According to a prison support group ( https://kolektiva.social/@malikspeaks/116361011946216063 ), Black, Palestinian, non-binary, anarchist prisoner Malik Muhammad has been transferred from “oregon” to “south carolina.” Malik’s locs were forcibly removed.
Retaliatory transfers between u.s. administrative divisions (“states”) & attacks on Black cultural expressions like hair have a long history. Retaliatory transfers are broadly known as ‘diesel therapy.’
Attached is a video of police on the gulf coast of the “Caribbean” sea executing Fallus Williams Polk, a 42-year-old Black parent for not wanting to be their property.
There are many critiques of videos of police killings in general & of Black people in particular. In many ways, they serve as “snuff films” – the violence is framed as justified by the society that produces them. The suffering recorded may or may not elicit sympathy, but rarely elicits action. The proliferation of police body cameras (critiqued by anarchists & others since at least 2014, in the wake of the armed uprising against “Ferguson, Missouri” & its armed defenders) has done nothing to prevent the proliferation of police bullets into Black people.
With the above context in mind, this video is being shared because (to me) it appears to have been produced & shared “independently,” as an initiative between people rather than released to the public by the state. Many local governments, particularly in the “u.s.” south, rely on suppression of evidence, including videos, to silence outrage in the wake of particularly stark incidents of slave patrolling. It also may allow some viewers to understand what kind of behavior, when undertaken by Black people, can be construed as a “threat,” in order for aspiring rebels to better shape resistance efforts. I hope it serves as a reminder to others, in particular others who will take action, that anti-Black violence is ubiquitous &, presently, unending. It does not only exist in neat containers like “2020” or “Black Lives Matter” or “when an article is published in the enemy’s news media.” The footage may also be useful for those interested in identifying the footsoldiers who carried out the killing.
The video source is a fedbook post by a cousin of the victim, Fallus Polk. It’s not clear to me how the cousin obtained the video.
One discussion of the limits of recording can be found by searching for the publication “Don’t Film, Act: A Call for Confrontation.”
An internal Homeland Security document shows how ICE plans to cram thousands of detained human beings inside a Georgia warehouse.
A newly built warehouse is seen on Feb. 6 in Social Circle, Ga., where local officials are concerned about U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s plans connected to a $45 billion expansion of immigrant detention centers.
So often in the iPhone Age, the whole world is watching the ugly side of humanity as captured on video, from murder in the snowy streets of Minneapolis to a plainclothes Pennsylvania police chief appearing to place a protesting teen girl in a choke hold.
But sometimes evil is buried deep in the black-and-white paperwork of government bureaucracy.
A once sleepy rural town named Social Circle, Ga. — just over 40 miles east of Atlanta off Interstate 20 — has become the epicenter of the stealthy plan by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to rapidly create an American gulag archipelago of massive former warehouses adapted into detainment camps for arrested immigrants.
The plan to convert a newly built 1.2 million-square-foot warehouse into a concentration camp where as many as 8,500 humans — double the size of the current largest federal prison — would be housed for as long as 60 days (or likely more) has riled up both residents and public officials in a place where 75% voted for Donald Trump in 2024.
The frustrated city manager of Social Circle, which was offered no input as a cash-flush ICE recently bought the spec warehouse for a whopping $128 million, told the Guardian that he’s denying the feds’ request to turn on the public water as they race to open their detention camp there as early as April.
“I told them I’m not going to do it,” Eric Taylor said. “Not until they come and talk to me.”
But officials in the small town of just 5,000 also did something else that probably raised some hackles at Kristi Noem’s ultrasecretive U.S. Department of Homeland Security. They made public what few documents DHS has so far been willing to share with Social Circle, including its blueprint for what the innards of an American gulag will look like.
Close to two-thirds of the massive, rectangular floor plan is divided into 80 squares separated by narrow corridors, each box with dozens of strike marks. The thousands of marks presumably represent bunk beds, but what they truly signify is human beings.
Based on the most recent statistics, as many as 70% of these arrested and handcuffed immigrants will have committed no crime after entering the United States — day laborers, restaurant workers, or Uber drivers now crammed into a prison camp unlike anything seen on U.S. soil since World War II’s immoral Japanese internment.
The new floor plan raises more questions than it answers. It’s not clear whether the small boxy rooms surrounding the rectangular detention space would be used for recreation, as no recreation space is explicitly marked. There are three cafeteria rooms and a medical space — a necessity in an instant town of 8,500 — yet still room for an indoor gun range where hundreds of guards will hone their shooting skills. Eight rooms are marked as handicap accessible, so there’s that.
