cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/29826178

The Senate has passed a bill making Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) the U.S.'s largest interior law enforcement agency with funding for Donald Trump's immigration enforcement agenda higher than most of the world's militaries, including Israel's.

Pending its passage in the House of Representatives, Trump's bill could mean a massive increase in ICE funding as part of an immigration enforcement agenda worth $150 billion over four years.

This figure is more than the annual military budget of Italy, which at $30.8 billion, is the world's 16th highest defense spender for this year according to tracker Global Fire Power.

It is also higher than military spending for Israel, ($30 billion), the Netherlands ($27 billion) and Brazil ($26.1 billion).

Held for 16 days in a “dry cell”—a solitary room with no running water or flushing toilet—Adams was kept under lighted observation by sight and security camera, with no privacy whatsoever for the entire duration. She had been segregated on suspicion of hiding drugs in her vagina at the Nova Institution for Women in Truro, Nova Scotia.

Mike German, an ex-FBI agent, said immigration agents hiding their identities ‘highlights the illegitimacy of actions’

Some wear balaclavas. Some wear neck gators, sunglasses and hats. Some wear masks and casual clothes.

Across the country, armed federal immigration officers have increasingly hidden their identities while carrying out immigration raids, arresting protesters and roughing up prominent Democratic critics.

It’s a trend that has sparked alarm among civil rights and law enforcement experts alike.

Mike German, a former FBI agent, said officers’ widespread use of masks was unprecedented in US law enforcement and a sign of a rapidly eroding democracy. “Masking symbolizes the drift of law enforcement away from democratic controls,” he said.

Having acknowledged the intimate bonds and episodic convergence of abolition and communism, it behoves us to inquire into what might be learned from their points of dissension. Are there ways in which abolitionism and communism might still operate, to cite Du Bois, as ‘separating ideologies’? I think the most fruitful approach, in view of an eventual ‘drawing together’, is to contend in tandem with abolitionist critiques of communism and communist critiques of abolition. My wager, to paraphrase an old philosopher from the Baltics, is that communism without abolition is empty, abolition without communism blind.

For those of us who have experienced isolation in prison, it's a trauma that never leaves.

We talked to detainees and prison guards to unearth the violent and inhumane conditions at private prisons. "In these places, human rights don't exist. You don't even exist as a human," one former detainee told us. Meanwhile, the CEO of private prison company CoreCivic is worth $20 million.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/45477118

It's like RoboCop, except the robots are villains helping human villains villain more comprehensively.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/22730020

archived (Wayback Machine)

A reminder folks: people engage in this kind of radical protest because it works:

Results of two online experiments conducted with diverse samples (N = 2,772), including a study of the animal rights movement and a preregistered study of the climate movement, show that the presence of a radical flank increases support for a moderate faction within the same movement. Further, it is the use of radical tactics, such as property destruction or violence, rather than a radical agenda, that drives this effect. Results indicate the effect owes to a contrast effect: Use of radical tactics by one flank led the more moderate faction to appear less radical, even though all characteristics of the moderate faction were held constant. This perception led participants to identify more with and, in turn, express greater support for the more moderate faction. These results suggest that activist groups that employ unpopular tactics can increase support for other groups within the same movement, pointing to a hidden way in which movement factions are complementary, despite pursuing divergent approaches to social change.

In May of 2023, we hosted “Practicing for an Abolitionist World,” a virtual gathering for transformative justice, restorative justice, and community accountability practitioners from around the world, with the belief that community-based responses to harm know no borders and have always been global. In this new report, Transformative Justice Knows No Borders, we share learnings from that convening, including case studies from Kurdistan, India, the Philippines, and Argentina.

This report looks at the different languages and lineages people draw on in each of these places to root transformative justice practices in their local soil. Under each of their responses to interpersonal violence lies a vast network of care infrastructures that enable such responses — solidarity economies, self-governance systems, and new relationships to law and to each other. Built by movements, these are like the root systems and mycelial networks of fungi under the soil that enable plants and trees aboveground to thrive.

The genocide in Palestine, along with war, violence, repression, and rising authoritarianism around the world, have drawn our attention yet again to the interdependence of state violence at home and globally. This calls on us to weave transnational networks of resistance. We hope that this new resource can help you connect your organizing to a larger mycelial network that spans borders and states as part of the “Transformative Justice Transnational,” and that you find it useful as we collectively continue to weave transnational networks of care, healing, and justice.

archived (Wayback Machine)

Benjamin Donnie Ritchie was executed in the early morning hours Tuesday by the state of Indiana. The state barred representatives of the media from witnessing the gruesome proceedings. His attorneys had argued that he should not be executed due to his “severe brain damage.”

• In late April, security forces fired live ammunition to disperse protesters near a mine in the DRC province of Lualaba.
• The protesters were demanding compensation from the mine’s owner, Kamoa, as part of a stalled resettlement process.
• The company says the delay is because the number of people claiming to have been displaced by its operations has ballooned.

archived (Wayback Machine)

Many people in California prisons and jails work for less than $1 an hour. Lawmakers are advancing two bills that could lead to wage increases for some of them.

France will build a new high-security prison in its overseas territory of French Guiana to house drug traffickers and radical Islamists, the country's justice minister announced during a visit to the territory.

Gérald Darmanin told Le Journal du Dimanche (JDD) newspaper that the prison would target organised crime "at all levels" of the drug supply chain.

The €400m (£337m) facility, which could open as early as 2028, will be built in an isolated location deep in the Amazon jungle in the northwestern region of Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni.

The plan was announced after a series of violent incidents linked to criminal gangs which saw prisons and staff targeted across France in recent months.

The prison will hold up to 500 people, with a separate wing designed to house the most dangerous criminals.

In an interview with JDD, the minister said the new prison would be governed by an "extremely strict carceral regime" designed to "incapacitate the most dangerous drug traffickers".

Darmanin said the facility would be used to detain people "at the beginning of the drug trail", as well as serving as a "lasting means of removing the heads of the drug trafficking networks" in mainland France.

Atlanta Democratic Mayor Andre Dickens, who has spearheaded a law-and-order campaign against the residents of Atlanta, inaugurated on April 29 the sprawling 85-acre militarized “public safety training center” popularly known as “Cop City.”

The sprawling complex will be used to train the state’s numerous police forces in urban warfare. Firing ranges, mock buildings and city streets have been constructed, providing police the “training” they need to violently raid people’s residences and to crush protests or rebellions the state and city authorities target. According to American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), “43% of the training at Cop City will be for officers outside of Atlanta, including military training with the infamous Israeli [sic] Defense Forces.”

Speaking before a select audience, which included arch-reactionary Georgia Republican Governor Brian Kemp and the CEO of the privately funded Atlanta Police Foundation (APF), Dave Wilkinson, Dickens triumphantly declared the building and opening of the police training center as a singular achievement of his three-year-old administration. Both Kemp and Dickens have worked in close coordination to unleash ferocious police violence against peaceful protesters by the state, city and county police forces.