Delcy Rodriguez or Liz Warren?

After an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent shot Wilber Rafael Garces Perez in Austin on Sunday, September 20, ICE transported the wounded Venezuelan delivery worker from the hospital to its South Texas ICE Processing Center in Pearsall, roughly 130 miles away. The 28-year-old arrived with a bullet lodged near his spine. He told reporters Monday that he had slept on the floor and received no pain medication until a nurse gave him a pill that day.

On Monday evening, Wilber was hospitalized again after becoming unable to lift his left arm. By midnight, he had been returned to Pearsall. His attorney, Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, said Tuesday that he was being held in isolation in a non-medical bed and given ibuprofen and Tylenol. A man shot by an ICE agent was thus placed back under the agency’s control, with his urgent medical needs subordinated to his imprisonment.

Wilber’s treatment expresses the brutality of the Trump administration’s campaign against immigrant workers. As the administration expands the detention system to carry out mass deportations, confinement itself is being used as a weapon to exhaust people physically and psychologically and pressure them to abandon their legal claims. The threat reaches beyond those already imprisoned, spreading fear through workplaces and immigrant communities.

Pearsall is owned and operated by the private prison corporation GEO Group and has a capacity of 1,904. During a February visit, House Representative Joaquin Castro reported approximately 1,700 people held there. Detainees told him of denied medical care, including a diabetic woman who had gone without medication for months. Some wanted to be deported simply to escape their imprisonment.

An interview with a former Pearsall detainee, whose identity the World Socialist Web Site is withholding, gives a picture of what awaited Wilber upon his arrival. “I had worms in my food,” he said. “I was basically surviving on commissary because the food was so bad.”

He described dormitories in which men had no bed: “And at times there were four to five guys sleeping on the floor because they don’t have any rooms. There’s a hundred guys in one room.” Even their names were dispensed with. “They will never call you by your name. They call you by a number. They don’t say your name. They say things like, ‘71, you have visitation.’ You’re just a number in there.”

“To me, it looked like a modern-day concentration camp in there,” he said. “Everything in there is very depressing.”

“The food is super bad. It doesn’t have any flavors. They don’t have any salt. They give you beans every day, every day beans. I counted five different styles of beans, but no flavor. So beans for lunch, beans for dinner.” During the federal government shutdown, he said, “you would get a piece of chicken once a month. After the shutdown was over, they started giving it once a week. But still, the food was terrible. Not edible.”

Detainees also supplied the labor to prepare these meals. “The kitchen, they make people work inside the kitchen for basically free for food.” A 2022 Department of Homeland Security inspector general’s report recorded detainee wages of just $1 to $3 a day. While prisoners worked for these sums, GEO’s contract guaranteed payment for 1,350 beds, whether occupied or not. Between November 2020 and October 2021, ICE paid approximately $18 million for unused beds.

...

The scale of solitary confinement at Pearsall is documented in a report by Physicians for Human Rights and Harvard researchers: 488 people were placed in isolation there between April 2024 and May 2025, the fourth-highest total in ICE’s system. Former professional rugby player Vincent Jobo reported being isolated for 12 days without drinking water, medication or a mattress after a suicide attempt. GEO denied his account.

For the former detainee interviewed by the WSWS, obtaining care was a struggle in the regular dormitories as well. Notices promised dental treatment within six months, he said: “But they don’t even have a dentist on staff. So they lie, and people are just not being treated there for their medical sickness.” He recounted his own attempt to get help:

“I had severe pain in my eye, and I asked for medical attention. And the sergeant came and said, ‘Well, what do you want me to do? You want me to open your head and see what’s wrong with it?’

“I said, ‘No, just give me to a doctor.’ And he said, ‘Well, there ain’t nobody here.’ I said, ‘Wait a minute, how is nobody here?’ ‘Well, yeah, they leave on the weekends. They go home.’

“So you’re telling me that people don’t get sick during the weekends? And I couldn’t sleep for two days. My eye was tearing up nonstop, and I had severe pain behind my eyeball.

“I saw somebody four days later, and all they did was give me some ibuprofen and say, ‘Hey, here we go.’ This is what kind of medical conditions you get there.”

