Tania Bernath

A New Tool That Inflicts Pain But Leaves No Mark

Tania Bernath — Wed, 12 Aug 2026 01:48:01 GMT

The Associated Press reported this morning that ICE plans to buy thousands of gloves that deliver electric shocks. Up to $20 million worth, by March. The contract is going to one company, with no other companies allowed to bid.

The gloves look like ordinary gloves. The officer wearing them presses a switch. Then, when the glove touches your skin, it delivers an electric shock. The company says most people do what they are told within three seconds.

The company’s selling point is that the shock leaves nothing behind. No burn. No mark. No scar. In their own words, it is a “low-optics” tool and an “invisible partner.”

A police trade magazine put it plainly: watching officers use force is hard to stomach, in person or on video. These gloves fix that. The company says whoever is touched feels the shock immediately and complies within seconds.

Once the shock is delivered there is no evidence of the pain caused. The fix is about who can see it.

It hurts the same. It just doesn’t show.

Who this will be used on

Not only people already locked up. The AP quotes John Peters of the Institute for the Prevention of In-Custody Deaths — someone who supports this technology — saying he expects officers to use the gloves pulling people out of cars and out of houses. So picture it where ICE actually works now: driveways, doorways, workplaces, the sidewalk outside a school, a car stopped on the street.

And think about who those people are. Almost everyone ICE picks up is facing a civil case, not a criminal one. No trial has happened. No judge has handed down a sentence. The law lets the government hold someone for exactly one purpose: making sure that person turns up for their hearing.

A tool that exists to hurt people until they obey is a punishment. It is being handed to the one part of the system that is forbidden to punish.

Why no one will be able to prove it happened

Think about how we normally find out when police hurt someone. Bruises a lawyer can photograph. A video someone filmed on their phone. Body camera footage. With Tasers, there is one more thing: the device itself keeps a record of every time it is fired, and lawyers can get that record in court.

Now think about this glove. A hand on someone’s arm looks like a hand on someone’s arm. No camera would notice. No mark shows up afterward for a doctor to find. And as far as I can tell from what the company has published, the glove keeps no record of when it was switched on. I have written to the company and to ICE to ask.

If there really is no record, then ICE is buying thousands of devices that hurt people and leave no evidence of anything at all.

One more thing

ICE says these are for people who turn combative. I volunteer in immigration court. I have seen who is in those buildings. People who are frightened. People awake since four in the morning. People trying to follow instructions in a language they don’t speak. People reaching for their family as they are pulled apart.

Any of that can be written down as resisting. And the person who decides whether it was is the same person with a finger on the switch.

What to do today

Read the AP story below.

Join me in stopping this.

Sources

Ryan J. Foley, “ICE plans to give officers gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks,” Associated Press, 11 August 2026: https://apnews.com/article/ice-electric-shock-gloves-85ff746d3e0ee5f39e7a9a3f1f576252

Department of Homeland Security notice, 10 August 2026: https://apfs-cloud.dhs.gov/record/74524/public-print/

“Giving Law Officers Validated Effectiveness,” Police and Security News, 24 May 2023: https://policeandsecuritynews.com/2023/05/24/giving-law-officers-validated-effectiveness/

They kidnapped a hardworking kid off our streets

Tania Bernath — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 01:38:12 GMT

What’s happening, and why this story matters1

I am volunteering with asylum seekers in New York, and this story really spoke to what I am finding. I wanted to pull out some commonalities and lessons, as we are increasingly finding friends and neighbors who have done nothing wrong yet are being detained for long periods without cause. If this happens in your community, get involved. You can make a difference, and you’ll be surprised by how much you learn about what is actually happening and that these practices need to stop.

Gerson Turcios has not been convicted of anything. He missed a single hearing years ago, during a period when courts were relocating and rescheduling constantly because of the pandemic. That missed hearing produced a removal order he didn’t know existed. Nothing about his record suggests he is dangerous. By every account in the story, he is the opposite: hardworking, well-liked, rooted in a community that mobilized for him within a day of his arrest.

Historically, someone in his position, who has been present for years, working, and going through legal procedures, would have a legitimate option to stay free while their case is ongoing: they could be released, apply for a work permit at their own expense, check in as needed, and pursue asylum through the courts. This route still exists on paper. The law clearly limits detention: after 90 days, the government must justify continued detention; after 180 days, a stronger reason is required. Turcios has now been detained for over a year. His lawyers contend that the government simply never conducted the legally mandated review. This is not a law gap; it is the government failing to comply with its own laws.

The repercussions of that failure fall entirely on him and his family. He has legal representation and is following the correct process to pursue his asylum claim. Despite this, he remains detained, calling his family at $10 per call, detained, unable to work, and absent from the community advocating for him. None of these conditions result from any proven fault on his part. Instead, they highlight a system that has ceased enforcing its own boundaries.

I want to point people toward the full story: They kidnapped a hard-working kid off our streets: the gardener seized by ICE, and the New York town fighting back, The Guardian. It is long and detailed, and worth reading start to finish. A few things it lays out plainly are worth pulling forward here because they are the kind of details that decide outcomes and merit more detailed attention.

Lessons from the article

Finding someone, and re-finding them if they’re moved, is what makes legal help possible at all. When ICE detains someone, they enter a public tracking system that shows which facility holds them. Detainees get moved between facilities, sometimes between states, often with no visible pattern. If a location stops appearing in that system, even briefly, it becomes very hard to help. The main legal tool for stopping a deportation, a habeas petition, has to name the exact place where the person is being held. No location, no filing. Losing track of someone can mean losing the ability to act on their behalf entirely. Arrests reportedly occur disproportionately on Fridays, which gives the system a weekend when it is harder for anyone to catch up.

A single missed piece of mail, years earlier, can resurface and decide everything. Turcios’s removal order traces back to one hearing notice that went astray during a chaotic stretch for the courts. Years later, that old failure became the central issue in his case. The outcome turned on whether a notice reached the right address on the right day, not on the truth of what he survived.

Legal detention limits exist on paper, but they do not enforce themselves. The 90-day and 180-day thresholds are intended to force the government to justify continued detention. They only function if someone is actively watching for them and fighting to enforce them, and even then, the government can miss the steps that trigger review, leaving someone held well past what the law intends.

Removal requires two specific things: a valid travel document and a final order of removal. Not having identification on hand at the moment of detention can buy real time, since establishing someone’s identity is one of the first things a case requires.

A stay of removal can happen at the literal last moment. Turcios was pulled off a deportation flight after his lawyers won a stay just before departure. Intervention can work even that late, but a case running that close to the edge shows how little margin exists.

Community support functions as part of a legal defense, not only as comfort. The government weighs whether someone is a flight risk when deciding how to handle their case, and a visible, organized community works against that finding. When neighbors rally, raise money, and show up in court, they are providing something the system itself takes into account.

A network that already exists moves faster than one built from scratch in a crisis. Within a day of Turcios’s arrest, people in his town had a fundraiser running and had identified a lawyer with exactly the right experience, because they already knew each other and knew who to call. Over $130,000 has now been raised from more than 1,100 donors.

I would be glad to hear what others doing this work, in any city, in any capacity, have seen that echoes this, or that looks different. Please find out how you can help. If you are in the city, you can also join the New Sanctuary Coalition, which is doing amazing work. New Sanctuary Coalition

This photograph is taken directly from the article with credit to: Yorleny Weigel holds a photograph of Gerson Turcios. Photograph: Celeste Sloman/The Guardian

Let’s talk about candidate quality

Tania Bernath — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 18:02:18 GMT

As if each person who gets pigeon- holed is exactly the same as each other based on how you pigeon- hole them.

And with the Republicans no I mean MAGA party it is a whole other metric and given it is loyalty to 47 with no other aspects about them that will largely matter they should be beatable and that is what should be leaned into- are these lackeyes able to deliver for the people at all but especially after Trump is gone.

The Remedy Is Broader Than the Legal System We Need People Power and Documentation Too.

Tania Bernath — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 12:07:40 GMT

In a coaching call, a tester with a coach who helps people like me- people with a background where I worked on human rights and humanitarian protection issues internationally and, more recently, in the evaluation of these kinds of programs- finding meaning and work when much of it has collapsed or is unrecognizable. For me, the question is how to use the skills I learned working on these issues in other countries in my own work, which is what I have been grappling with for the last year.

My whole professional life has been outside the US, except for right after college when I worked for a cultural exchange organization, and then as a community organizer in Brooklyn. Otherwise, I have worked for Amnesty International, MSF, other INGOs, and the UN, doing human rights and humanitarian work in conflict and natural disasters, poor governance, repression, and places where human rights violations are a major concern.

Over the years, I would sometimes look for work in the States, and mostly the kind of work I wanted required a law degree and Spanish. Both are critical, then and now. I have neither. I also love the international work, and I chose it every time. But everything has changed in the last year- and now that job market is unrecognizable for a consultant like me.

What’s also changed is that the US has gotten a lot more like the places I used to work where human rights violations were integral to the government strategy. There is the rampant corruption, security forces that act above the law, ineffective government and dangerous leaders who sow doubt and manipulate, and ignorance and an easily manilputed. It is familiar but at the same time it is totally foreign. Its my country and while becuase of my civil status as an American I am safe for now, my political and social beliefs do not match the ruling party.

Knowing the law, largely international law, mattered. The remedy was broader than courts and cases. It was documentation, report writing, campaigning and advocacy. It was writing and meetings and supporting other groups with our campaigns. In the humanitarian work it was those same skills, and also the witnessing, acknowledging what people’s lives are like and speaking on their behalf and in support of them.

I started volunteering. ICE watch, court accompaniment, support to asylum seekers. Things are changing so fast that the work needs to respond to the changing times.

One thing we did to support an asylum seeker was to set up a mock individual hearing and build a tool. Another was to create an information sheet for churches, in case people going to that church need Know Your Rights training.

I see so many other things happening. Role plays to anticipate what to do in case ICE came to the neighborhood. Wondering how a volunteer led organization is assessing their impact and presenting it to potential donors.

All of it is familiar. The documentation. The tool built because the situation called for one. The information sheet. Sitting with someone and getting their account down accurately. I have done versions of this in Liberia and Sierra Leone and Rakhine State under other names and with other budgets.

The skills I count first are the hard ones. Country conditions research. Monitoring and evaluation. Report writing. Those list easily and they travel. The ones I forget to count are the others. I am used to working in low resource environments, with people who speak a different language from mine and hold different beliefs and ideas. International work requires developing self awareness, a sense of how we are viewed. Listening. Ways of interviewing. Talking directly to a person even when we share no language. Being a self starter, taking initiative, solving problems, working where the structure has yet to be built.

When Chen Reis and I wrote Becoming an International Humanitarian Aid Worker, we gave the soft skills their own chapter and put it ahead of the hard ones. Ten years later, sitting with my own question, I reach for the hard skills list first. The advice holds. Taking it is the work.

There is something to say plainly here. When I do this volunteer work I am assisting people in figuring out my system, and the threats they face are theirs to carry. That was also true of the humanitarian and human rights work. I represented people’s stories and spoke boldly about them, and I went home. That asymmetry is the condition of the work. What it asks for is accuracy, and being led by what people want said about them.

In 1998 I was organizing in Brooklyn, and the thought that often ran through my head was that the people I was supposed to be working with were looking at me and thinking, what are you going to do for me, lady. Almost everything since has been somewhere else.

One of the organizations I am working with now, I have no idea how many people they have supported, or in which ways. I see the work land every week in the clinic. I cannot find the number on their website or in a pamphlet. So I wonder whether that is deliberate, or whether the information has yet to be assembled, or whether it exists and goes only to potential funders. It is information that is critical for fundraising. I am curious, and I know how to build the system that would produce it.

None of this replaces the international work. I continue to take assignments abroad and I want them. What I am finding is that these skills have a wider range than I gave them credit for, and that some of what is needed here is work I already know how to do.

All of it so far is unpaid. I am learning a lot. I am also working out how to use these skills in this moment for good and to get paid for it, which feels like a strange thing to say out loud alongside everything else.

They Should See What’s Happening on the Ninth Floor

Tue, 28 Jul 2026 16:38:26 GMT

I go to 26 Federal Plaza or 290 Broadway about once a week to do court accompaniment. The purpose is to keep people from being detained. We ask if people are represented, observe in the court, we walk them out afterward, and we collect privacy waivers so that we can find them if ICE abducts them.

In the waiting room I ask people whether they have a lawyer. The ones without one I point toward the Wednesday pro se clinic at New Sanctuary Coalition. The court calls represented and unrepresented cases in separate groups. After a hearing I walk people out of the building, because ICE is inside it.

I marched to 26 Federal Plaza in protest including when Renee Good was murdered, and most recently last week with NYCLA for Good Trouble. We held up photographs of people who have been killed or injured by ICE, demanding that ICE get out of NYC, and I extend that across the US. We had a moment of silence.

I believed the people arrested in that building were sent elsewhere.

Sheriff Bojang Jnr sent me the link from the Washington Post. He is Deputy Political Editor at The Africa Report, and a friend. We met in Senegal while I was the Gambia researcher for Amnesty International, and I have followed his reporting ever since. See more on him below.

I mention this because even though I am there frequently the article he sent to me on Linked In really opened my eyes and I am admittedly ashamed that I was not aware of this happening in my own backyard.

The article was a visual reconstruction of a holding room on the tenth floor of 26 Federal Plaza. ICE allows no cameras inside, so the Washington Post built a digital model from a leaked cellphone video, photographs, measurements, and detainee statements filed in court. The room is about thirty feet on each side, with hard floors, concrete benches and three metal toilets. Over the first four days of June 2025 the number of people inside it went from around eight to eighty-six. Ten square feet each, about the floor of a phone booth. Men slept on concrete under lights that stayed on. One Venezuelan man arrested after his hearing spent nine days in there with more than seventy others.

The elevators in that building go to the tenth floor.

I responded to the post right away, on LinkedIn, saying that I am in this building constantly for court accompaniment and that this had never come up in any conversation I had there. I was most horrified at my own ignorance.

Then I went looking, and found that the story had been sitting in front of me the entire time.

Gwynne Hogan at THE CITY published the leaked video in July 2025 with an analysis of ICE’s own data: people held an average of twenty-nine hours through May and June, 186 in the building on the single worst night, some held eight days. She stayed on it. She was there in February when government attorneys admitted in open court that they had also been holding people on the ninth floor, a floor nobody outside the agency knew existed as a cell. She was there in May for the bench trial, where ICE’s own texts and emails described detainees with seizures, kidney failure and tuberculosis.

Dean Moses at amNY found clothing on the fifth floor that appeared to belong to detained immigrants. After that story ran, an ICE agent was overheard saying, “They should see what’s happening on the 9th floor.” Court advocates had been saying it for months.

Documented NY covered the May trial, where plaintiffs called the overcrowding a crisis of the government’s own making and alleged that ICE obscured evidence and filed a false affidavit.