This banal blueprint for inhumanity is the embodiment of the notorious words last April from ICE’s acting director, Todd Lyons, who said the Trump regime wants to make deportation “like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.” Indeed, the ultimate goal of stacking desperate people in dingy, dehumanizing concrete caverns built for bath mats or pet treats is to force them to abandon their legal right to fight for U.S. asylum and agree to leave the country, bringing Trump closer to his goal of one million deportations every year.
John Miller, an organizer with One Circle Community Coalition, shows a variance request while describing plans to oppose converting a warehouse into an ICE detention facility last month.Arvin Temkar / AP
“The focus on speed is extremely concerning,” Sari Arvey of Human Rights First’s ICE Flight Monitor told Georgia Public Broadcasting, referring to the goals of getting detainees in and out in 60 days. “If they’re trying to speed up this process even further, it’s only going to extremely exacerbate the due process violations, the separation of families, [and] also conditions in detention centers.”
Online, the blueprint of detainees forced to live in such crammed conditions — a necessity to house 8,500 people in one building, even a warehouse the size of roughly 20 football fields — prompted comparisons to some of the worst of human history. Some on Bluesky linked the Social Circle blueprint to diagrams of tightly packed ships that brought enslaved Africans to America in the 18th century, while others wondered if the boxy quarters would look just like the rows of bunk beds inside Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp.
No one is suggesting ICE is planning anything close to mass extermination, but experts do say floor plans like this are more evidence that what the Trump regime, with its ambitions for a national network of as many as 24 converted warehouses, is racing to create is clearly comparable to history’s worst concentration camps.
In a conversation this weekend with New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, author Andrea Pitzer of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps called it “the purging of anyone that’s deemed the outsider or the foreigner. It has been weaponized into this much, much more dangerous state. And with the number of detention beds in terms of expansions and the warehousing, the potential for this, we’re really looking at stuff on the scale of the concentration camp systems that most people have heard of.”
As the existence of the ICE detention scheme has become a coast-to-coast controversy, Homeland Security has insisted these sites will be modern, well-run, and humane. “These will not be warehouses — they will be very well-structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards,” DHS said earlier this month.
The problem is that the recent history of ICE has shown its current “modern” detention sites are plagued by squalid conditions and rising rates of infectious disease and premature death. The idea that these same bad actors could achieve humane conditions in much larger, hastily assembled warehouses seems utterly ludicrous.
Earlier this year, Democratic U.S. Rep. April McClain Delaney visited an ICE detention center at a Baltimore federal building and reported “horrendous” conditions, with 50 people in a room with “concrete floors, a bench around the perimeter, and a makeshift bathroom in the middle that has minimal privacy.” Detainees recounted sleeping under foil blankets and experiencing hunger and thirst.
“Our patients are more frightened and sicker than ever,” three Philadelphia physicians who primarily treat immigrant communities wrote in a recent Times guest essay that described a variety of dire problems, including substandard treatment in ICE detention.
One case they described involved a stroke recovery patient who was arrested and detained by ICE for several weeks at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Central Pennsylvania before family members won his release.
“In detention he had missed weeks of medication, and he continues to deal with the undertreated effects of his stroke, which make walking difficult and returning to work impossible,” they wrote. “He told us he struggles to sleep through the night and often feels exhausted and depressed.” Meanwhile, large ICE detention camps in Texas have reported outbreaks of measles and tuberculosis.
The reality of the concentration camps that are planned for Social Circle or Tremont, Pa. — in a site that used to move cheap consumer goods for the now-bankrupt Big Lots — is that they are much more likely to breed disease and human misery than to alleviate them.
It’s not clear how far ICE can get with this scheme. Were ICE successful in its initial $38 billion plan to buy 24 facilities that could house as many as 76,500 detainees, it would need to arrest people in multiple cities on the scale that recently generated a national uproar in just one, Minneapolis. But the exposure of the detention proposal has also caused several planned purchases to collapse. This week, for example, officials in New York state claimed that a large, controversial site in the Hudson Valley town of Chester won’t be happening.
The irony is that what might be described as NIMBY (“not in my backyard”) issues — like not having enough drinking water or sewage treatment capacity for thousands of new arrivals, or the loss of tax revenue from warehouses meant for economic development — are giving permission to weak-kneed politicians afraid of the immigration issue to still oppose these sites without addressing the bigger human rights crisis.