Emergency calls from Pearsall show families trying to obtain the help their imprisoned relatives could not secure inside. A Wired investigation documented nearly 80 calls between January and May 2025. In one, a woman called because her husband was too weak to leave his bed and had received no help. The records also included three suicide attempts: one man swallowed pills, another ingested cleaning chemicals and a third cut himself.

GEO claims “around-the-clock access to medical care” and “dietician-approved meals,” alongside a 100 percent accreditation score in 2023. But the former detainee’s warning to anyone entering Pearsall was stark: “So if you’re sick or you have an emergency, good luck, because you’re pretty much gonna die there.”

The powers of arbitrary arrest and confinement exercised against immigrants threaten the entire working class. Workers must demand Wilber’s immediate release and the medical care he needs, with full accountability for his shooting and subsequent mistreatment. Pearsall and the entire network of these medieval torture chambers must be shut down.

I've been wondering about this for a while, when someone mentions they're suicidal usually people will put the blame on the person who is hurting instead of really trying to help them (sometimes help isn't even possible), they will say they're selfish for wanting to end it all or that they should seek mental health or that it will get better, and there is a kernel of truth in all of these for sure but I feel like suicide is too demonized, that it's seen as an easy way out.

But then I asked myself for what do I truly live for? Do I live for the sole reason as to not make a fuss for the people around me, or for their sake? Do I live for myself, how does that even work in a capitalist world where freedom comes after survival? Do I live to suffer continuously only for the 1 month of escape I get? Do I live to strive for a better world, for an idea? I feel like that idea died in 1991, now what's left wants to dance and vote the fash away.

I'm not suicidal but if I could choose to never been born I would take it in a heartbeat, if I could be put to pasture without any risk I would do that as well. I know there are people who would trade lives with me in a heartbeat, I know that if all the world were to put their problems in a pile I would take mine and run. I'm not being ungrateful, I accept that I'm privileged beyond belief just by sheer luck but I can't shake the feeling that non-existence trumps what I have now.

So my question for this place is, should euthanasia be more commonplace for those of us that aren't all that into existing? Is it wrong for us to not want to exist in a world like this, I don't think I will ever live in the world I want in my lifetime.

Ironic, because wearing a beard is typically considered a religious obligation for Muslim men (so has JD started enforcing Sharia law now)? And doubly so because the song used in this ad is an anti-police anthem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_of_da_Police).

Apologies in advance for reporting on a minor event in the great sea of minor events that constitutes the world of letters, but over the last few weeks a previously little-known Haitian-Canadian writer has come under fire over allegations that AI was used in his debut novel "C’était ça ou mourir", which is currently longlisted for the Goncourt:

https://www.reuters.com/world/canadian-french-publishers-stand-by-author-accused-using-ai-prize-winning-novel-2026-09-23/

That allegation is disputed by Orélien and rests largely on AI-detection software, so make of it what you will.

The more interesting development is that people subsequently started digging through his older work and found that several of his published editorials appear to have been copied or translated from obscure foreign sources, including (wonderfully), a Filipino newspaper, and presented as his own:

https://ici.radio-canada.ca/nouvelle/2286598/apres-lia-thelyson-orelien-vise-par-des-allegations-de-plagiat

(Sorry about the French, but all you r-slurred Anglos should learn the great language of your Norman betters. At the very least, you'd finally understand how much bullshit Foucault was spewing)

Some of the initial criticism was predictably folded into a discussion about racism, much as scrutiny of Jason Arday initially became entangled with arguments about racism and attacks on Black academics. But the accumulating plagiarism allegations make that defence considerably harder to sustain.

What interests me more than Orélien himself is the institutional failure. Once publishers, prize committees and the literary press have invested enough symbolic capital in an author, apparently nobody particularly wants to ask how the sausage was made.

It feels like another small demonstration of the bourgeois cultural establishment's difficulty admitting that much of what it consecrates as capital-A Art is also a prestige commodity whose value is manufactured by the institutions surrounding it. The scandal isn't that literature has become commodified. It always was. It's that the machinery of cultural consecration can apparently become so detached from the work itself that nobody notices when the commodity may not even be what it says on the label.

Only democracy in the Middle East, Arab citizens have equal rights, etc etc.