Three newsrooms. A handful of reporters. Every number in the Post’s model rests on work these people did first, and on filings that exist because immigrants sued.

The people around me were on it, too.

Rise and Resist has held a silent vigil at the federal workers’ entrance every Thursday since the summer of 2025, for those taken by ICE. They hold up photographs of detainees printed in amNY. The local paper’s images became the placards. Father Fabian Arias of Saint Peter’s leads a procession around the complex the same hour each week, seven laps with a rosary, a Jericho walk.

Elected officials went in, or tried to. Dan Goldman and Jerry Nadler were turned away from the tenth floor in June 2025. Twelve members of Congress sued over being blocked, won in December, and Goldman has gone back weekly since. Eleven officials were arrested on the tenth floor in September while more than seventy people were arrested outside blocking ICE vans. Letitia James filed a brief. Two federal judges have now ruled on the conditions.

All of it public. All of it a subway ride from my apartment.

Yet I got the link from Sheriff.

This story broke through in a way the others did not. What surprises me most is that it has never come up in my ICE Watch group, or in the court accompaniment work, or through Indivisible. I am not clear why. I am grateful to know now, and the next question is what we do about it.

The Washington Post reporter asks us for greater empathy. I think the empathy is there. What is missing is the solution.

Sheriff Bojang Jnr is Deputy Political Editor at The Africa Report, published in Paris by Jeune Afrique Media Group. He is a former president of The Gambia Press Union and has reported across West Africa for RFI, Al Jazeera, France 24, and the Guardian. His coverage of the Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone made him a finalist for the 2015 CNN African Journalist of the Year award. His work is here.

A Chinese human rights lawyer did everything US asylum law asked. ICE detained him anyway.

Tania Bernath — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 15:52:08 GMT

On July 15 2026, in the small borough of Mount Holly Springs, Pennsylvania, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers stopped a man delivering Amazon parcels and asked him to prove his citizenship. He showed them the paperwork for his pending asylum application and explained that he had entered the country legally. They arrested him.

The courier was Wu Shaoping, a Chinese human rights lawyer. In China, he took on cases on behalf of religious minorities and political dissidents, risky work that can result in disbarment, harassment, or imprisonment. In December 2019 he attended a gathering of human rights defenders in the city of Xiamen. Several who were there were swept up in a crackdown, including Ding Jiaxi and Xu Zhiyong, two of China’s most prominent human rights lawyers, who remain in prison in China today on convictions for subversion of state power. Wu fled soon after. He reached the United States on a tourist visa, filed for asylum in 2020, and has been waiting for a decision since then. He has stayed active with China’s human rights community.

He did everything the United States, for decades, told the world’s dissidents to do: flee persecution, come here, and trust the law. He followed the law. On Wednesday, the US government broke that promise.

The administration says its priority is removing people with criminal convictions. In June 2025, it deported 122 people to China on a single charter flight, which ICE said included people convicted of murder, rape, and trafficking — though the agency described only “many” of the 122 as having such convictions. Wu Shaoping has no criminal record. Neither do most people now held in ICE detention: as of April 2026, roughly 71% had no criminal conviction at all, and independent analyses found that nearly all the recent growth in detention came from people with none.

So the question is why an effort sold to the public as a matter of safety has widened to sweep up asylum seekers with no criminal record who followed the proper procedure.

In another case, Guan Heng, a Chinese citizen journalist, secretly filmed detention facilities in Xinjiang in 2020, adding to the record of what rights groups describe as the mass internment of up to a million Uyghurs — footage that helped inform US laws written to hold Beijing accountable. Guan fled to the US, applied for asylum, and in August 2025 was arrested and detained in an ICE raid. The Department of Homeland Security then tried to deport him to Uganda, a country he had never set foot in. He spent more than five months in detention before an immigration judge found him credible and granted asylum in late January. The asylum approval rate had fallen to around 10% in 2025, down from an average of 28% between 2010 and 2024.

The principle at stake has a name: non-refoulement, the bedrock rule of international law, codified in the UN Convention Against Torture, that a state must never return a person to a place where they face torture or persecution. It is not a technicality. It is the single promise that gives asylum meaning.

Marco Rubio, now Secretary of State, has a history of championing China’s persecuted. As a senator, he authored the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act and the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act. He chaired the Congressional-Executive Commission on China, the body that documents exactly the kind of repression Wu Shaoping fled. Beijing sanctioned him twice for his advocacy.

In February 2025, about five weeks into his tenure as Secretary of State, Rubio condemned Thailand “in the strongest possible terms” for forcibly returning at least 40 Uyghurs to China, warning that Bangkok risked running afoul of its obligations under the UN Convention Against Torture. He had spent his first weeks in office personally lobbying Bangkok to stop that deportation; it went ahead anyway. He urged “all governments in countries where Uyghurs seek protection not to forcibly return ethnic Uyghurs to China.”

All governments, apparently, except his own. In the same period Rubio was condemning Thailand over refoulement, the US government was detaining a Chinese asylum seeker, Guan Heng, and moving to deport him not to China but to Uganda, a country he had no connection to, and where the United States would have no say over what became of him.

This is how a government evades the refoulement rule without appearing to break it. Sending a dissident straight back to China is plainly a violation. Sending him to a third country is not, at least not on paper, even when that country may hand him onward, or simply deliver him to danger the United States claims no responsibility for. It is refoulement at one remove, with the deniability built in. In June 2025, the Supreme Court let the administration resume these removals, lifting a lower court’s requirement that people first get a chance to show they would face torture, while the underlying case continues.

The standard Rubio spent a decade demanding of every other government, his own now conspicuously fails to meet.

Wu Shaoping spent his career defending the people China tried to silence. He came to the US and spent five years following asylum procedures. Whether America’s promise of asylum still means anything depends on whether it protects people like Wu Shaoping and Guan Heng, who believed what the United States said about itself and acted on that belief.

Marco Rubio does not run ICE. But as a senator, he chaired the commission that documents the very repression Wu Shaoping fled, and as Secretary of State, he told Thailand it was wrong to force Uyghurs back to China. He knows what a returned dissident faces, because he spent years telling the rest of us. Wu’s asylum hearing is set for 27 July. Rubio is one of the few people in this administration with both the standing and the record to say that Wu Shaoping should not be sent back.

Sources

Wu Shaoping’s arrest, background, tourist-visa entry, 2020 asylum filing, the December 2019 Xiamen meeting, and the 27 July hearing date: Amy Hawkins, “ICE arrests human rights lawyer who fled Chinese crackdown,” The Guardian (17 July 2026); hearing date attributed there to The New York Times.

The imprisonment of Ding Jiaxi and Xu Zhiyong on subversion-of-state-power convictions: The Guardian (above); Guardian coverage of their April 2023 sentencing.

The June 3, 2025 charter flight removing 122 Chinese nationals (96 men, 26 women, ages 19–68, all with final removal orders), and the “many … convicted of egregious crimes” framing with named example cases: ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations press release, “ICE Dallas leads DHS effort removing 122 illegal aliens aboard Special High Risk Charter flight,” ice.gov (9 June 2025).

Roughly 71% of ICE detainees having no criminal conviction (as of April 2026): TRAC, Syracuse University. The finding that nearly all recent detention growth came from people without convictions: analyses by the Cato Institute and by Austin Kocher (Syracuse University).

Guan Heng’s filming of Xinjiang detention sites, his August 2025 ICE arrest, the attempted deportation to Uganda, the more-than-five-months detention, and his late-January asylum grant on a “well founded fear” finding: Associated Press (January 2026); Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, House Select Committee on the CCP, press release (13 December 2025).

The asylum approval rate falling to roughly 10% in 2025 (from a 2010–2024 average of 28%): federal data compiled by Mobile Pathways, cited by AP.

Non-refoulement as codified in the UN Convention Against Torture (Article 3).

Marco Rubio’s authorship of the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act and the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act, his chairmanship of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China and its documentation of political and religious prisoners, and Beijing’s two rounds of sanctions against him: CECC (cecc.gov); Radio Free Asia; Freedom House (2024).

Rubio’s condemnation of Thailand’s return of at least 40 Uyghurs, both quoted passages, and the Convention Against Torture warning: “On Thailand’s Forced Return of Uyghurs to China,” US Department of State press statement, Marco Rubio, Secretary of State (27 February 2025).

Rubio’s lobbying of Bangkok during his first weeks in office to prevent the deportation: NOTUS, “Marco Rubio’s State Department Failed an Early Test of Its Influence” (7 March 2025); CNN (27 February 2025).

The Supreme Court clearing the way for third-country removals: Department of Homeland Security v. D.V.D., No. 24A1153, stay granted 23 June 2025 (Sotomayor, J., dissenting) — an emergency-docket order staying a district-court injunction, not a merits ruling; the policy at issue was DHS’s 30 March 2025 \u201cGuidance Regarding Third Country Removals.\u201d

The Machine Outlasts the Election

Tania Bernath — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 04:36:51 GMT

Eight in the morning outside 290 Broadway. I’d left my Citi Bike a block over and joined the line, where volunteers from New Sanctuary, families, and a few lawyers waited to meet clients they were seeing for the first time. The lawyer next to me was waiting for his. We talked about the deaths. The lack of accountability. And then I said what I’d been saying for months: we have to balance the power. That’s what the midterms are for.

He said he’d asked his clients over and over, and none of them believed the Democrats would fix it. Most didn’t know how the government was put together, so they couldn’t see why Democrats winning might not change much either way. He’d said it. I realized I’d been talking as if I knew, and I didn’t. I couldn’t have told him what would actually change after the midterms on ICE behavior and accountability — even if the Democrats took both chambers.

What power does Congress really have over DHS and ICE?

Most of what ICE does is set by the executive branch, not by law. Priorities memos. Courthouse arrests. Parole and deferred action. Third-country removal agreements. Which facilities open, how full they run, who inspects them. None of this is legislated. It is discretion, downstream of a memo.

Right now the number is set by Stephen Miller. He directed ICE to hit 3,000 arrests a day and runs a daily 10 a.m. call pressing agencies for their totals. DHS denies any quota exists; Miller, asked about it on CNN, said the numbers “are a floor, not a ceiling. Very importantly, they’re a floor. The goal is to arrest at least that many, but hopefully many more.”

When Kristi Noem was replaced by Markwayne Mullin, the tactics changed — quieter, no photo ops — and the arrests went up. More than 10,000 people taken in a single week. Same machine, quieter manager, higher numbers. None of it required a vote. And none of it depends on the next budget: the money was appropriated in advance and locked in for years — hundreds of billions of dollars, enough to hire agents and pay overtime through the end of the decade, whoever controls Congress in the meantime.

Miller is a White House staffer. Not elected, not confirmed by the Senate, not removable by Congress. No voter and no committee ever passed on him, and none can dislodge him. He answers in one direction only — upward, to the President — which is the single thread of accountability least likely to ever be pulled. And even that overstates his importance. Noem was swapped for Mullin and the arrests went up. If Miller went tomorrow, the quota, the money, the infrastructure, the discretion all remain, and someone else runs the 10 a.m. call. The gap he sits in isn’t a flaw that shields one man. It’s a property of the machine that outlasts any man in it.

Congress holds appropriations. It can cap detention beds, condition funds, demand documents. But it cannot direct how an agency uses its discretion. And the appropriations lever has a known failure mode: Democrats pushed a detention-bed cap in 2019 and abandoned it under shutdown pressure, because refusing to fund DHS means a shutdown, and the shutdown gets blamed on whoever blocked the bill.

So: the midterms are a brake. They are not a repeal.

I assumed the presidency would be the answer. It is closer — most of the discretion lives there. But the ratchet runs one way. A restraining president has to actively hold back an agency that wants to enforce; an unleashing president simply removes the brakes. And what gets built during the unleashed period does not come down when the memo changes. Beds. Contracts. Data-sharing infrastructure. 287(g) agreements. A workforce that self-selected into the job during a period when the job meant this. Every expansion becomes the floor the next administration inherits.

Then there’s accountability — the part I hadn’t let myself look at closely. The people driving this machinery are not reachable by elections, and the mechanisms that once let people sue federal officers for constitutional violations have been narrowed, though not quite eliminated. In 2022, in Egbert v. Boule, the Supreme Court held that an agency’s own internal grievance process forecloses a court-created damages claim — and, as the Harvard Law Review’s case comment noted, because that grievance process offered so little real relief, the Court set the bar for an adequate “alternative remedy” so low that the procedures at nearly every federal agency clear it. Internal grievance has replaced external consequence. Most of the conduct that matters happens in a zone where the ballot has no jurisdiction.

Winning the midterms is critical. It is also insufficient. And the gap between those two things is where the honest work is — because a Democratic Congress is not powerless here, it is only limited, and the difference matters. It should say plainly what it would do with the brake it has.

It can claw back what remains. Congress gave DHS these hundreds of billions; it can rescind whatever has not yet been spent or locked into a contract. The window is closing — ICE has been obligating the money fast, converting warehouses into detention with $38 billion of the detention fund committed almost overnight, and once money is obligated even Republicans concede it can’t be pulled back — but every dollar not yet out the door is a dollar Congress can still reach.

It can make the next dollar conditional. The money already appropriated runs through 2029, but there is always a next bill, and Congress can attach to it the things it has so far only demanded: body cameras, a ban on masks, warrants before home entry, the rebuilding of the oversight offices this administration gutted — the detention ombudsman, the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties — with real enforcement power this time, not the toothless version.

It can pass the Bivens Act, which would restore by statute what Egbert took away: the right to sue a federal officer who violates your constitutional rights, so that accountability no longer depends on a grievance process the agency runs against itself.

And it can show up. A federal court ruled in December 2025, in Neguse v. ICE, that members of Congress have a legal right to enter immigration detention facilities for oversight without advance notice — a right the administration has repeatedly tried to block, and one most members have barely used. Unannounced visits produce exactly the documents that produce litigation and journalism. The authority already exists; what’s missing is the willingness to use it relentlessly.

None of that stops Miller. All of it raises the cost of what he does and narrows the room he has to do it. That is the actual answer to the lawyer’s clients — not that Democrats will fix it, but that there is a specific list of things a Democratic Congress could do, none of it sufficient, all of it owed.

What the midterms cannot do is end it. Miller stays where he is no matter how November goes. So the question is not how to vote him out. It is how to raise the cost of every order he gives, and how to deny the machine what it needs to carry them out.

Courts are the only thing that has actually stopped an operation mid-stride. The quota manufactures its own vulnerability: pushed to hit a number, agents cast a wide net, and the arrests that result are exactly the ones a judge can enjoin. Two of every three at-large arrests this year have been of people with no criminal record. Every one of those is a possible habeas case, a possible Fourth Amendment claim.