To echo Malcolm X, these monstrosities should be stopped by any means necessary, even if it takes just turning off the water spigot. Still, the biggest reason to be outraged about this scheme for American concentration camps should not be infrastructure, but the rank immorality spelled out in the cold ink of the DHS floor plan.
It’s our challenge as the neighbors and allies of our nation’s immigrant communities to make sure those black marks on a page are never turned into the suffering of actual humans.
One lone license-plate reader outside the Tractor Supply on State Highway 173 has turned Bandera into a battleground over surveillance. The Flock Safety camera the city installed there was vandalized and removed, and officials have now slammed the brakes on the rest of the rollout while police sort out what happened. That pause has supercharged an already tense debate, with residents packing a town hall last Wednesday to demand answers, push City Council to kill the project, and trade barbs over whether the cameras are a public-safety upgrade or flat-out “the deep state.”
The city has frozen additional camera installations “until after the vandalism investigation,” and officials said the question will go back to City Council once that probe is finished, according to MySA. City leaders told the crowd that only a single camera had been put up before it was damaged and taken down.
The city has frozen additional camera installations “until after the vandalism investigation,” and officials said the question will go back to City Council once that probe is finished, according to MySA. City leaders told the crowd that only a single camera had been put up before it was damaged and taken down.
Town Hall Becomes a Privacy Showdown
At the town hall, Flock Safety representative Kerry McCormack stressed that the cameras are meant to help law enforcement and, according to the company, do not scan faces, track vehicle speed or collect other categories of personal data, as reported by the Bandera Bulletin. Skeptical residents pressed McCormack on how the data is encrypted, where the hardware comes from and who ultimately controls the information.
Speakers compared the system to Big Brother and questioned whether audit logs and written policies would really stop abuse. Several people at the mic urged council members to scrap the Flock contract altogether before more cameras go up around town.
How the System Is Supposed to Work
Under Flock Safety’s own rules, images captured by its license-plate readers are owned by the customer agency, and the default setting automatically deletes that data after 30 days, according to Flock Safety. The company says that retention windows can be lengthened or shortened if local law requires it or if the customer signs off on a different timeframe.
Flock also states that the devices are designed to read rear license plates and that its system does not perform facial-recognition searches or pull in other types of personal information, per the company’s evidence policy.
National Surveillance Fights Spill Into Bandera
The Bandera dust-up is unfolding as Flock and similar tools draw scrutiny across the country. Amazon’s Ring recently scrapped a planned integration with Flock after public backlash to a Super Bowl commercial, according to TechCrunch. Meanwhile, cities around the United States have scaled back or reconsidered automatic license plate reader programs altogether, AP News reports.
That broader backlash has only fueled anxiety in small communities like Bandera, where residents are weighing the promise of crime-fighting technology against the risk of normalizing always-on surveillance.
What Comes Next for Bandera
According to the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles, Bandera officials say the initial round of cameras was funded through a Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Authority grant administered by the agency, and that the purchase relied on grant money instead of general tax revenue, per TxDMV and local reporting. City Council members have pledged to revisit the proposal once the vandalism investigation wraps.
Residents, for their part, say they are not letting this drop. Opponents are already pushing for clear, written local rules on who can access camera data and how long it can be kept, insisting those protections be in place before any new Flock hardware is bolted back onto Bandera’s streets.
A man is in custody after an officer-involved shooting in Columbiana Saturday.
According to Columbiana Police, officers responded a welfare check at the Columbiana Villas Saturday afternoon.
Police say during the welfare check, the suspect fired shots and officers returned fire. One officer was struck and was taken to a local hospital but has since been released. The other officer did not suffer any major injuries.
3619 Atlanta Hwy, Flowery Branch, GA 30542 (capacity 1,500)
542 SE Loop 410 Acc Rd, San Antonio, TX 78220 (capacity 1,500)
1365 E Hightower Trail, Social Circle, GA 30025 (capacity 8,500)
UNCONFIRMED proposed warehouses:
2070 Commercial Dr, Port Allen, LA 70767 (capacity 500) – Owned by CAP INDUSTRIAL PARK LLC (https://wbrassessor.azurewebsites.net/Details?parcelNumber=305200012800/0)
8660 Transport Dr, Orlando, FL 32832 (capacity 1,500) – Owned by BEACHLINE LOGISTICS CENTER LLC (https://ocpaweb.ocpafl.org/parcelsearch/Parcel%20ID/312336384900013)
DCFL BHM01, marketed as the Birmingham AI Factory, is a planned 300-megawatt data center to be operated by Nebius Group N.V. of Amsterdam on the site of the former Regions Lakeshore Operations Center at 201 Milan Parkway in the Oxmoor Corporate Park in Birmingham’s Oxmoor neighborhood.
