous third party countries willing to accept trafficked migrants the US government insists are "dangerous criminals" yet in many cases, have no significant criminal record at all. Perhaps adhering to a philosophy of out of sight, out of mind, the US media has shown little interest in pursing these stories beyond whatever mystifying, pro-kidnapping and deportation rulings come out of a 6-3 fascist-high Supreme Court. As multiple investigations by The Intercept have shown however, the regime is running far more deportation flights, to far more dangerous concentration camps around the globe, than mainstream media coverage would lead you to believe.

In this examination, Turse checks out the US State Department's own assessments of the human rights records of both the countries the Trump regime has actually trafficked people to, and the countries the Trumpenreich is negotiating with to allow those "deportations." To the surprise of precisely no one, Foggy Bottom gave the vast majority of them a failing grade - 91% of them to be precise.

https://theintercept.com/2025/07/29/trump-deport-immigrants-third-country-human-rights/

State Dept: Trump’s “Third Countries” for Immigrants Have Awful Human Rights Records

"The nations that the Trump administration is collaborating with to accept these expelled immigrants are some of the worst human rights offenders on the planet, according to the U.S. government’s own reports.

More than 8,100 people have been expelled in this manner since January 20, and the U.S. has made arrangements to send people to at least 13 nations, so far, across the globe. Of them, 12 have been cited by the State Department for significant human rights abuses.

But the Trump administration has cast a much wider net for its third-country deportations. The U.S. has solicited 64 nations to participate in its growing global gulag for expelled immigrants. Fifty-eight of them — roughly 91 percent — were rebuked for human rights violations in the State Department’s most recent human rights reports."

Given the alarming number of people the Gestapo is rounding up off the streets, I can understand folks getting the idea that 8,100 kidnapped migrants trafficked to countries they often have no connection to whatsoever, is merely a drop in the bucket. They reality however is that these deportation flights, which can often contain as few as five people, represent one of the highest priorities for the Pork Reich's larger ethnic cleansing project because they are among the most difficult to stop, or undo. This is why the Trump regime took their case to remove the injunction blocking these third country deportation flights, all the way to the Supreme Court - where Roberts and the other "conservatives" found a loophole to let them get away with it.

Please then, keep in mind that the regime fought tooth and nail for the right to conduct expensive and inefficient migrant trafficking flights, while you consider what the rest of this data means. Specifically, and as Refugees International's Yael Schacher told the Intercept, that "the Trump administration cares nothing for human rights and wants these deportations to third countries to be punitive." Which is a very college way of saying we're purposely shipping migrants to unstable third country gulags because we want to disappear them in the cruelest, most harmful way possible. Let me rephrase that: we are paying to vanish people in some of the worst dungeons, and least safe places on Earth because our white nationalist government loves hurting nonwhite people, and is trying to create a white, or at least significantly whiter, American ethnostate.

Given the broad spread of countries the US is secretly negotiating with (at least 64 right now), the conditions trafficked migrants are held in vary significantly; but as the State Department's own reports detail, confinement, abuse, torture and extrajudicial murder are common dangers in the majority of third party countries accepting US deportation flights. For example, both South Sudan and Eswatini, countries which recently accepting 8 and 5 kidnapped migrants from the US government, are unquestionably hotbeds for extrajudicial killings and torture according to both the US State Department, and the United Nations.

In the end, it doesn't matter what the media, or the Supreme Court say, these are all violations of international law, and in some cases crimes against humanity. The Trump regime can write themselves whatever policy guideline excuses they like, it doesn't change the fact that this is absolutely nightmare Nazi shit, and everyone involved had better hope America never sees another day free from fascist domination, or they're all going to prison for a very long time.

One of the immutable truths of any large scale, targeted fascist oppression operation, is that the most horrifying consequences will tend to fall directly on marginalized communities, and within those communities, the outcomes will be the worst for the most marginalize people overall. As such, it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone to learn that the Gestapo's recent mass deportation project is disproportionately destroying the lives of undocumented sex workers as a result of targeted ICE raids featuring common abuses, and even sexual extortion. Unfortunately, the reason that it *may* still surprise you is that despite widespread coverage of the Gestapo's fascist abuses targeting other migrants, almost nobody, even among migrant activists and civil rights organizations, is speaking out for migrant sex workers targeted as part of the Trump regime's slow motion ethnic cleansing project.

This excellent essay on Truthout is divided up into main themes. Firstly, it raises awareness about targeted ICE raids on massage parlors, and calls advocates out for not standing up for sex workers who're being disappeared into the Gestapo's migrant cages at an alarming high rate without anyone really keeping track of it at all. Additionally, the piece also explores the way anti-sex work legislation and surveillance technology, originally adopted under the guise of preventing human "trafficking" has functioned as both a permission gate and a testing ground for the anti-migrant panopticon DHS is operating; a panopticon Trump is now trying to turn towards his political enemies more broadly by partnering with companies like Palantir to create dossiers on as many Americans as they possibly can.

https://truthout.org/articles/sex-workers-are-being-abducted-by-ice-and-abandoned-by-respectability-politics/

Sex Workers Are Being Abducted by ICE — and Abandoned by Respectability Politics

"Since January 2025, police raids on massage parlors have intensified, targeting immigrant women suspected of sex work. Amid nationwide protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), these workers — among ICE’s most systematically targeted — are largely excluded from community defense."

I don't want to give short shrift to the primary thrust of authors Kate Zen and Chanelle Gallant's work here, because at the end of the day it really is both alarming and disheartening to see that we as a society have learned very little over the past six months about how the regime targets those it is somehow socially acceptable to victimize (migrants instead of Americans, brown people instead of white people, trans people instead of cis people, etc) for fascist repression and abuse first, and uses that to create a gateway that allows those very same policies to work more broadly against everyone. The fact that nobody is fighting to protect migrant sex workers, calling for the release of kidnapping victims who happened to be captured at massage parlors, or even tracking what's happening to these (primarily) women isn't just respectability politics; it's mutual suicide in the face of a fascist ethnic cleansing and a broader eliminationist program. Migrant sex workers are migrants. Migrant sex workers are workers. Migrant sex workers are human beings. That makes the issue of Gestapo kidnappings targeting migrant sex workers a labor issue, a civil rights issue, and a human rights issue all rolled up into one horrifying fascist jelly roll of oppression.

Which of course then brings us to the long term costs of ignoring carceral violence, oppression, and civil rights violations of sex workers in the first place.

"The Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act (2015) authorized the creation of the Cyber Crimes Center within ICE, enabling wiretaps and internet surveillance. Between 2014 and 2018, DHS funneled over $3 million to local police for license plate readers to combat trafficking — now used in broader workplace raids.

Authorities justified travel bans, surveillance, racial profiling, raids, detentions, deportations, asset seizures, even sexual assault as anti-trafficking measures to protect women and children. But these measures do more harm than good, exposing migrants to additional forms of violence. Most funding went to prosecutions and public campaigns promoting false statistics and racist stereotypes, not victims’ services — fueling misguided vigilantism and MAGA fearmongering around child trafficking."

Folks, the authors of this piece are absolutely correct to point out that our decades long obsession with stopping "trafficking" was just an excuse to crack down on sex workers, and the digital panopticon used to do so is now being expanded to target migrants and even Trump's political opposition. Once you're willing to sacrifice the human rights of some ppl, for nothing more than patriarchal morality in this case, you're inevitably fueling the argument that your rights too, are subject to conditions and exemptions. And well, here we are.

#Fascism #Trump #ICE Gestapo #SexWork #Labor #HumanRights #Kidnapping #surveillance