States and local governments are the most underrated lever. Miller can set a floor; he cannot make a county sheriff honor a detainer, a state DMV hand over its data, or a governor lend the Guard. A federal agency working without local cooperation is a federal agency working much harder for much less.

Documentation is a slow process. The strategy has shifted from announced raids and photo ops to a more discreet operation that relies on no one watching. The record is established before it can be utilized, and making it visible acts as the counter.

And people, physically present. Court accompaniment. Know-your-rights. Rapid response. Standing on the line at 290 Broadway at eight in the morning. None of that is a substitute for the vote, but requires people’s participation.

I left the court that afternoon and walked toward City Hall. Near Foley Square, I came upon the end of a press conference as the crowd broke up. I asked a man at the edge what it had been — a local journalist, tall and young, waiting to interview the person at the center. It had just ended, he said. It was Mahmoud Khalil.

That morning — the same day I’d been standing on the line — Khalil had filed suit naming Stephen Miller and others, describing how private groups and federal officials worked together to target him for his advocacy: the groups drew up the list and smeared the people on it, and federal officials used ICE to arrest them. He filed under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 — a law written during Reconstruction to stop private actors and government officials from combining to strip people of their constitutional rights. The law built for one such conspiracy is now aimed at another.

The man at the center of it is the same man no election reaches, and the only venue that can touch him is a court. It was the argument I’d landed on that morning, and I hadn’t gone looking for.

I think about how easily I said it on that line. We have to balance the power. That’s what the midterms are for. I hadn’t examined it; it was doing the work of an analysis without being one.

The correction isn’t to stop voting. It’s to stop outsourcing.

The machine has a great deal of money, an expansive mandate, and almost no oversight, and the man setting its pace sits outside every mechanism built to check him — unelected, unconfirmed, answerable only upward. All of that will still be true the morning after any election you care to name. What changes what it does is what surrounds it: the Congress that claws back what it can and conditions the rest, the states that refuse it, the courts that constrain it, the record that follows it, and the people willing to stand — outside a building at eight in the morning, or at the back of a press conference at Foley Square — for a stranger whose name they learned that day.

Vote in November. Then go back to the line.

Sources

Jonathan Blitzer, “Locked Away,” The New Yorker — his account of Camp East Montana at Fort Bliss, including the three deaths and the fact that ICE had not inspected the facility. He also discussed the reporting on Fresh Air with Tonya Mosley, July 14, 2026.

The 3,000-a-day quota, the daily 10 a.m. call, and Miller’s role: reporting by Forbes (Stuart Anderson, “Stephen Miller, Not Kristi Noem, May Be Driving U.S. Immigration Policy,” Feb. 2026) and CNN (”How Stephen Miller micromanages Trump’s immigration policies,” Jan. 2026). Miller’s full “floor, not a ceiling” remark — “the numbers you cited are a floor, not a ceiling. Very importantly, they’re a floor. The goal is to arrest at least that many, but hopefully many more” — was made on CNN and is collected, alongside DHS’s denial that any quota exists, by the Immigration Policy Tracking Project (immpolicytracking.org), which links the underlying New York Times and Wall Street Journal reporting. The shift under Mullin — quieter tactics, higher numbers, more than 10,000 arrests in a single week — is from the New York Times, summarized in MSNBC/ms.now, “Trump’s war on immigrants is ramping back up” (July 2026). The share of at-large arrests involving people with no criminal record is tracked by the American Immigration Council and the UC Berkeley Deportation Data Project.

On the funding: figures for ICE and immigration enforcement have been reported as roughly $170 billion over four years (from the 2025 reconciliation bill, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act) plus a further tranche of about $70 billion over three years (the 2026 Secure America Act). Reporting on these totals varies, so I’ve described them in the piece as “hundreds of billions … through the end of the decade” rather than citing a single hard number. Confirm the exact figures against the appropriations text before relying on a precise amount.

On what a Democratic Congress could do: the Brennan Center’s report “ICE and Customs and Border Protection Budgets to Exceed $200 Billion” (2026) lays out the case for clawing back unspent funds and conditioning future appropriations on rebuilding the gutted oversight offices (the detention ombudsman and the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties), and for passing the Bivens Act. The limits are real and worth stating honestly: once funds are obligated — a contract signed — they generally cannot be rescinded (a point conceded on the record by Rep. Morgan Griffith during the OBBBA markup), and ICE has been obligating the money quickly, committing roughly $38 billion of its detention funding to converting warehouses (American Immigration Council, May 2026). A rescission over a presidential veto would require a two-thirds majority in both chambers.

On congressional facility visits: Neguse et al. v. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement et al., U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. On December 17, 2025, the court stayed a DHS policy that had imposed a seven-day notice requirement and barred access to certain field offices, restoring members of Congress’s right under federal law to conduct unannounced oversight visits to immigration detention facilities. The plaintiffs — a dozen House members led by Assistant Democratic Leader Joe Neguse — are represented by Democracy Forward Foundation and American Oversight. (Statutory basis: the longstanding appropriations provision, Section 527, barring DHS from using funds to prevent members of Congress from entering, for oversight, any facility used to detain immigrants.)

Egbert v. Boule, 596 U.S. 482 (2022) — the Supreme Court’s 6–3 ruling that CBP’s internal grievance process forecloses a court-created damages claim against a federal officer under Bivens. The Harvard Law Review’s case comment (Vol. 136) explains that because the grievance process offered so little real relief, the Court set the bar for an “alternative remedy” so low that the procedures at nearly every federal agency clear it — reaching well beyond the Border Patrol agent in the case. SCOTUSblog (Howard Wasserman, June 2022) describes the ruling as having “narrowed, but not eliminated,” damages actions under Bivens. The ACLU’s “Four Things to Know About the Supreme Court’s Ruling in Egbert v. Boule” is a clear short summary.

On the 2019 detention-bed cap: during the February 2019 shutdown negotiations, House Democrats proposed capping ICE detention — first around 16,500 interior beds, then reframed as a limit on the number of people held — and abandoned the proposal under pressure from ICE and Republicans as a shutdown loomed (NPR and Pacific Standard, February 2019). It is the clearest illustration of the appropriations trap; verify the specifics before publishing.

Khalil v. The Heritage Foundation et al., filed in the Southern District of New York, July 14, 2026, by the Center for Constitutional Rights and Beldock Levine & Hoffman. Complaint, case page, and press statement at ccrjustice.org. Brought under the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 (42 U.S.C. § 1985(3)). Named defendants include Stephen Miller, Marco Rubio, Markwayne Mullin, Todd Blanche, Kristi Noem, and State Department official John Armstrong, alongside the Heritage Foundation, Betar, Canary Mission, and named individuals including Robert Greenway and Victoria Coates (Project Esther co-authors). Khalil seeks compensatory and punitive damages and an injunction barring the defendants from continuing the alleged conspiracy. Contemporaneous coverage: Al Jazeera, Courthouse News, Common Dreams, amNewYork (all July 14, 2026).

They said the report was bigger than them

Tania Bernath — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:23:10 GMT

I worked as a humanitarian affairs officer for Médecins Sans Frontières, focusing on analysis and access. My role involved interviewing patients and displaced people to understand their situations, briefing the mission on protection and humanitarian law, negotiating access to maintain operations, and helping shape MSF’s communications and priorities. This role is unique and exists only in missions where MSF prioritizes understanding and responding to the conditions affecting those it treats, guiding their future actions.

In 2012, Myanmar’s Rakhine State experienced unprecedented violence against the Rohingya. Rakhine communities attacked Rohingya populations, leading to mass displacement. Long-standing mixed communities were divided: Rohingya were confined to camps, isolated from towns, markets, and hospitals.

The Rohingya are stateless. Rakhine, Myanmar, is their home, and they have lived there for generations, but Myanmar does not recognize them as citizens. They have no legal claim to the place they are from. They are not welcome there, and they have no standing to insist on staying. When the pressure becomes unbearable, and they leave, they arrive somewhere else with no nationality at all — belonging nowhere, claimable by no one. They are the largest stateless population in the world, scattered across Bangladesh and other parts of Asia and the rest of the world.

There is no government working on their behalf.

In 2013, I was in Rakhine, with the access MSF had built over two decades. I travelled across the Rakhine state and conducted hundreds of interviews trying to understand the impact of the violence and segregation on their access to health. .

Women were dying in childbirth. Others died of preventable deaths. They died because they could not reach a medical facility in time, and they could not reach one because they were prevented by checkpoints, by permits, by bribes they could not pay, because the nearest hospital that would admit them was hours away, and the one nearby would not.

The report compared that system to the mechanisms behind it: the movement restrictions, the camps, segregation, and deliberate withholding of care. At its core, it highlighted the discrimination and dehumanization of the Rohingya, which were not mere byproducts but the core forces driving the entire machinery.

This was a shift from persecution to targeted exclusion

Then the drafts were dissected. I wrote twenty-five versions as more people weighed in. The feedback was that it was too human-rightsy, that there was not enough medical data, and that it was one thing after another. All of this against a particular backdrop. In 2013, Myanmar was in the midst of a democratic transition, and the international community had a great deal invested in it. Sanctions were being lifted. The story was reform.

Two of our Rohingya staff were in detention at the time, and there was concern that a report critical of the government would put them at greater risk. That was the heart of the risk assessment, as it should have been.

The staff members and their families were asked.

This report is bigger than us, they said. They urged MSF to speak out and to carry out advocacy on behalf of the Rohingya, whose situation was then far less known than it is now. Our other Rohingya staff said the same. So did the international staff working in the country. The need to speak out was clear, and the call for support was overwhelming.

But the report was not published. Management decided not to use it at all.

Four months later, in January 2014, MSF was expelled from Rakhine. The situation there worsened, and by 2017, more than 700,000 Rohingya had left for Bangladesh. MSF surveyed the survivors in the camps at Cox’s Bazar and estimated that at least 6,700 had been killed in Rakhine in a single month, 730 of them children under five.

The Humanitarian Policy Group recently published Oppression, liberation and humanitarianism in Palestine, Myanmar and Sudan. Its argument is that these are political crises misdescribed as humanitarian ones, that aid organisations are routinely absorbed into the structures producing them, and that the way out runs through solidarity — standing with the people most affected, supporting not only their relief work but their advocacy, their politics, their demands.

It follows an earlier HPG report, A Humanitarian Trap?, which asked how organisations balance access against speaking about the abuses they witness. Its Ethiopia chapter cites an inter-agency evaluation finding that agencies failed to collectively condemn the Tigray blockade, the torture of humanitarian staff, the use of starvation as a weapon — and that this went against the centrality of protection, which encourages speaking out, in private or in public, on gross abuses of human rights. The chapter ends by asking how humanitarian actors can preserve access while addressing violations.

This tension was there from my first day as a humanitarian affairs officer with MSF — someone in that role, inside a medical organisation, lives in it: the constant pull between keeping access and speaking about what you see. Speaking is not one thing. It runs from a quiet word to a diplomat, to sharing documentation with those whose mandate it is, all the way to a public statement. The trap is not failing to shout. It is letting the fear of the loudest option talk you out of all the quieter ones too, until you have done nothing. These reports name that bind. I had been living inside it for years.

It is easy to be critical in retrospect, and I am not interested in that. Consulting the detained men and their families was right. They had the most to lose, and wanting to protect them was fair. What I can see now is that when they said this is bigger than us, they were not speaking only for themselves. The Rohingya wanted MSF to speak. That was where the solidarity was, and we missed it.

The new HPG report describes how humanitarian actors are instrumentalised: praised, consulted, valued for their reach and their access, while the political thing they are actually asking for is quietly set aside. Its Sudan chapter is largely about this — mutual aid networks sanitised and depoliticised, pulled away from their activist origins and put to work on delivery.

It is what we did to two men in a Myanmar prison. We asked them, and then we set their answer beside the things that carry real weight, access, registration, the memorandum, the operation, and it weighed nothing.

We consulted them. We did not weigh what they said. Consultation is built into every process we have, but consultation that cannot change the outcome is not solidarity. It is documenting a preference we have already decided to override.

And it cannot change the outcome, because the two sides of the scale are not the same kind of thing. The risks of speaking arrive with names and dates and an owner: a head of mission who will sit across a table next week, a registration that could lapse, a colleague who could be arrested tomorrow. The cost of silence has none of that. It is diffuse, deferred, borne by people who are not in the room and will never know the meeting happened. It is not argued and lost. It is never set on the scale at all.

So it loses. Every time.

Human Rights Watch and Fortify Rights were doing serious human rights work on the Rohingya, and doing it well. But there was no domestic voice: no civil society of their own, no constituency inside Myanmar, no movement willing even to name them. MSF had two decades in Rakhine and clinics inside the camps.

To publish would not have been to fill a gap in the record. It would have been to stand with a population that had nobody standing with them where it mattered — inside their own country.

When someone gives you their testimony, you enter something together. There is an unofficial contract in it: they are trusting you with their account, and you are telling them, at least implicitly, that it matters — that it will be measured against the law, set beside others, and shown to be part of a pattern. Their story becoming evidence is not a thing that happens to them afterward. It is what they signed up for when they told you. They are already in it.

To gather that testimony and then do nothing is not neutral. It is deciding, on your own, that their story was yours to shelve — treating a contract you were already inside as if it were still yours to walk away from.

And the contract does not end at the decision to speak or stay silent. An organisation striving for solidarity with the population it serves owes those explanations — to the staff drawn from that population, to the community closest to the risk — as part of the process, not as a courtesy after it. I was not there for those conversations and don’t know how this aspect was handled, if at all.

In 2020, as part of its Speaking Out series, the archive that exists to reconstruct these dilemmas, MSF published a case study on the Rohingya containing a section titled “The Never Ending Report.” It records the field coordinator calling the shelving irresponsible. It records the head of the advocacy unit saying the report never saw the light, and that the reason I was given was never the real one. And it records MSF’s international representative on why: “There was a lot of resistance within MSF because it was very ‘human rights.’”

It is also on the record that MSF’s own evaluators, in October 2013 — before the expulsion, four years before the genocide — found the organisation had failed to establish any positioning strategy on Rakhine, and recommended humanitarian affairs support in contexts involving, in their words, exclusion, ethnic cleansing, apartheid. And that in 2015 the MSF Holland general assembly voted 174 to 6 to commission an independent review of the movement’s Rohingya strategy, which was never carried out.

Anyone can read all of it, and it is to MSF’s credit that this is so.

The humanitarian principles are not freestanding ethics. Humanity, impartiality, neutrality, independence rest on international humanitarian law and human rights law.

MSF had the mandate, the machinery, the archive, and an association that voted. It still happened. If it can happen there, it is not the failure of one organisation. It is the system.

And smaller steps were available. The record does not have to be public in order to exist. It could have been finalised internally. It could have gone to a journalist, to a diplomat, or if the problem really was that it was too human rightsy to the organisations whose work that is.