Nebius acquired the former bank operations center and adjoining parcels totaling 75 acres for $90 million in 2025. Hoar Construction was awarded the contract for initial construction, which is expected to be completed in 2028. A demolition permit for the existing building was awarded in January 2026.
The company negotiated with Alabama Power Company for its electrical needs, and is constructing a power substation on site. The facility is designed to operate with a closed-loop cooling system, which would use significantly less water than the former banking center.
Nebius has projected that its operation would employ about 100 people, and would “generate $80 million annually for Birmingham City and Jefferson County Schools.” It also plans to offer its “TripleTen” online career training program to local grade schools. It has applied for sales and use tax abatement incentives from the Birmingham Industrial Development Board.
A 36-year-old woman has been arrested for an alleged arson attack at a Miami-Dade Sheriff’s Office station, authorities confirmed. She faces 11 counts of second-degree attempted murder of a law enforcement officer and arson, according to the Miami Herald.
Officials reported that [name] purchased Tampico juice containers at an Exxon gas station on NE 79th Street, emptied and refilled them with gasoline, and pre-paid $5 for fuel. She then entered the MDSO Northside District Office, poured gasoline in the lobby, and ignited it, according to NBC Miami and the arrest affidavit. Deputy A. Young witnessed the incident at 2:12 p.m. and detained [name] after she left the building. Deputy J. Socarras extinguished the fire with a fire extinguisher, and no injuries were reported.
[Name] appeared in court yesterday and expressed a desire to plead guilty, but the judge denied bond. She is currently being held at Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center awaiting further proceedings. Eleven deputies were inside the station at the time of the alleged arson.
Immigrant families protested Saturday inside a detention facility near San Antonio where federal authorities sent 5-year-old Ecuadorian boy Liam Conejo Ramos and his father after detaining them in Minneapolis last week.
Aerial photos captured by the Associated Press show parents and children at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley holding signs reading “Libertad para los niños,” or “Liberty for the kids” as they’re surveyed by guards. The lockup is located an hour southwest of the Alamo City.
“The message we want to send is for them to treat us with dignity and according to the law. We’re immigrants with children, not criminals,” Maria Alejandra Montoya Sanchez, 31, told the AP in a phone interview from the Dilley site. She and her 9-year-old daughter have been confined there since October.
Department of Homeland Security officials didn’t respond to the AP’s request for comment.
In videos shared on social media platform X, immigration attorney Eric Lee said detainees were protesting the treatment of Ramos, whose detention triggered a national uproar.
In the video clips, Lee explains he was ejected from the detention center while visiting a client held there. In the footage, inmates can he heard chanting “Let us go!” and “Libertad!” as the attorney films from the parking lot. Eventually, a detention center employee demands that he leave the premises altogether.
In one of the videos, Lee relates that he’d spoken to people inside the facility via phone and learned that around 80% of detainees, or a total of 1,500 people, participated in the demonstration.
“Guards are trying to physically block people from protesting — from joining the protest,” Lee says in the clip. “They’ve closed off a gate between two separate parts of the facility to prevent another section of the detention center from joining the protest. Up along the highway and on the roads, you can still see ICE, [Customs and Border Patrol] and county sheriffs’ vehicles traveling to this.”
As he closes out the video, Lee says he hopes the crackdown on the prisoners won’t turn violent.
ICE agents sent Ramos and his father to Dilley after detaining them outside their Minneapolis home. Family and neighbors maintain agents used the child as “bait” to convince his mother to open the door — an account ICE officials deny.
The South Texas Family Residential Center is the only family detention center currently operating in the U.S. Although the Biden White House shuttered it in 2024, President Donald Trump ordered it reopened when he returned for a second term.
Court testimony filed by immigrant advocacy group RAICES in July reported that Dilley detainees voiced concerns about lack of heath care, clean drinking water and the absence of adequate food. One detainee said her 9-month-old son lost more than 9 pounds during the first month of the family’s detention.
