The WEEK magazine's (page 12) Best Columns: The U.S., (Feb. 22, 2026) has four truthful thus powerful snapshots of MAGA mega flaws on one page. And the full page before it details the Administration's un-American immigration policy trashing the foundation of our truly great Declaration of Independence. Its global framework offered humankind the fundamental principle recognizing for the first time in recorded history that "all" humankind "are endowed" ... "with certain inalienable Rights". Nothing below this paragraph has been edited by this blogger. And everything Trump has trumped has been un-American and whitewashing our bloody too often unjust history.
Trump’s pagan worldview: Leighton Woodhouse The New York Times
The Trump administration has rejected “the values of Christianity” and adopted paganism, said Leighton Woodhouse. In the ancient world, the Greeks and Romans believed that “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must,” as Thucydides put it. Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, recently echoed this pagan worldview. “You can talk about international niceties,” he said, but “we live in a real world that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.” The naive “niceties” Miller dismissed are the moral center of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Christianity was revolutionary because “it taught that all humans are God’s creation. To oppress any person, even a slave, is an offense before him.” Indeed, “the weak are closer to God than the rich and the powerful.” Trump and his allies emphatically reject Christ’s teachings. By extorting Venezuela for its oil, by threatening to annex Greenland and attack even our allies, they are acting like the ancient Greeks or barbarian tribes—“without shame or apology.” ICE’s violent immigration crusade also repudiates Christian values. For this amoral strongman government, Thucydides’ famous aphorism describes “the world they wish to make.”
The election raid based on ‘ZebraDuck’: Elie Honig New York
The FBI’s recent raid on a Fulton County, Georgia, elections office “was even worse than it seemed,” said Elie Honig. The seizure of hundreds of thousands of 2020 ballots was a “blunt force” effort to “manifest” President Trump’s “exhausting, delusional” claims of a stolen election. When a federal judge last week ordered the Justice Department to unseal its search-warrant affidavit, the pretext for the raid was “somewhere between dubious and nuts.” The affidavit states that Trump’s team learned of “duplicate ballots” from an “unnamed ‘data analyst’” who found some unspecified, secondhand data from an internet source called ZebraDuck. That’s right: “The FBI forcibly entered a county elections office” based on secondhand information found online. The affidavit also reveals that the investigation “originated from a referral sent by Kurt Olsen,” Trump’s former campaign lawyer and “a dogged 2020 election denier.” His wild theories about 2020 election fraud have been “found ‘not viable’” by Trump’s own DOJ. What’s more, the “FBI never alleges that any actual person committed any actual crime,” such as intentionally mishandling or miscounting ballots. This bogus investigation was “political score settling masquerading as criminal enforcement.”
MAGA’s schism on Zionism: Andrew Egger The Bulwark
Donald Trump’s MAGA coalition is being torn apart by an ugly battle between “the antisemites” and “the Zionists,” said Andrew Egger. The schism was on full display at the Presidential Religious Liberty Commission’s recent hearing on antisemitism. Commissioner Carrie Prejean Boller, a right-wing Catholic and strident anti-Zionist, asked commissioners, “If I don’t support the political state of Israel, am I an antisemite, yes or no?” Chairman Dan Patrick of Texas, a Trump supporter, tried to silence Prejean Boller by taking her off the commission. She insisted that “only the president can remove me.” Prejean Boller is part of a loud right-wing faction that includes commentators Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, who spew vitriolic antisemitism while criticizing Israel’s war in Gaza. They portray Israel as evil and even demonic and claim that Israeli leaders control the U.S. government—an old antisemitic trope. Trump and Vice President JD Vance have refused to renounce right-wing antisemites but also want to keep pro-Israel Christian evangelicals in the GOP tent. That’s not viable: The “philosemites and antisemites are unlikely to share a political coalition for long.”
Viewpoint: “A kind of post-ironic fatalism that was once endemic to seedy message boards [like 4chan] has bled into the broader culture. Nihilism is now the lingua franca of the internet. The 4chan logic that turned even the most hideous news and ideas into empty entertainment pervades everything on the internet now—more proof that lol, nothing matters. You can see it everywhere in different forms: In the mass shooters who seem to care about nothing other than performing for others online. In a culture of AI slop and brain rot, and in an administration that prioritizes propaganda and graft over governing. It threatens to rip us apart for good if we let it.” Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic
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(Page 11)
Trump’s detention empire: As reports mount of abuse and neglect in ICE detention centers, vast new facilities are in the works.
How many people are being held? As of mid-January, Immigration and Customs Enforcement had some 73,000 people in detention, its highest number ever and an 81% increase from the same point in 2025. The numbers are spiking not only because of the Trump administration’s enforcement blitz, but also because of a radical shift away from decades-old policies. People charged with civil immigration violations—such as entering the U.S. unlawfully or overstaying a visa—now face mandatory detention while their cases wind through overtaxed courts. Previously, migrants in this situation would typically be released on bond, especially asylum seekers and those who’ve lived in the U.S. for years and don’t have criminal records. The result of that change is a crush of detainees being kept in more than 200 locations, including county jails, ICE field offices, military sites, and tent facilities such as Florida’s notorious “Alligator Alcatraz.” The U.S. already had “the largest detention and removal infrastructure of any country in the world,” said Doris Meissner of the Migration Policy Institute. “And now it’s being put on steroids.”