Nobody gave the material to anyone. The choice was never publish or lose access. It was publish, or take one of several quieter steps, or do nothing. We did nothing. And the access we bought with the silence was gone in four months anyway.

The deeper problem is not the call itself. It is that MSF’s consideration appeared to be only about the organisation, and not about the population and people whose lives it was about.

The rights were theirs. The obligation was owed to them. When they said the report was bigger than them, that was their call to action, and overriding this signals not seeing them in the true spirit of partnership and solidarity. Why ask the question at all?

A Humanitarian Trap? asks how humanitarians balance access against the obligation to address violations. As long as it is a balance, and as long as we are the ones holding the scales, it will come out the same way. The weights are not equal. What we might lose is vivid, immediate, and ours. What they will lose is abstract, deferred, and theirs.

The reports ask the sector to stand with people rather than adjudicate on their behalf. Solidarity is not a better outcome from the same deliberation. It is a different relationship to the question — one in which the people at risk are not consulted, but heeded.

This June, at the MSF USA General Assembly in New York, Palestinian colleagues joined a public session on Gaza by video — national staff, medical staff, people who are themselves targets, working in the deadliest place in the world to be an aid worker.

They were asked what they wanted from the organisation.

They said it over and over. Speak out. Keep speaking out.

They were on the screen, in front of the association, being asked. That is the thing the reports are calling for, and it is further than we got in 2013, and it is worth saying so.

But asking is the easy half. MSF has spoken on Gaza, and so have many others, and still the people running the risk, the people who are invoked whenever caution is being explained, were asking for more. They were not asking to be protected from MSF’s voice. They were asking MSF to use it.

Tania Bernath was MSF’s Humanitarian Affairs Officer in Rakhine State, Myanmar, in 2013, and the author of “From Bad to Worse: Humanitarian Crisis and Segregation in Rakhine State,” which MSF did not publish. She is an independent human rights researcher and evaluator.

Nora Hassanien, Manny Maung and Dustin Barter, Oppression, liberation and humanitarianism in Palestine, Myanmar and Sudan (HPG/ODI Global, July 2026).

Zainab Moallin, Leen Fouad and Dustin Barter, A humanitarian trap? Navigating neutrality, relief and rights in Ethiopia, Myanmar, Syria and Guatemala (HPG/ODI Global, January 2025).

Laurence Binet, MSF and the Rohingya 1992–2014, MSF Speaking Out case study series (2020). MSF’s own framing of the dilemma, on the case study’s landing page: “Under an authoritarian regime, should MSF maintain a medical operational presence which enables information collection for potential public positioning, while imposing a communication silence for fear of losing access?”

Outsourced Punishment: The human beings disappearing Into Eswatini’s Prison System

Tania Bernath — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 16:48:05 GMT

Photo by Emiliano Bar on Unsplash

$5.1 million of our tax dollars to Eswatini to receive up to 160 people, an average of more than four separate flights so far, and counting, and this is part of a much larger third-party deportation program that the US is carrying out over more than two dozen countries.

Every few weeks, a story appears about the United States sending “third‑country deportees” to Eswatini. It’s never front‑page news. It’s never treated as the extraordinary thing it is. But it keeps happening: men who have already served their sentences in the U.S. fly halfway across the world to a country they have never lived in, then are taken directly to a maximum‑security prison.

The coverage is better than silence. But it is still nowhere near complete. And the gaps matter, because they hide the scale of the wrongness, the legal violations, the human rights risks, and the utter dehumanization of the people being moved around like cargo.

What we know

The reporting establishes the basic facts:

The U.S. paid $5.1 million to Eswatini to receive up to 160 deportees. As of July 2026, Reuters reported that 29 people had been sent under this agreement.
The men come from Somalia, Sudan, Tanzania, Vietnam, Cuba, Laos, Yemen, Jamaica, Cambodia, and other countries.
Many had criminal convictions in the U.S. and they already served their sentences.
They were not returned to their home countries. They were sent to Eswatini, an absolute monarchy with no connection to them.
Upon arrival, they were taken directly to Matsapha Correctional Complex, a maximum‑security prison.
They are being held without charges, without due process, and initially without access to lawyers.
Only two deportees have been repatriated to their actual home countries — one to Jamaica, one to Cambodia. By July 2026, twenty-nine men had been sent to Eswatini under the agreement; twenty-seven remain held at Matsapha.

These are the facts I have found so far from the reporting.

What’s missing and why it matters

The reporting names the deal, the numbers, and the legal dispute. It does not show the human reality of what this program actually is.

We don’t see Matsapha. We get a file photo of the prison gate and the word “notorious,” but not the reality inside: overcrowding, lack of medical care, abuse, isolation, and what it means to arrive there as a foreigner with no language, no community, and no legal status. One Cuban man reportedly went on hunger strike after more than three months without charge or access to a lawyer — the kind of detail that surfaces only through a deportee’s own attorney, rarely in the wire coverage itself.

We don’t see the families. No one interviews the mother in Jamaica, the brother in Somalia, the wife in Vietnam. No one asks what it means to have a loved one disappeared into a foreign prison in a country they don’t know.

We don’t see the onward risk. What happens when Eswatini eventually releases them? Where do they go? Who receives them? What protections exist? What dangers? The reporting doesn’t follow a single person past the prison gate.

We don’t see U.S. accountability. The articles mention a “crackdown on immigration,” but they rarely interrogate the legal reality: the United States is outsourcing detention to a monarchy, paying for a legal grey zone where people can be held indefinitely without charge. This is not immigration enforcement. It is outsourced punishment.

And I wonder in learning about this:

Why weren’t these men sent to their own countries?

The reporting rarely explains this, so the deal looks arbitrary. It isn’t. There are two reasons these men ended up in Eswatini instead of home, and both matter.

For some, the home country refused them. Deportation is a bilateral act: the receiving country has to acknowledge the person as its national and issue travel documents. Cuba, Laos, Vietnam, and others on this list have long declined to do that — the U.S. labels them “recalcitrant.” When a home government will not take someone back, the U.S. reaches for a third country. That part of the statute is real; the Immigration and Nationality Act permits removal to a third country when return home is “impracticable, inadvisable, or impossible.”

For others, the reason is the opposite, and it is the heart of the wrongness. A U.S. immigration judge had already ruled that these men could not be sent home because they would face persecution or torture there. That ruling exists to protect them. Under U.S. law and the Convention Against Torture, the government cannot return a person to that danger. So the government sent them to Eswatini instead — to a maximum-security prison in a country documented for torture, arbitrary detention, and violent repression.

Read that again. The legal finding meant to shield these men from harm became the pretext for delivering them to it by another route. Protection was turned into a reason for punishment.

Eswatini’s human rights record is poor

Eswatini is an absolute monarchy. Political dissent is criminalized. Torture and ill‑treatment have been documented. Arbitrary detention is routine. Security forces have killed protesters. The judiciary is not independent. Civil society operates under threat.

This is not a neutral place to send anyone.

Yet the coverage treats Eswatini as scenery: a small African kingdom, a distant partner, a place that “embraced” the deal as its “contribution to world order.”

The human rights record is mentioned, if at all, as a footnote. It should be central.

The language problem: how headlines flatten people into categories

Look at the headlines:

“Eswatini quickly embraced Trump’s deportee program despite doubts over legality”
“Eleven more Trump deportees arrive in Eswatini”
“Eswatini court rules first Trump deportees have right to lawyer”

The framing does the work before the reader even begins.

“Deportees” not people and why say “Trump deportees” a political brand, not human beings.

Once the category is established, empathy collapses. And you see it immediately in the comment sections.

The comments section: cruelty as public performance

Under the article about the eleven new arrivals, the comments read like a chorus of indifference and cruelty. People cheer the pace of deportations, suggest calling Zelensky, propose providing “more manpower,” say the policy is “doing wonders for our country,” and urge authorities to “pick up the pace.”

It’s not just the words, it’s the tone. The casualness. The way suffering is treated as entertainment.

These are ordinary readers responding to mainstream coverage. And that’s the point: when reporting flattens people into categories — “Trump deportees,” “immigration policy” “agreements” it gives permission for this kind of cruelty. The language of policy makes it easier to forget that these are human beings with families, histories, and rights.

“They committed crimes” is not a moral exit ramp

Most of the men sent to Eswatini had criminal convictions in the United States. That is true.

But so are these facts:

They already served their sentences.
They have not committed a crime in Eswatini.
They are being imprisoned again, in a foreign monarchy, without charges, without due process, and initially without access to lawyers.
They are human beings.
They are being held in a prison in a country with a documented record of torture, arbitrary detention, and violent repression.

A criminal conviction does not erase a person’s rights. It does not erase their family. It does not erase the obligation of states to avoid torture, arbitrary detention, or refoulement.

The takeaway

It is good that these stories are being reported at all. Without them, this would be happening almost entirely in the dark.

But the coverage is still incomplete. It names the policy but not the full human cost. It reports the numbers but not the conditions. It quotes officials but not families. It describes the deal but not the legal violations. It shows the surface but not the structure.

And it leaves too much room for the dehumanization of the people at the center of it, men who have already served their sentences, who have families, who have histories, and who are now being held in a foreign prison with no charges, no oversight, and no path.

The United States is doing what its own courts’ protection orders, the Convention Against Torture, and the human rights bodies now hearing these cases all say it cannot lawfully do. Eswatini is violating rights. And the people caught in the middle are being erased by the very language used to describe them.

Eswatini deportation coverage

Eswatini receives 11 people deported from the U.S. as part of migration crackdown (AP / NBC News, July 2026) https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/eswatini-receives-11-people-deported-us-part-migration-crackdown-rcna353745
Eswatini confirms receiving $5.1 million from the US to accept 160 deportees (APAnews, November 2025) https://apanews.net/eswatini-gets-5-1m-us-payout-for-secretive-deportee-deal/
Court rules in favor of 4 men deported by the US to Africa and denied lawyer meetings for 9 months (AP / Washington Post, April 2026) https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2026/04/10/deportees-us-trump-immigration-eswatini-africa/9fdea60e-34d7-11f1-b85b-2cd751275c1d_story.html
Eswatini: Supreme Court ruling on legal access offers limited relief for US deportees (Amnesty International, April 2026) https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/04/eswatini-supreme-court-ruling-on-legal-access-offers-limited-relief-for-us-deportees/
Matsapha Correctional Centre — conditions and detainee records, including the Cuban hunger strike (Global Detention Project) https://www.globaldetentionproject.org/countries/africa/eswatini/detention-centres/2832/matsapha-correctional-centre
Eleven more Trump deportees arrive in Eswatini from the United States, lawyer says (Reuters, July 2026) https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2026-07-08/eleven-more-trump-deportees-arrive-in-eswatini-from-the-united-states-lawyer-says

The Children That Were Promised Protection

Tania Bernath — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 11:48:21 GMT

Photo by Ilya Ryabov on Unsplash

ProPublica’s investigation, published July 6 by Mica Rosenberg and Jeff Ernsthausen, is built on ICE detention data and immigration court records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and validated by outside experts. Their findings show that there is an escalation of detention and removal of children who came to the US alone at roughly three times the rate of the final years of the first Trump administration. Immigration judges are now issuing more than 10,000 removal and voluntary departure orders each month for immigrant minors which is close to four times the earlier rate. And the vast majority of the unaccompanied minors removed last year don’t have any criminal record in the United States.

Yet this administration’s rationale for this campaign is criminality and fraud. Its own data, backed by FOIA requests, shows that these kids are going to school and following routine checks as required.

The Dismantling

The government ended deferred action for Special Immigrant Juvenile Status recipients, the policy that shielded children who had already proven, in family court, that they were abused, abandoned, or neglected, while they waited for a green card to come through. The government has defunded the legal service organizations that represent these children. They instructed immigration judges to stop granting minors time for their SIJ and asylum petitions to process. And they fired more than a hundred judges, including those who oversaw juvenile dockets.

ProPublica observed in court in Manhattan this April a single judge order 25 minors deported in the span of three hours. The children ranged from an eight-year-old girl from Ecuador whose mother had already won asylum to a high school senior from Guatemala living in Queens; most appeared by video, and some hearings lasted only a few minutes. That judge, Jem Sponzo, cited instructions from the authorities overseeing the immigration courts as she issued the orders — and has since been fired without explanation, one of more than 100 immigration judges dismissed since Trump returned to office. The Justice Department declined to answer ProPublica’s questions about the firings.

SIJS exists because Congress, with bipartisan support for over two decades, recognized a child who has already survived abandonment or abuse should be met by this country with protection. That architecture is being dismantled and the children are being handed removal at a swift pace.

What I am seeing up close

I volunteer with the New Sanctuary Coalition in New York, and right now I am learning the SIJS process from the inside, supporting a family through one case — the family court filings, the petitions, the careful assembly of evidence. Each of these steps is meant to provide legal protection, and the families taking them are doing everything the law asks of them. The ProPublica investigation shows how hard this administration is working to strip that protection away even as the filings continue. It also shows why the work continues to matter: the federal courts are holding the line, and every completed petition is a claim on the promise Congress made.

The story of Elder Chavez

Elder Chavez, abandoned by his parents in Honduras as a toddler, crossed the border alone at 14 to live with his older sister in Alabama. He was granted SIJS. He was pursuing permanent residency with a lawyer. He carried his documents everywhere. When Alabama police stopped him for driving 15 mph over the limit, and before he was turned over to ICE, he showed the police his papers, but as Chavez recounted to ProPublica, the officer said: “Your papers are of no use to me.”

He has now spent six months in Louisiana’s Winn Correctional Center, a facility where two migrants have died this year and where DHS’s own inspector general documented unsafe and unsanitary conditions. He is a high school junior with braces his sister saved up for, a welding class he loved, and a new nephew he has never met.

Where the resistance is holding

The federal courts are the counterweight, and the numbers there matter too. The National Immigration Project tracked 263 cases of detained SIJ applicants who had entered as unaccompanied minors. Federal judges ordered releases or bond hearings in all but twelve. One district judge, ruling in March, invoked the laws of human decency in condemning the government’s conduct.

That ratio — 251 out of 263 — tells us the law still recognizes what these detentions are. It also tells us that every habeas petition, every appeal, every hour of pro bono representation is buying children their freedom. The legal service organizations doing this work are the same ones the administration tried to defund; several reported federal agents arriving at their offices, warrantless, asking to see client files.

What you can do

Read and share the full investigation. ProPublica publishes under Creative Commons precisely so this reporting travels: These Immigrant Kids Were Once Protected. Under Trump, Their Deportations Have Tripled.

If you know a story, tell it. ProPublica is continuing this reporting with a focus on graduating high school seniors — the class of 2026. They are asking for tips at their published contact channels.

Support the people doing the work. Organizations like the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights and the National Immigration Project are winning release for detained children case by case, and they need volunteers and funds. In New York, you can volunteer with the New Sanctuary Coalition, which trains people for court accompaniment and supports immigrants through their cases. Court accompaniment is open to anyone willing to sit in a courtroom and bear witness. Presence changes what happens in those rooms. I have seen it.

Vote, and get others to vote. The fixes already exist on paper: the Fair Day in Court for Kids Act (H.R. 9259 in the House, S. 1297 in the Senate) would guarantee these children lawyers, and other bills would repeal the new fees and close the green card backlog that leaves SIJS kids exposed for years. The current Congress is unwilling to pass them. You can look up your members’ co-sponsorships in thirty seconds on congress.gov and ask them, by bill number, where they stand. Then register your neighbors, vote in the primaries, and get involved during the polls. Accompaniment protects our neighbors one hearing at a time; the ballot is how we change who writes the rules.

What Happens When a Person Is Deported:

Tania Bernath — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 19:49:47 GMT

Photo by Gary George on Unsplash

In October 2025, ICE seized Abdullahi Mohamed during a routine check-in in Maine. He had no criminal record; he had a removal order from 2001 and had shown up for twenty-four years whenever ICE told him to. He came from Somalia in 1999, paid his taxes, got married, and drove a cab. After several weeks in detention, he vanished from his family’s view. Days of frantic calls followed. When his family finally heard his voice again, he was calling from Mogadishu. He described being beaten and shackled on a deportation flight that crossed several countries in West, Central, and East Africa before landing in Somalia, and enduring long stretches without food or water. Every update reached his family too late, and never directly from ICE. “I think the whole point was to traumatize us,” his niece told The Marshall Project, “and leave us with a lasting scar.”

This one story alone is so problematic. Why was he separated from his family and deported without any ability to fight it? Why wasn’t his family contacted? Why was he beaten and shackled? Why, why, why, why. There are so many aspects of this one story that are wrong, and this is a practice the US government now uses on a routine basis.

And Abdullahi Mohamed is one person. Independent analysts, counting ICE’s own records, estimate removals at roughly 335,000 in the administration’s first year, close to a thousand people a day. Every one of them passes through the machinery described below: the seizure, the shackles, the sealed flights, the silence toward families. The government claims far higher numbers and releases no reliable data, and that refusal is part of the story.

Based solely on documented sources, we can confidently say that in the first year, approximately 335,000 deportations occurred, as estimated by independent analysts using ICE’s records. Amid this volume, a particularly harsh practice involves sending people to countries they have never lived in and where they have no connections. The government has not disclosed exact figures, but estimates from the Migration Policy Institute suggest around 15,000 people were deported in the first year, mostly to Mexico (about 13,000) with roughly 2,000 sent elsewhere, including small numbers to El Salvador, Panama, Costa Rica, Uzbekistan, Ghana, Eswatini, Guatemala, Equatorial Guinea, the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan, and Rwanda.

Human Rights Watch found that the U.S. deportees sent to Mexico are not released but handed over to Mexico’s immigration agency, INM. They are then bused hundreds of miles south to Chiapas or Tabasco without money, medication, or legal status. Many are older long-term U.S. residents in their sixties and seventies who had lived in the U.S. for decades.. HRW documented cases where detainees were threatened into signing deportation papers, families were never notified, and deportees were left impoverished in southern Mexico, unable to access medical care or reunite with U.S. citizen relatives. Mexico denies any agreement publicly, but HRW’s findings reveal a quiet pipeline where third-country nationals are effectively exiled into internal displacement, hidden from oversight, and stranded far from the border.

The two thousand individuals, combined with the government’s agreements with over 30 countries—more extensive than what any country has offered for a single person—and at least $44 million paid out, sometimes even before anyone arrived. Analysts suggest that the main concern is fear, not the actual figures: each deportation carries the risk of ending up anywhere.

The third-country system runs on the same planes, under the same rules, as removals home. Abdullahi Mohamed was sent to his country of birth; the people sent to Ghana and South Sudan were sent to countries they had never lived in; the shackles, the WRAP, the suppressed flights, and the silence toward families are identical.

And across every destination, the pattern holds: blanket shackling, prolonged restraint, WRAP use, denial of basic needs, flight secrecy, incommunicado detention, onward repatriation, undisclosed agreements, and people with formal protection orders deported anyway.

There has been pushback domestically, but this government has ignored these efforts. Some receiving governments, such as Brazil, ordered the restraints removed on the tarmac; Colombia refused the flights outright, and India’s parliament erupted in protest.

The scale is enormous and needs much more visibility.

Here is the story as it unfolds for a person: initially, the machinery that every deportee encounters, followed by the second ordeal awaiting those sent to unfamiliar places where they know no one. Finally, the actions we can take to address it.

1. The Pickup: No Notice, No Destination, No Counsel

People are taken into custody and placed on flights with less than 24 hours’ notice, at times without knowing where they are being sent. Internal memos show the government uses third-country deportations as deterrence, intentionally creating fear and confusion to pressure people to abandon their claims.

“Deportees are routinely placed on flights with less than 24 hours of notice, minimal access to legal counsel, and no advance knowledge of their destination.” (American Immigration Council; Migration Policy Institute)

Some of these individuals hold formal US protection orders, including withholding of removal and Convention Against Torture protections. They are transferred anyway, to countries they have never lived in.

2. The Transport: Shackled for 16 to 51 Hours

Once boarded, people are restrained and this can be up to 16 to 51 hours, including during layovers and refueling stops. ICE’s own 2024 Air Operations Handbook makes full restraint the default for every person on every flight: handcuffs, waist chains, and leg irons, regardless of individual risk.

The WRAP full-body restraint device is used even though DHS’s own civil rights office warned in 2023 of the absence of policy and training governing it. An AP investigation found officers deployed it to punish people who asked to contact their attorneys. “One man was kept in the device for 16 hours; another reported a concussion and dislocated jaw.”

People report being denied food, water, bathroom access, and medical care. None of this is new. In December 2017, ICE kept 92 Somalis shackled at the wrists, waist, and ankles for roughly 40 hours on a failed deportation flight; court filings describe beatings, a man tased, and detainees forced to urinate on themselves. Lawyers filed a complaint with DHS’s Inspector General recommending changes to ICE’s restraint policy. The 2024 Handbook shows what happened instead: blanket restraint became codified policy.

And ICE has used the FAA’s LADD program to suppress deportation flights from public tracking systems. Combined with boarding people without notice to counsel or family, this means a person effectively disappears for the entire transport period. Abdullahi Mohamed’s family lived that disappearance in real time.

3. The Arrival: Incommunicado Detention, No Access to Lawyers

When the plane lands, the two stories split. Abdullahi Mohamed stepped off into a country he at least came from, and even that landing was devastating: he told The Marshall Project he has no family left in Somalia, no way to support himself, and nothing of the life he built over twenty-six years.

For a person deported to a third country, there is no language they speak, no cousin to call, no community that recognizes them. And in case after case, the receiving state locks them up.

South Sudan. Deportees were held incommunicado in an undisclosed guarded complex. Lawyers were unable to locate them for months.

Ghana. People were taken to Dema camp, a military training facility with heat, mosquitoes, and unsanitary water. Some were forcibly removed from hotels by armed authorities.

Cameroon. Four journalists and a lawyer were arrested and beaten while attempting to visit deportees.

Panama. People were locked in a Panama City hotel under armed guard, phones confiscated, children bused to the San Vicente jungle camp with no asylum screening, lawyers denied access.

4. The Onward Repatriation: Sent Again, Sometimes to the Country They Fled

Some deportees are sent onward to yet another country, including the country they originally fled. At least one individual was repatriated onward from Ghana to The Gambia, a country with no formal agreement. Venezuelan deportees sent to El Salvador’s CECOT prison were later repatriated to Venezuela.

This is chain refoulement, a violation of the Convention Against Torture.

5. The Receiving Countries: Money, Secrecy, and Undisclosed Agreements

The US has paid over $44 million to foreign governments to accept deportees, with over $32 million sent to Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda, El Salvador, Eswatini, and Palau, in some cases before any deportee arrived. Rwanda received $7.5 million to accept seven people, roughly $1.1 million per person. Under the DRC agreement, the US pays all costs and the DRC pays none.

The Ghana agreement text remains undisclosed despite a Supreme Court order requiring its release.

What Accountability Looks Like

The government is violating US statute codifying the Convention Against Torture, ignoring formal protection orders, and defying a court order to disclose an agreement. When a government breaks its own laws, accountability comes from the institutions and people still willing to enforce them. Here is where the pressure points are.

Elected officials already hold the paper trail. A May 2026 House letter demands complete flight data from the FAA, and an October 2025 letter from eleven senators demands ICE suspend the WRAP and account for its air operations. The ask is simple: co-sign those letters, hold hearings, and subpoena the two documents at the center of this, the ICE Air Operations Handbook and the undisclosed agreements. Ask your representative one question: have you signed?

The press has a rich and mostly unmined record waiting: sworn deportee declarations in D.A. et al. v. Noem on CourtListener, monthly flight data from Human Rights First’s ICE Flight Monitor, and a proven FOIA route (the AP pried loose DHS’s internal WRAP warning that way). The local version of the story is even simpler: who from our community has been taken, and what happened to them in transit? Abdullahi Mohamed’s story surfaced because a reporter called his family.

Campaigns heading into the 2026 midterms need one question for every candidate: will you vote to condition ICE Air funding on flight transparency and an end to blanket shackling? The $1.1 million per person paid to Rwanda is a number any voter understands.

I’ve started on my own list. I’ve written to my representative and both senators asking whether they’ve signed the FAA letter and whether they’ll demand suspension of the WRAP, and the template is linked in the resources below so you can send yours in five minutes. And this is where I want to hear from you. Some of you work in law, in journalism, in congressional offices, in immigrant defense, in campaigns. What steps make sense from where you sit? What am I missing? The comments are open, and I’ll gather the best answers into a follow-up post.

Why I’m Writing This

Because this is happening now. Because it is documented. Because it is global. Because it is hidden. Because people are being treated in ways that would be criminal anywhere else. Because the laws being broken are ours, the money being spent is ours, and the institutions capable of stopping it answer to us.

This is what I know so far. And I’m not letting it go

Resources: Where to Learn More and Take Action

Track the system

Deportation Data Project: ICE’s own individual-level records obtained through FOIA, with analyses; the source for the finding that interior deportations quintupled in the administration’s first year
TRAC: the long-running independent tracker of ICE detention and removals; as of late 2025, nearly three-quarters of the 65,000 people in detention had no criminal conviction
Austin Kocher’s Substack: forensic accounting of the gap between DHS’s claimed deportation numbers and what the agency’s own records support
Third Country Deportation Watch (Human Rights First and Refugees International): country-by-country tracker of transfers, agreements, conditions, and litigation, updated continuously
Refugees International TCD Tracker: the agreements, now spanning more than 30 countries
ICE Flight Monitor (Human Rights First): monthly flight counts, destinations, durations, and tail numbers
Migration Policy Institute: analysis of the third-country agreements and the deterrence strategy behind them

Read the documentation

The Marshall Project on ICE transfers and disappearance, including Abdullahi Mohamed’s story
The AP investigation into the WRAP restraint device
Senate Foreign Relations Committee minority report, “At What Cost”: the secret deals and the $44 million
American Immigration Council fact sheet on third-country removals: the legal framework in plain language
Deportee declarations in D.A. et al. v. Noem, searchable on CourtListener

Take a step

The May 2026 House letter to the FAA: read it, then ask your representative whether they’ve signed
My letter to Congress as a template: [link]
Amnesty International USA’s campaign against mass deportation and detention
Find your rapid-response network or accompaniment program through your local immigrant defense coalition; if you’re in New York, New Sanctuary Coalition trains volunteers for court accompaniment

Our elections need you now

Tania Bernath — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 15:14:26 GMT

Photo by Donald Teel on Unsplash

I worked the polls again for the NY primary, and it reminded me how mechanically simple this process actually is. A person shows up. We confirm they’re registered. They sign. We check their signature, and they’re checked off the rolls. They’re handed one ballot, and once they’ve filled it in, they scan it. We track every single one against the machine count, and at the end of the night, everything gets reconciled. That’s the entire system. It works largely the same way across the country, with small variations by state, and none of it is glamorous or mysterious, just paperwork.

For a long time, I thought a system with this much tracking left no room for fraud. Then Tina Peters proved me wrong. Peters, the former Mesa County, Colorado clerk, was convicted on multiple felony counts for letting an unauthorized person access her county’s voting machines. She was caught hunting for evidence of the fraud she’d convinced herself existed, finding none, and breaking the law trying to manufacture some anyway. Trump reportedly wanted to pardon her and couldn’t because hers was a state conviction, out of his reach. Even that accountability was later weakened when the Colorado governor commuted her sentence under GOP pressure.

Cases like hers deserve thorough investigation. But they also reveal something important: the fraud narrative didn’t exist at scale until one man needed it.

Where the doubt came from

For decades, American elections ran without a cloud of “stolen election” suspicion hanging over them. That framing arrived with Trump, and Trump alone. He introduced doubt into the process in 2016 when he expected to lose, went quiet about it the moment he won, and revived the accusations the moment he lost in 2020. They’ve stayed in circulation ever since.

Even the people most motivated to find fraud haven’t found much. The Heritage Foundation, an organization that actively supports stricter voting laws, maintains a database going back decades, covering billions of votes cast. In all of it, they’ve documented around 68 cases of noncitizen voting since the 1980s. That’s the strongest case for “rampant fraud” the most motivated investigators have been able to build.

But the rhetoric didn’t stay rhetoric.

When the claims became action

Where this stopped being talk and became an actual attempt to overturn a result was the fake electors scheme. In seven states Trump lost in 2020, his allies organized and submitted certificates falsely declaring themselves the legitimate electors, hoping Congress would count the wrong slate on January 6th.

Charges followed in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin. Accountability has been uneven. Lawyers who built the scheme have been punished. Rudy Giuliani was disbarred in New York and D.C., John Eastman was disbarred in California, Jenna Ellis and Kenneth Chesebro plead guilty in Georgia. The electors themselves have mostly escaped consequences. Nevada’s case was dismissed on a technicality. Arizona’s case was thrown back to the grand jury and left in jeopardy after the state Supreme Court declined to revive it in June 2026. Only one elector nationwide has been sentenced, and only for a misdemeanor.

The pattern repeated. Kari Lake ran the same playbook after losing her 2022 Arizona gubernatorial race: unsupported fraud claims, lawsuits dismissed for lack of evidence, and a refusal to concede that outlasted every court ruling against her.

The tactic: manufacturing doubt that can never be disproven

After Republican Spencer Pratt lost the Los Angeles mayoral primary this June, House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters the count “stinks to high heaven.” Asked what evidence supported that, he said the efforts involved were too diabolical and too far upstream to prove, and that everybody knows that something is instinctively wrong. Vice President Vance made a version of the same case on Fox News that same week, questioning a mail-ballot count simply because it took time.