What are conditions like?
Detainees describe a litany of horrors, from extreme overcrowding to physical abuse. “It’s like a concentration camp,” said Seamus Culleton, an Irish national who’s spent five months at Camp East Montana, an ICE facility in El Paso, Texas. A Boston plastering contractor who is married to a U.S. citizen and has applied for a green card, Culleton said he is being held in a cold, damp room with some 70 other men; is constantly hungry because the meals are child-size; and has been allowed outside fewer than a dozen times. It’s not just detainees blowing the whistle. A former worker at a Baltimore ICE facility said officers there treated migrants like “animals,” with people left “lying in feces” and detainees in overstuffed cells “lying on the floor head to toe.” That scene reminded the worker of images “of how they brought the slaves from Africa.” Nonprofit groups that focus on human-rights abuses have also produced damning reports on U.S. facilities.
What do they say? An Amnesty International report on Alligator Alcatraz detailed food contaminated with maggots, sewage seeping into sleeping areas, and insect infestations. At other facilities in Florida, Human Rights Watch documented people sleeping on cold concrete floors, inmates in psychological distress subjected to solitary confinement, and men being forced to eat with their hands shackled behind their backs. “The guards treat you like garbage,” said a Colombian detainee. “You feel like your life is over.” Numerous reports and lawsuits include allegations of medical neglect, among them the dismissal of serious complaints such as chest pains; at least 32 people died in ICE custody last year, up from 11 in 2024. Six more died in January, including Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban immigrant at Camp East Montana who stopped breathing after a struggle with detention guards. The Trump administration said the guards tried to save Lunas Campos from a suicide attempt; an autopsy report gave the cause of death as homicide by asphyxiation. Despite such reports, the administration is planning to significantly expand its detention capacity.
BREIFING (page 11) Inside the Baltimore facility: Children caught in the crackdown
As the number of adult detainees has skyrocketed, so has the number of children held along with them. The detainment in January of 5-year-old Minneapolis boy Liam Conejo Ramos sparked widespread outrage, but “that’s very much the norm,” said Javier Hidalgo of Texas-based advocacy group RAICES. More than 3,800 children were booked into ICE facilities last year, according to the Marshall Project, many of them at the Dilley, Texas, center where Ramos was held. In court documents, families detained there described moldy food, undrinkable water, medical neglect, and children playing with rocks for lack of other activities. Parents and advocates have reported weight loss, nightmares, and behavior regressions such as children engaging in self-harm. Kelly Vargas, a former New York resident who spent two months at Dilley, said after arriving there her 6-year-old began wetting the bed, crying through the night, and begging to breastfeed. “How are they going to do this to a child?” said Vargas, who in November agreed to be deported to Colombia with her family. “How could this happen here?”
How many facilities are in the works? Flush with $45 billion allocated for new detention centers in last year’s spending bill, ICE has in recent weeks bought seven massive warehouses in five states. They include a $70 million warehouse the size of seven football fields outside Phoenix and a $119 million, 1.3-million-square-foot former Big Lots distribution center near Harrisburg, Pa., that’s expected to house up to 7,500 people. That’s nearly double the number of inmates currently held at the largest federal prison. In all, ICE is proposing 23 new sites that together would hold 80,000 people. But fierce local opposition is hampering those plans.
Have any new facilities been blocked? Protests and political pressure have led some site sellers to back out of deals. “We understand that the conversation around immigration policy is particularly heated,” the owners of an Ashland, Va., warehouse said after canceling a federal sale. A firm in Oklahoma City reversed course following a meeting with Republican Mayor David Holt, while the owners of a Salt Lake City warehouse rumored to be in ICE’s sights said they had no plans to sell after protests outside their offices. Many opponents of the facilities are motivated by humanitarian concerns; others cite strain on local resources and loss of tax revenue. A mega-detention center planned for Byhalia, Miss., would “foreclose on economic opportunities better suited for this site,” Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) wrote to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. An ICE official said such facilities make “communities safer for business owners and customers”; the agency also denies allegations of neglect and abuse at its centers. But critics and detainees say the brutality is real, and a deliberate policy choice.
What do they say is the goal? To deter anyone else who might come to the U.S. unlawfully, and to make those already here self-deport—even if their immigration cases are still working through the system. “They do it so you give up,” said Julio Cesar Santos Avalos, who was held at an ICE facility in California City, Calif. Detainees there have complained of being denied insulin and other medications; in a lawsuit, immigrants called the center a “torture chamber.” It was too much for Avalos, 47, who suffers from chronic pain due to a foot deformity. Denied pain meds and forced to sleep on a top bunk, he left his two children in California and self-deported to El Salvador, which he last saw at age 7. Some of his former fellow detainees are wrestling with similar choices. “This place,” said Cambodian national Sokhean Keo, “is built to break us.”
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