Both men are Ivy League–trained lawyers. They know exactly what they’re doing. Phrases like “the evidence is unprovable by design” paired with “the conclusion is instinctive” are engineered to sow doubt where none exists — and engineered so no evidence could ever prove them wrong.

It is 2020 all over again. In 2020, Trump supporters chanted “stop the count” in Detroit when mail ballots favored Biden, and “count the vote” in Arizona when the count favored Trump. Johnson’s complaint this June “the numbers just kept changing” is the same argument Trump used in the 2020 election.

Trump’s relationship to evidence has never been the standard anyone held him to. Johnson and Vance are different. Law school trains you early and repeatedly to distinguish an unsupported assertion from a proven one. Johnson made this move knowing exactly what it was: constructing a claim explicitly designed so it can never be disproven, then treating that very unprovability as if it were evidence. That’s a choice made by people who know better.

And it isn’t isolated. Trump and his allies filed 62 lawsuits challenging the 2020 results. Sixty-one came back the same way: no fraud found, including 30 dismissed only after judges heard the merits. Some of those judges were Trump appointees. The one ruling that went his way was a narrow procedural question in Pennsylvania that didn’t change a single outcome.

A theory tested 62 times and failed 61, yet still loudly repeated, isn’t just a hypothesis waiting for proof. It’s a loyalty indicator. Repeating it after losses isn’t dismissing them, it shows that the losses are irrelevant.

I’d genuinely welcome it if Johnson or Vance got up at 5 a.m. to help open a polling place, sat through the reconciliation at the end of a fourteen-hour day, and saw firsthand how well-documented this process actually is. Anyone doubting how it works is welcome to find out.

This is the strategy running right now.

The Justice Department has sued roughly 30 states demanding unredacted voter rolls: full names, dates of birth, addresses, partial Social Security numbers, driver’s license numbers, to cross-check against a Homeland Security system already documented to mistakenly flag citizens as noncitizens. The FBI has assigned 260 analysts to a Fulton County ballot investigation. A Postal Service rule change, still open to public comment, would allow USPS to refuse to deliver ballots to any voter it deems ineligible.

All any of this requires is enough doubt, in enough places, that any adverse result in November can be contested.

And it’s happening in the run-up to an election where Republicans are, by most measures, positioned to lose, because of unpopularity of the GOP more generally, poor-quality candidates, unpopular positions on programs like Social Security, and an electorate that consistently says it wants leaders it can believe in over leaders it’s told to fear. Manufacturing doubt is a hedge against an outcome they can see coming.

The part that deserves equal airtime: it’s already being countered, and winning

Judges in five states — Michigan, Oregon, California, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island — have already dismissed DOJ’s voter-roll lawsuits outright. A federal court has ruled that the executive branch has neither the legal authority nor the practical capacity to compile a national list of eligible voters, and that USPS has no authority to decide whose ballots get delivered. Federal law bars major voter purges within 90 days of an election, a timeline that already has Michigan’s own lawyers calling DOJ’s review plans “dubious.”

This work is coordinated and already underway. Indivisible runs a named, 50-state program for 2026 called Hands Off Our Vote, built specifically to track these threats and mobilize against them state by state. Local chapters are running live, dated actions right now — this week it’s public comments opposing the USPS ballot rule, with real deadlines and real instructions. The ACLU has committed $24.5 million, its largest election-safeguarding investment ever, mapped against 25 specific threat scenarios, and it’s training volunteers to help protect results in their own communities.

I hear some version of the same question constantly: is anyone actually doing something, or are we just supposed to wait and see what happens in November? The honest answer is that this work is happening every week in courtrooms, in comment periods, in local chapters and it deserves reporting as the ongoing story it is, not background noise to a single headline every few months.

Every thread runs back to one man — and it can end with him too

Every thread in this story runs back to Trump: the doubt he introduced when he expected to lose in 2016, the fake electors his allies organized in 2020, the acolyte he couldn’t pardon because her conviction was a state matter beyond his reach, and the lawsuits filed in his name that keep finding nothing.

It can end with him too, the day enough Republicans in his party are willing to put their country over loyalty to a person.

Until that day, the fight continues in courtrooms, in comment periods, and in church basements where people sign up for shifts.

If you want in

Sign up for Indivisible’s Hands Off Our Vote for deadline alerts and rapid-response calls specific to your state
Find your local Indivisible chapter — many are running weekly actions with clear, simple asks and real deadlines
Look into ACLU’s election-safeguarding volunteer track if a legal or procedural role suits you better
Pay attention to SAVE-system voter roll challenges in your own state, especially if you know naturalized citizens, this is where wrongful purges are most likely to land first, and local eyes catch the errors before they become disenfranchisement

Two hundred fifty years ago, the founders proclaimed it self-evident that governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. That consent gets produced, actively, by people willing to show up to a court filing, a comment period, a rapid-response call, week after week, whether or not anyone’s watching.

That work is already underway.
The only real question is how many more of us join it before November.

Sources

1. Tina Peters convicted and sentenced to prison for the Mesa County voting-machine breach — NPR: https://www.npr.org/2024/10/04/nx-s1-5139456/former-colorado-county-clerk-sentenced-to-prison-for-tampering-with-voting-machines

2. Trump’s attempted pardon of Peters ruled to have no effect on her state conviction — PBS News: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/colorado-court-orders-resentencing-of-tina-peters-for-election-fraud-scheme

3. Colorado Gov. Polis commutes Peters’s sentence amid administration pressure — Colorado Newsline: https://coloradonewsline.com/2026/05/15/polis-tina-peters-prison-sentence/

4. Heritage Foundation’s own database documents 68 noncitizen voting cases since the 1980s — American Immigration Council: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/myths-about-noncitizen-voting-heritage-foundation-data/

5. The fake electors scheme, overview — Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot

6. Fake elector case status by state, including Arizona’s case being sent back to the grand jury and the state Supreme Court declining to revive it — CREW and Wikipedia: https://www.citizensforethics.org/reports-investigations/crew-reports/the-cases-against-fake-electors-and-where-they-stand/ ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arizona_prosecution_of_fake_electors

7. Giuliani disbarred in New York and D.C., Eastman disbarred in California, Ellis and Chesebro plead guilty in Georgia — Newsweek: https://www.newsweek.com/trump-lawyers-disbarred-law-licenses-suspended-chesebro-giuliani-cohen-1978351

8. Kari Lake’s 2022 fraud claims, repeated court losses, and refusal to concede — PBS News: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/judge-dismisses-kari-lakes-last-challenge-in-election-loss-for-arizona-governor

9. Mike Johnson’s “stinks to high heaven” and “impossible to prove” comments on the LA mayoral primary — Mediaite: https://www.mediaite.com/media/news/stinks-to-high-heaven-speaker-johnson-claims-rigged-election-accusations-are-impossible-to-prove/

10. JD Vance’s Fox News comments questioning the mail-ballot count — The New Republic: https://newrepublic.com/post/211544/mike-johnson-california-election-fraud-no-proof

11. The Trump campaign’s 62 post-2020 lawsuits, 61 losses, 30 dismissed on the merits, and the single narrow Pennsylvania procedural win — Just Security: https://www.justsecurity.org/95313/trump-trials-court-jury/

12. DOJ lawsuits against roughly 30 states for unredacted voter rolls and the SAVE system’s history of flagging citizens as noncitizens — Brennan Center tracker: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/tracker-justice-department-requests-voter-information

13. FBI surges 260 analysts into the Fulton County 2020 election investigation — PBS News / AP: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/the-fbi-is-directing-hundreds-of-analysts-to-its-investigation-of-georgias-2020-presidential-election

14. USPS proposed rule allowing refusal to deliver ballots to voters it deems ineligible — ABC News: https://abcnews.com/Politics/postal-service-deliver-ballots-states-refuse-turn-voter/story?id=134185698

15. Court dismissals of DOJ voter-roll lawsuits, now numbering nine states — PBS News: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/federal-judge-dismisses-justice-department-lawsuit-seeking-detailed-maryland-voter-data

16. Federal judge blocks USPS from withholding ballots and rules the executive branch lacks authority over mail voting — NPR: https://www.npr.org/2026/06/25/nx-s1-5869755/judge-blocks-postal-service-proposal-to-restrict-mail-in-voting-under-trumps-order

17. Indivisible’s Hands Off Our Vote 2026 program — Indivisible: https://indivisible.org/campaigns/our-vote/

18. ACLU’s $24.5 million election safeguarding investment across 25 threat scenarios — ACLU: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-launches-historic-election-safeguarding-effort-ahead-of-the-midterms

When I Spoke My Values, I Was Called Deranged

Tania Bernath — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:10:12 GMT

Photo by Marek Studzinski on Unsplash

I’d just finished cheering on Alex Bores before the NY1 debate at Baruch College and was on my way to the gym, still holding my Bores sign. Three men were standing on the sidewalk in front of a big blow‑up cutout of Caroline Shinkle, one of the Republicans running in NY‑12. As I turned to look at the cutout, one of the guys peeled off to talk to me. He looked like someone I could have gone to high school with.

He looked at the sign. “Are you a Democrat?”

“Yes.”

“Who are you supporting?”

“Bores.”

I rolled my eyes. The sign in my hand answered the question.

“Why are you a Democrat? Would you vote for a Republican? Don’t you care about the person?”

“I am a registered Democrat, and I haven’t ever voted for a Republican. I want affordable health care, affordable housing, and a multi‑racial and ethnic democracy…”

Interrupting, he said, “Oh, that’s just a line from the Democratic agenda. You’re such a Democrat.

And so?

“Do you like Mamdani?” he asked.

“Yes, very much. His values are close to mine. He’s young, I want to give him a chance. He’s got good ideas. I was at the inauguration and was so proud to be standing there among people who represented our city. He represents groups that don’t usually get reflected well in our politics. And that for me is important.”

“Well, there was Adams,” he said. “He’s Black.”

“Okay. But he wasn’t good. He was indicted during his term. So no — I’m not just talking about race. The person has to show that their values align. Adams didn’t. Almost his entire leadership team was indicted or quit. It’s values.”

“I was at the Israel Day parade last week,” he said. “Not one person there supported Mamdani. They all love Trump.”

Did you speak to everyone at the parade? I didn’t say it out loud.

“I bet you weren’t there.”

“No. I wasn’t. I hate parades.”

“So what’s wrong with Mamdani?” I asked. “He won decisively in the primary and in the general, and he pulled people out to campaign and vote in high numbers of young people, people from all the boroughs, people who don’t usually get represented.”

“It was a messed‑up election,” he said.

“Messed up how?”

He didn’t answer. Maybe he meant something he couldn’t say — something that would sound politically incorrect, or even racist, if he said it out loud. I didn’t press him. But there was something behind that statement.

I offered, “What was messed up was Cuomo,, who lost the primary and then switched to run as an independent, and lost again.”

“Was Sliwa your pick?”

He didn’t answer.

“He is setting up free grocery stores,” he said, as if that explained everything.

“They are not free.”

That landed somewhere, or didn’t. Hard to tell.

“Why do you hate Donald Trump?”

“Did I say I hated Donald Trump? I don’t remember saying that. But I don’t support him. His values aren’t aligned with mine on any front. I look at intentions, and I don’t like or trust his.”

“Oh,” he said, suddenly getting a lot more energy. “You’re one of those people with Trump derangement syndrome.”

I paused. “Why, because I said I don’t agree with or support what he is doing? I guess you have Mamdani derangement syndrome, then. Or every other politician you don’t agree with,, Biden, Obama. Is that it?”

A pause.

“What are you happy about with Trump?”

“Everything,” he said. “I like everything he’s doing.”

“Everything? Even the Iran war, he decided alone to start?”

He didn’t say anything. Just looked at me.

“And his approval rating is low, really low, historically low,” I said.

“Well, it is because of the Iran war.”

“That’s the point, he decided to go to war all by himself, and it was a very bad decision.”

He jumped in with, “Obama’s. Biden’s. All presidents have low approval ratings.”

“Well, we are talking about Trump right now,” I said. “Check it, it is lower even than his first term.”

Then one of the other guys standing there tried to jump in, praising Trump for “bringing the country together.”

The man I’d been talking to told his friend, “She’s voting for Alex Bores, don’t bother.” But his friend kept going.

My face went hot at the absurdity of the statement, and this conversation proved it.

The guy must have seen my face because he then said, “We are ganging up on you.” Then he said he felt exhausted. This was the one thing we agreed on in the entire interaction.

I turned away and started walking toward the gym, feeling icky and angry, and wondering what that was what they wanted. They never once mentioned Caroline Shinkle, whose huge cutout was beside them and presumably the reason they were there. They didn’t even ask me why I was supporting Alex Bores

I guess they already knew exactly what I thought, since they seemed intent on diagnosing me.

And here’s the part that keeps snagging. This guy told me he was happy with everything Trump is doing while standing a block from the debate, where every Democrat on that stage, in one of the most Democratic districts in the country, was competing over who would be toughest on removing Trump. George Conway’s entire campaign is essentially that. I watched it later on my phone at the gym, each candidate calling Trump a threat, talking about impeachment and removal.

Why did he approach me? What was he trying to get out of the conversation? I spoke honestly and sincerely, yet believing what I believe was somehow turned into something deranged.

People keep saying we should engage with MAGA. But how? Not because the other side is unreachable in principle, but because this particular exchange wasn’t an exchange at all. He didn’t want to know what I cared about. He wanted to catch me caring about it.

I walked away with twenty comebacks. This is what I always do: leave a conversation and spend the next hour assembling the perfect retorts, telling myself to remember them for next time in case I run into someone like him again. And then, somewhere around the second block, I stopped. Because that’s exhausting. And why am I making myself wrong? I answered honestly. I said what I believe, plainly, more than once. If he couldn’t meet me there, that’s not a failure of my comebacks. I don’t owe a sharper performance to a man who came looking for a type, not a person.

But here’s the question I can’t put down. Why was there no common ground? Not one inch of it. Here, in New York — a city I love precisely because of who’s in it — with a guy who could have come from my own high school. But we didn’t connect on anything.

Maybe I should have asked him what he cared about.

We used to call the US to pressurize violators now they are the violator.

Tania Bernath — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:26:53 GMT

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash

For more than two decades, I worked in human rights and humanitarian protection across roughly forty countries. As a regional researcher for Amnesty International’s Africa Program, I focused on West Africa — Liberia, Sierra Leone, and The Gambia — documenting enforced disappearances, due process violations, and broader human rights concerns under governments that detained, tortured, and killed with impunity. In the years that followed I carried out humanitarian protection work across Africa and beyond. In all of those places, we often pressured the United States government to use its diplomatic pressure. apply funding conditions, and make public statements as a strategy to prevent human rights violations.

Now my energy is focused on the United States, and it seems that the US government has become the violator, using ICE to implement its illegal and human rights-violating policies.

As of early May 2026, the Trump administration has forcibly transferred roughly 19,000 people to at least 23 countries where those individuals have no ties, no family, no legal status, and in many cases no shared language, according to the Third Country Deportation Watch tracker maintained by Human Rights First and Refugees International. The majority of those transfers — over 17,000 — went to Mexico. The remainder have been sent across four continents, including to countries in Africa where the documented conditions have been among the most severe.

They are what the administration calls “third-country transfers” taking someone who fled persecution, who may hold a US protection order granted by an American immigration judge, and putting them on a plane to somewhere they have never been. According to the American Immigration Council, deportees are routinely placed on flights with less than 24 hours of notice, with minimal access to legal counsel and no advance knowledge of their destination.

Some recipient countries include Equatorial Guinea, Eswatini, Rwanda, South Sudan, Cameroon, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. These nations are not neutral transit states; they are governments with documented histories of arbitrary detention, torture, press suppression, and persecution of political opponents. Human rights organizations have spent decades documenting and condemning their actions.

And the United States is using tax payer money to pay these countries to m.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee minority staff report, At What Cost: Inside the Trump Administration’s Secret Deportation Deals, found that at least $44 million in US taxpayer funds has gone directly to foreign governments to accept these transfers — in some cases paid before a single deportee arrived. Rwanda received $7.5 million and accepted seven people as of January 2026. That is $1.1 million per person, paid to secure the cooperation of a government with a well-documented record of human rights violations.

What has happened to the people transferred is documented by human rights monitors and in federal court filings. In South Sudan, six of eight men deported in May 2025 remained arbitrarily detained in an undisclosed location six months later, their lawyers unable to find them, resulting in a formal statement from UN human rights experts. In Cameroon, four journalists and a lawyer were arrested and beaten by authorities when they attempted to visit deportees held in a compound in Yaoundé. In Eswatini, people are reportedly held in solitary confinement, denied access to legal counsel, and allowed only occasional contact with family, according to Third Country Deportation Watch. In Ghana, according to court filings in D.A. et al. v. Noem, people were held in restraints for sixteen-hour flights and detained on arrival in a military training camp outside Accra with no legal access.

Several of those transferred held formal US protection orders, withholding of removal, or protection under the Convention Against Torture, meaning American immigration judges had already determined they faced a real risk of persecution or torture if returned to their own countries. Instead, the US transferred anyway, to countries not named in their removal orders.

Federal courts have repeatedly ruled these transfers unlawful. In February 2026, a Massachusetts district court vacated the administration’s entire third-country removal policy, finding it violated due process and US obligations under international law. The Supreme Court has twice intervened to allow transfers to continue while litigation proceeds. Many of the agreements are not disclosed publicly, as the US government has refused to release their texts even when ordered to do so by the Supreme Court, as in the case of the memorandum of understanding with Ghana.

The organizations doing the hardest work of documentation and accountability right now include Human Rights First and Refugees International, who jointly run the Third Country Deportation Watch which is the most comprehensive public record of what is known. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International USA, the American Immigration Council, and the Global Detention Project are all documenting and taking steps to challenge the administration. This week, an international coalition of lawyers filed a complaint with the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights seeking to block further transfers to Equatorial Guinea and to secure access to lawyers for the people held there.

We once urged the United States to pressure these countries to prevent human rights abuses. Now, it is U.S. policy to collaborate with human rights violators, using taxpayer funds to do so. Our money is sent to detain immigrants and asylum seekers in centers where they have no ties to their home countries and no legal recourse. This is done intentionally, through secret agreements hidden even from the Supreme Court.

These are human rights violations. This needs to stop, and those who have created and implemented this need to be held accountable.

This is why I am volunteering for Alex Bores for Congress NY 12

Tania Bernath — Thu, 14 May 2026 18:47:44 GMT

This is why I am volunteering for Alex Bores for Congress NY 12 And you should too!

Ten candidates are competing in the Democratic primary for New York’s 12th Congressional District on June 23, 2026, to replace Jerry Nadler, who is leaving after over three decades. Whoever wins the Democratic primary wins the seat. My main focus is usually Get Out the Vote efforts, which is key for this primary, but I’m campaigning for Alex Bores.

The evening after ICE agents killed Renee Good in Minneapolis, there was a rally at City Hall. Many powerful voices spoke that day. Alex Bores was one of them. He was clear, compassionate, and specific about what was actually happening, and I wanted to know more.

But then I started getting negative mailers about him — the only mailers I was receiving about the June primary. That made me want to look even harder. I was even more intrigued. I watched him debate. I listened to his 90-minute conversation with Ezra Klein — the episode is called “Why Are Palantir and OpenAI Scared of Alex Bores?” I read as much as I could on him.

Alex Bores is a fifth-generation New Yorker with a BS in Industrial & Labor Relations from Cornell and an MS in computer science from Georgia Tech. He’s been in the State Assembly since January 2023, and in just over three years, he’s passed 30 bills and been recognized as one of the most effective freshman legislators. He passed the strongest AI regulation law in the country — the RAISE Act — through both the New York State Senate and Assembly in June 2025. He left Palantir in 2019 when the company renewed its ICE contract.

That AI work is why tech industry super PACs are spending hundreds of millions to defeat him. They’ve already poured over $445,000 into attack ads against a smart legislator who is fighting for basic safety regulations and accountability. I hate negative campaigning — but it is clear he is a threat to exactly the people who need to be threatened.

I have started canvassing in different parts of the district, handing out flyers and talking to people about the primary. In New York, the primary is what counts. That’s why I’m doing this work now.

The strongest choice — and why now

There are really four competitive candidates, and recent polls show Bores, Schlossberg, and Lasher in a statistical dead heat, with Conway trailing. Those are the candidates worth focusing on.

Honestly, the platforms of these four candidates are not that far apart. They all oppose Trump, focus on affordability, fight to protect healthcare, push back against ICE, and want to keep money out of politics. They all have strengths. But Bores stands out for me — and here’s why.

Jack Schlossberg is a Kennedy. That is genuinely his main qualification. George Conway has done great work opposing Trump, but he recently moved back to New York, and there needs to be a broader agenda beyond opposition to Trump. Micah Lasher has real legislative accomplishments and the backing of Nadler, Hochul, and Bloomberg, for whom he served as policy director. That’s a formidable machine. But it’s an Albany and New York City machine, and this is a job in Washington. There are conflicts of interest that I’ll leave readers to find for themselves.

Alex Bores has endorsements from the UFT, New York State United Teachers, PSC-CUNY, and District Council 37. The educators and workers back him because he’s delivered for them. That’s not celebrity. That’s not being handed a seat by the outgoing congressman. That’s a record.

We are going to need people in Congress who can actually pass laws. Who are clear on the issues, willing to stand up when it’s hard, and who have the knowledge to back it up. AI alone is reshaping every aspect of our lives — labor, surveillance, healthcare, democracy itself — and we need someone in that room who actually understands what’s at stake and has already proven they’ll fight for it. Alex Bores is that person. He’s been in the middle of that fight, passing real law, standing his ground in every interview and debate, and making the tech oligarchs so nervous they’ve spent a fortune trying to stop him.

And that’s what this really comes down to. The super PACs spending millions to defeat Alex Bores don’t care about New York’s 12th district. They care about what happens when someone actually tries to hold them accountable. If they can take down a state assemblyman who passed an AI safety law — spend enough money, run enough attack ads, drown out enough voices — they send a message to every legislator in the country: don’t even try. That’s the precedent they’re trying to set. That regulation is futile. That accountability has a price tag. That democracy itself can be outspent.

We cannot let that be the lesson of this race.

The primary is June 23rd. I’m in — and I hope you will be too.

Learn More:

Alex Bores for Congress (includes press coverage, endorsements, and interviews): https://www.alexbores.nyc/
Ezra Klein Show: "Why Are Palantir and OpenAI Scared of Alex Bores?": nytimes.com
NY Times investigation of Schlossberg’s chaotic campaign: https://www.mediaite.com/politics/scathing-ny-times-report-questions-if-jack-schlossberg-is-capable-of-public-service/
New York Post on Lasher’s wife’s ICE contracts: https://www.aol.com/articles/jerry-nadler-prot-g-micah-120000925.html

Why I’ve Been Attending Literary Festivals for Two Years

Tania Bernath — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 19:04:10 GMT

I don’t have a book deal. I don’t have a table at literary festivals. I’m not on any panels—yet. But for the past two years, I’ve been attending literary festivals around the world, and I love it and feel it is a valuable investment in my writing career.

Let me tell you why.

How This Started

In 2024, I found myself deep in the writing of a memoir—a book that weaves together my two decades of humanitarian work across 30+ countries with reflections on authoritarianism abroad and democratic strain at home. I had finished a first draft through The Write Practice, but I was stuck in that difficult middle space: serious about the work, committed to the craft, but not published yet.

I was hungry for something I couldn’t get from writing workshops or craft books alone. I wanted to hear how authors talked about living through historical moments. I wanted to understand the publishing landscape from the inside. Most of all, I needed to stay connected to the literary world during what I was learning would be a very long journey.

So I started going to festivals.

The Festivals

Over the past two years, I’ve attended:

Jaipur Literature Festival (2024 and 2026)
The Atlantic Festival, 2025
The New Yorker Festival, 2025
Africa Center Festival, 2025
Brooklyn Book Festival 2024, 2025

Each one taught me something different. And I’m planning to continue in 2026 and 2027, with a specific goal: eventually getting a speaking spot of my own.

What I Actually Do There

This isn’t about wandering around soaking up the literary atmosphere (though that’s nice too). I approach festivals strategically:

I choose festivals and sessions based on what I’m writing about If I’m grappling with how to write about time and place in my memoir, I’ll seek out panels on craft. If I’m trying to understand my book’s position in the market, I’ll attend publishing seminars.

I network intentionally. Not just with the big-name authors (though I’ll get to that), but with other attendees—fellow aspiring authors, readers, people working in publishing. Each one jut builds my network in different ways.

I ask questions during Q&A sessions. Here’s something I realized: these are often recorded and become part of the festival’s historical record. It’s a way to get my perspective and voice into the conversation, even when I’m not on stage. It’s also helped me practice articulating my ideas in front of an audience.

I buy books and prepare for signings. When I want to connect with a specific author, I buy their book and think through what I want to say during the signing. I’m creating a memory I can reference if I reach out later. [I’ll add the Anne Applebaum example here]

I write about what I learn. Festival sessions become content for my Substack, which means I’m not just consuming—I’m contributing to the conversation and building my platform at the same time.

What I’m Learning (The Stuff They Don’t Tell You)

Even Booker Prize-winning authors are nervous about their work. Hearing celebrated authors express vulnerability and uncertainty about their writing has been oddly comforting. It normalizes every insecurity I have about my own manuscript.

How authors talk about their books is a masterclass in itself. I study how they refine their pitch for different audiences. I notice what makes me lean in and what makes me tune out. It’s teaching me how I want to eventually talk about my own work.

International festivals offer different conversations. At Jaipur, there are discussions about the genocide in Gaza, democratic backsliding, and other topics that don’t always get the same space at US festivals. [I can expand this with specific examples from Jaipur]

There’s infrastructure to learn about. How do festivals choose speakers? What are they looking for? Where are the gaps my voice might fill? I’m studying this carefully because I’m playing the long game.

The community is real. Everyone started somewhere. Even the authors signing their tenth book remember what it felt like to be working on their first.

The Honest Part (What I’m Still Figuring Out)

Let me be clear: I haven’t had any groundbreaking luck yet. No book deal from a festival connection. No agent who discovered me in the audience. No speaking invitation.

But here’s where I’m struggling: the follow-through.

I create these moments—I build a connection with the Jaipur organizer, I get Anne Applebaum to sign my book, I have meaningful conversations with other authors. But then I get stuck on what to do next when the manuscript isn’t “ready” yet.

I’m stuck in the planning phase. I have a list of festivals I want to target for speaking opportunities, but I keep waiting for the manuscript to be perfect before I activate those connections.

This is my 2026 challenge: getting out of planning mode and into action mode.

The Practical Stuff (Money and Logistics)

Let’s talk about the financial reality, because I want to be honest about this.

Not all festivals are expensive, but it does require resources and flexibility. Here’s how I make it work:

Layer festival attendance onto other plans. I attend festivals during writing retreats, while visiting friends, or as part of vacations.
Choose strategically. Brooklyn Book Festival is free. Africa Center festivals are low-cost. I went to the Atlantic Monthly and New Yorker festivals because they are dealing with the most topical issues of our time and they are in the city that I live. I go all in. I buy the full pass and go to every session that I can.
Look for international festivals. Jaipur can be attended for free at the basic level, or you can do Friends of the Festival for deeper networking access.

It’s not for everyone, and I want to acknowledge that. If you’re someone who gets discouraged easily by being around published authors, festivals might not be the right move for you right now. You also have to be willing to network, which doesn’t come naturally to everyone (it’s definitely a struggle for me).

Why Other Aspiring Authors Might Consider This

Despite my still-in-progress status, here’s why I think this approach has value:

It keeps the work alive. When you’re spending years on a manuscript, festivals remind you why you’re doing this.

It’s professional development. You’re learning craft, understanding the market, and building a network—all things you’ll need when your book is ready.

It builds infrastructure before you need it. When your manuscript is finally done, you won’t be starting from zero. You’ll have relationships, you’ll understand how the industry works, and you’ll have a platform.

You don’t have to be published to engage meaningfully. I’ve found that showing up as a thoughtful participant—someone who asks good questions, who writes about sessions, who genuinely engages with ideas—earns respect even without a book credit to your name.

What Happens Next

For me, 2026 is about moving from observation to participation. I’m going to:

Continue attending festivals, but with the specific goal of understanding how to get a speaking spot
Write more consistently on Substack about what I’m learning
Actually follow through on networking—send those emails, maintain those relationships
Build relationships with festival organizers and learn about their submission processes
Start with smaller festivals where I might have a better shot

This is an experiment I’m running. I’m sharing it because I think there are others out there in this same in-between space—serious about the work, committed to the craft, but not published yet.

If that’s you, maybe this approach is worth considering. Maybe it’s not. But I wanted you to know it’s possible to engage with the literary world before your book is on shelves.

I’ll keep you posted on how it goes.

What about you? Have you attended literary festivals as an aspiring author? What was your experience? I’d love to hear in the comments.

If you’re interested in exploring literary festivals, here are a few resources I’ve found helpful:

This Is No Time to Sit It Out

Tania Bernath — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 18:19:25 GMT

When an expert on authoritarianism tells you “We need people in the U.S. too,” you listen. Especially when you’ve spent your career helping human rights defenders resist strongman dictators—and you’ve watched what happens when people wait too long to act.

I was standing in a book-signing line at the Jaipur Literature Festival in January 2025 when Anne Applebaum said those words to me. She’d just finished a session on democratic erosion. I’d told her I work in humanitarian aid and human rights. That I’d been to Sudan. That I was writing a memoir about my work in the Gambia during the Jammeh years.

“You need to work in the U.S.,” she said. “We need people there too.”

She wasn’t being polite. She was drawing from decades studying Russia, Poland, Hungary, and now the United States. She was saying: Americans need to stand up now.

And I heard it as confirmation of what I already knew—but had been avoiding.

What I Learned in Poland

I met Lech Wałęsa in 1987. I was twenty, studying East-West relations in divided Germany and Poland. He was a resistance leader who’d won the Nobel Peace Prize. He talked to our group about organizing, about the resistance movement against tyranny in occupied Poland.

I left that program convinced Germany would remain divided during my lifetime. The Berlin Wall, which I visited every day while living with my German family in Spandau, seemed permanent. “The GDR is stable,” they told us. “The Soviet grip is firm.” “The system will endure.”

Two years later, in November 1989, I was on a work trip in St. Louis when I saw the headline: “The Berlin Wall has fallen.” I checked the New York Times to confirm it. I was certain they’d gotten it wrong.

That whiplash taught me something I’ve never forgotten: Experts don’t always get it right. And resistance is often underreported, misunderstood, not taken seriously enough—until it works.

The Polish people I met in 1987 were angry. East Germans asked me to smuggle banned books through Checkpoint Charlie so they could study resistance tactics. I thought they were brave. I didn’t think they would win.

They won.

What I Learned from Yahya

Yahya Danfa was a Gambian journalist. We worked together during Yahya Jammeh’s dictatorship—one of the darkest periods in Gambia’s history. Jammeh’s regime disappeared critics, tortured dissidents, ruled through fear.

Yahya documented human rights abuses. He knew the risks. Journalists had been killed for less. But he was driven by injustice—by a need to find truth, to support the rule of law, to resist.

My job was to support people like Yahya. Help them use international pressure to push back against their governments. Get them out if their lives were at risk.

The defenders I worked with in Gambia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Sudan had everything to lose. They resisted anyway. They showed me what courage looks like when the stakes are life and death.

They also showed me what happens when people wait too long.

In Liberia under Charles Taylor, I watched activists write essays about democracy while Taylor consolidated power. The ones who survived weren’t the writers who stayed at their desks. They were the organizers who acted early—who built networks, who got people into the streets, who didn’t wait for the perfect moment.

The Question I’m Wrestling With

Standing in that signing line in Jaipur, I felt those years collapse into this moment. Poland in 1987. The wall falling in 1989. Gambia under Jammeh. Sudan in 2024. And now the United States in 2025.

My memoir tries to make sense of this arc: Where do I belong in this moment?

I know I need to act. I am acting—I’ve organized an Indivisible group with two friends, I get out the vote, I engage domestically. But I also spend hours at my desk working on the memoir. And I wonder: Is writing its own form of engagement? Or is it avoidance?

I know the answer. I learned it in Liberia.

Writing without organizing is avoidance. The activists who survived Taylor weren’t the ones who documented abuses from a safe distance. They were the ones who documented and organized. Who used their words to mobilize people, not just to process their own experience.

So I’m doing both. I’m writing this memoir about Yahya and Gambia and what resistance looks like under dictatorship. And I’m organizing here, now, in the U.S.

Because Anne Applebaum is right. We need people here too.

What’s Different This Time

Americans have so much more freedom to act than the defenders I worked with ever did.

I can organize without risking my life. I can speak without fearing arrest. I can vote. I can gather. I can write this essay and publish it under my own name.

Many of the defenders I’ve worked with couldn’t do any of that. The human rights defenders I worked with in the Gambia and Liberia under risked their lives for a fraction of the freedom we still have.

That freedom is an advantage. It’s also a test.

Because here’s what I learned from watching resistance movements: The people who win are the ones who act before it feels urgent. They organize when their colleagues say they’re overreacting. They build networks when the threat still seems distant. They create infrastructure before they need it.

By the time it feels urgent to everyone, it’s often too late.

What I’m Asking You to Do

I’m not asking you to quit your job and become a full-time activist. The defenders I worked with didn’t do that either—they were journalists, teachers, lawyers, doctors who organized on the side.

But they showed up. Consistently. Even when it was hard. Even when progress felt invisible.

Here’s what showing up can look like:

Join a local organizing group (Indivisible, Swing Left, your city’s Democratic committee—pick one and go to a meeting)
Commit to three hours a week: phone banking, canvassing, voter registration
Use your professional skills for the resistance (lawyers → legal aid, teachers → civic education, designers → campaign materials)
Subscribe to independent media outlets and support the voices you feel are speaking the truth
Support institutions like museums, theater and all different art forms
Don’t just donate money—donate time

That’s how resistance works. It’s not dramatic. It’s repetitive and exhausting and sometimes it feels pointless.

But I’ve seen it win. In Poland. In Gambia, eventually. In places where the odds were longer and the risks were higher.

Why I’m Writing This Now

I think about my twenty-year-old self in divided Germany, living with a family in Spandau, walking past the Berlin Wall every day on my way to class. I couldn’t imagine it falling. No one could.

And then it did.

I think about the experts who were so certain the Soviet grip was firm. Who said the system would endure.

They were wrong.

I think about Yahya and other Gambian defenders, who resisted when it seemed hopeless. Who documented abuses when Jammeh seemed invincible.

But Jammeh fell too.

History moves faster than we think. Systems that seem permanent collapse. Resistance that seems futile wins.

But only if people act. Only if they organize. Only if they refuse to sit it out.

Anne Applebaum has spent her career studying autocracy. She knows what the warning signs look like. She’s watching the United States right now, and she’s saying: We need people here too.

I’m one of those people. So are you.

This is no time to sit it out.

The author has worked in humanitarian aid and human rights for over two decades, including with organizations like Amnesty International and Doctors Without Borders. Her memoir about resistance in the Gambia is forthcoming.

A woman shot and killed by ICE today

Tania Bernath — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 03:02:32 GMT

Tonight, I went to Foley Square to protest this administration and the killing of Renee Nicole Good in Minnesota.

I cannot stop thinking about her child, her partner, her parents, her friends — the people whose lives have been torn open. I feel overwhelming sadness for them, and a burning anger at an administration that lies as easily as it breathes, and a president whose first — and only — response was to defend the man who killed her.

Watching the video is unbearable. It is also unmistakably clear.

Renee Good was trying to get away.
She was likely frightened.
She posed no threat.
There were four of them.
She was alone.
She was leaving in her car.

That is it.

I try to put myself in her place. I know I would have done the same thing. Most people would. Fear does not look orderly. Survival does not ask permission. And for that — for trying to leave — she was shot.

There is no “both sides” here.
There is no spin.
This is not confusion or chaos or tragedy without cause.

It is a senseless killing.

I cannot stop wondering about the man who pulled the trigger. How does he feel tonight? Is he proud of himself? Does he believe he carried out his orders — the unspoken but unmistakable mandate of this administration — to make Americans who care about this country afraid?

And I cannot stop wondering what MAGA sees when they watch that video. Because what I see is impossible to miss: a terrified person trying to escape. If you see something else, you are choosing not to see at all.

I went to Foley Square. There were thousands of people — elected officials, community members, organizers, faith leaders. They spoke with urgency and clarity: to fight, to resist, to abolish ICE, and — just as importantly — to come together and do something. Anything.

I love this city. I love that I live here. I love that we have city leaders who speak with compassion and courage, who are calling on all of us to stand together.

And I am answering that call.

I am patrolling.
I am going to court.
I am doing what I can to help.
I am ready to respond.

That includes serving as a witness — to what is happening, to what is being done in our name.

My anger is not abstract. It is not performative. It is rooted in grief, memory, and an acute sense of danger. This is a callous, corrupt, and increasingly fascist government. Days ago, it kidnapped a leader from another country. We just marked the fifth anniversary of January 6, 2021 — the saddest day of my life as an American — a day that must never be forgotten, erased, or normalized.

And now this.

We are watching the machinery of authoritarianism grind forward in real time. The cruelty is the point. The fear is the objective. And the lies are relentless.

I am so sorry for the loss of Renee Nicole Good.
Her life mattered.
Her death matters.
And remembering her — telling the truth about how she died — is an act of resistance

Authoritarianism · State Violence · Immigration · Witnessing · Resistance · New York City

Human Rights Day Reflections:

Tania Bernath — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 18:56:37 GMT

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

On Human Rights Day, I attended a panel at the Harvard Human Rights Clinic titled “Bringing Human Rights Home: From Global Principles to Local Impact.” The discussion took place at a time when international human rights institutions are under pressure and when many people in the United States are experiencing increasing political division, weakening protections, and uncertainty about the reliability of national systems that once felt stable. The speakers reflected on these shifts and what they mean for human rights in practice.

Although they work in different areas including racial equity, LGBTQI+ rights, labor rights, diplomacy, and multilateral policy. The speakers shared a common point: local engagement in the United States has become an important space for sustaining human rights values and protections. They did not describe it as a replacement for national or international action, but as a necessary part of the ecosystem, especially when federal commitments fluctuate.

This resonated with me because I have recently been spending more time in community-level work and thinking about how to apply the experience I gained abroad to the context in which I now live. The panel did not frame local action as a romantic idea or an easy solution. Instead, they treated it as a practical reality: people encounter systems at the local level. This is where inequities are felt most directly, and where responses can either reinforce or counter broader patterns of discrimination and exclusion.

Several speakers also emphasized that the United States has a long history of asserting human rights commitments internationally while failing to uphold them domestically, particularly for African Americans and other marginalized groups. They discussed this not to dismiss human rights ideals, but to underline that the gap between stated values and lived experience has always been part of the American story. This historical context is relevant because the country again faces questions about whether it will act in accordance with the values it claims to represent.

Listening to the panel reinforced my view that this is a moment when Americans need to engage with the principles underlying the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — dignity, equality, non-discrimination — and consider how these principles apply in the communities where we live. The panelists did not suggest that local action is sufficient on its own, but they made a strong case that it is an essential part of sustaining any broader commitment to human rights.

Key Points I Took Away

The United States helped shape the UDHR while denying rights at home.
This contradiction continues to inform the country’s approach to human rights, both domestically and internationally.
Local engagement is increasingly important.
Cities, neighborhoods, and community networks are addressing issues that national institutions are inconsistent in responding to.
Attacks on rights are coordinated and global.
The rise in efforts targeting racial equity, LGBTQI+ rights, labor rights, reproductive rights, and academic freedom reflect broader international trends.
International human rights mechanisms still play a meaningful role.
Their effectiveness, however, depends heavily on whether local actors and institutions engage with the standards they set.
Human rights principles require practical application.
Abstract commitments matter less than how rights are interpreted and enforced in everyday local settings.

Why This Matters

As I continue to participate in local community efforts, the panel confirmed that these spaces are not peripheral to human rights; they are one of the places where rights are either upheld or eroded. My interest in this work comes from wanting to understand how global human rights experience can be relevant to the challenges unfolding in the United States today. The discussion helped clarify why local engagement is not only valid but necessary in the current environment.

Featured Speakers

Aminta Ossom — Clinical Instructor, Harvard Human Rights Clinic (Facilitator)
Jessica Stern — Former U.S. Special Envoy to Advance the Human Rights of LGBTQI+ Persons
Desirée Cormier Smith — Inaugural U.S. Special Representative for Racial Equity and Justice
Maggie Dougherty — Former Senior Director for International Organizations, National Security Council
Kelly Fay Rodriguez — Former Special Representative for International Labor Affairs

Why ICE Funding Needs to Be Part of the Conversation

Tania Bernath — Sat, 06 Dec 2025 04:07:34 GMT

Over the past few months, I’ve been learning about the community-based strategies people use to protect one another from ICE: court accompaniment, rapid-response networks, neighborhood observation teams, and legal support. These efforts are practical and humane, helping people navigate a system that feels increasingly unpredictable.

But one thing keeps standing out—something I rarely hear discussed even among groups focused on immigration enforcement:

ICE is funded by taxpayers. And Congress controls that funding.

ICE has expanded far beyond its original mandate. Its operations have grown in scale and aggressiveness in ways that often have little to do with actual public safety. Many of us now spend volunteer hours trying to reduce the harm caused by an agency our federal tax dollars simultaneously empower.

That contradiction is hard to ignore.

On the ground, communities are building protection networks. Meanwhile, at the federal level, Congress continues to appropriate billions to ICE with almost no debate or public accounting. Two realities exist side by side—one local and human, the other federal and largely disconnected from the consequences on the ground.

In a functioning system, when a federal agency grows beyond its intended scope or produces demonstrable harm, the most straightforward oversight tool is the budget. That is Congress’s responsibility. Yet in major national debates—shutdown negotiations, spending bills, and fiscal deadlines—we hear almost nothing about ICE’s nearly $9 billion annual budget.

We debate healthcare subsidies and child tax credits. But not ICE’s funding.

That silence has consequences. Communities absorb the impact. Volunteers fill the gaps. Local networks shoulder responsibilities that shouldn’t fall on them alone. Meanwhile, funding for excessive and often counterproductive enforcement continues uninterrupted.

What strikes me as inconsistent is this: I see campaigns urging people to cancel Spotify subscriptions because ICE placed recruiting ads there. Fine. But if we can organize around an ad campaign, why aren’t we organizing sustained pressure on Congress—the one body with constitutional authority—to reassess ICE’s budget?

There are even complementary approaches we rarely talk about: questioning specific enforcement practices, pointing to wrongful arrests of U.S. citizens, highlighting raids at day care centers, asking why taxpayer money is funding actions that have no public-safety rationale. These are legitimate areas for oversight, yet they’re barely discussed. Many lawmakers—Democrats and Republicans—are reluctant to raise them, largely out of fear of appearing “weak on enforcement.”

But fear can’t be the only force shaping public policy.
At some point, we have to start having these conversations.

I may be old-fashioned, but I still believe constituents can ask their representatives—across both parties—why our tax dollars are funding practices that harm communities and fail basic standards of accountability. Im guesssing that not everyone wants their money going toward wrongful detentions, intimidation at schools, or operations that produce no clear benefit to public safety. These questions deserve daylight.

What I’m proposing is straightforward: our strategies should include not only community protection and direct support, but also sustained pressure on Congress to reevaluate ICE’s funding levels. Budget oversight doesn’t require abolishing anything. It simply means aligning resources with what actually serves the public good.

If ICE’s mandate and funding were more proportional, fewer families would need accompaniment teams. If the agency’s operations were properly scoped and accountable, rapid-response networks wouldn’t be as essential as they’ve become. Community protection is vital work—but so is addressing the source of the problem.

The more I do this work, the clearer it becomes: we can’t continue playing defense at the local level while ignoring the federal mechanism that funds the very expansion we are responding to. Budget accountability isn’t a distraction from direct action—it’s the missing piece of it.

Tania Bernath

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