By Edward Yudelovich
June 19, 2025

The 22-year-old U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency is now perceived as international public enemy number one. Many thousands have protested the kidnapping, torture, abuse and murder of migrants in the U.S. Yet, the U.S. ableist establishment media has largely under-reported or ignored these crimes against humanity when ICE’s targets happen to be people with disabilities.

A June 8 exposé in “The Disabled Ginger” entitled “Disabled People are Being Mistreated in ICE Detention Facilities” unmasked this media negligence and pointed out how detention by ICE can be a petri dish that causes new disabilities and aggravates existing ones.

The report condemns ICE: “Disabled individuals have been tossed to the wayside for far too long. We are treated as ‘acceptable losses’ when it comes to COVID-19 and public health policies. Targeted by fascists who want to remove social supports like Medicaid and food assistance programs … It’s created a world where instead of showing compassion when someone dies of an infectious disease, the first question folks ask is: ‘How much comorbidity [i.e. the simultaneous presence of two or more diseases or medical conditions] did they have?’ As though a certain number of pre-existing conditions make their death acceptable.

“This shift, this narrative that insists over and over that disabled people are expendable, has given permission to treat us as ‘useless eaters,’ a term originally used by the Nazis when they targeted disabled people during WWII.” (disabledginger.com, June 8)

On June 24, 2024, Physicians for Human Rights released a report stating ICE admitted to 68 deaths of people in its custody since 2017.

Alma Bowman is a 58 year old disabled Filipina mother from Macon, Georgia. During the first Trump regime, Bowman was detained for 30 months in ICE custody. Her permanent residency was revoked for writing $1,200 in bad checks 20 years prior, even though she had since paid the debt. Bowman endured separation from her two children and experienced medical negligence for her chronic health conditions and inhumane living conditions.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Bowman was released from ICE custody due to overcrowding and then proudly became a whistleblower and advocate to expose atrocities committed against people within the detention facilities.

Bowman was a survivor of and key witness to non-consensual procedures being committed by a doctor, including non-consensual gynecological procedures against women in the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia, which was investigated and condemned by the U.S. Senate and which has since closed. After Trump was reelected, when Bowman showed up at the ICE Atlanta Field Office for her regular check-in, she was separated from her family and thrown back into custody. Since then she’s been held at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia.

ICE denies accessibility needs

Rodney Taylor is a Black double amputee at an ICE detention facility in Georgia. Taylor’s mother brought him to the U.S. from Liberia on a medical visa as a small child. Now 46, he has lived in the U.S. nearly his entire life, works as a barber, is active in promoting cancer awareness in his community and recently became engaged.

Nonetheless, Taylor’s immigration status is unresolved. Despite having an application for a residency permit — a “green card” — he is being detained by ICE because of a burglary conviction he received as a teen and for which he was pardoned in 2010. When he was detained, he was only two days away from receiving new prosthetic legs. His old ones require eight hours of charging, which the detention facility almost never provides.

Taylor was given shoes that don’t fit his feet. The facility offered him a non-motarized wheelchair which he can’t push, because he has only two fingers on his right hand. Taylor has experienced pain and swelling in his thumb since being detained; as a result he has gone without food. He has increasingly severe hip issues and his request for a medical leave to be assessed for new prosthetics was denied.

Ableist abuse in ICE concentration camps is cut from the same cloth as the blatant violation of the rights of disabled people behind the walls of U.S. concentration camps also known as prisons, as reported in Workers World in January 2024. (workers.org/2024/01/76247/ )

The article opens with a quote from Disability Rights California: “The disproportionate incarceration of people with disabilities in the United States is a serious and growing problem. As the prison population ages, more inmates are reporting physical disabilities. The U.S. has also seen a rise in the number of people with mental illness and developmental and cognitive disabilities in prison. National surveys now indicate that as many as 31% of inmates in state prisons report having at least one disability.”

This interview with a disabled activist incarcerated in Pennsylvania was banned from the Pennsylvania prison system.

Long, ugly history

The U.S. Immigration Act of 1882 prohibited people from entering the U.S. if they were “unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” These regulations were made even more restrictive in 1891, 1903, 1907 and 1924. (Draconian immigration laws were also racist, excluding Asian Americans, especially Chinese people.)

At Ellis Island in New York Harbor during peak years of immigration from 1870 to 1924, when potential immigrants were screened, interviewed and examined, U.S. officials marked those with any form of disability with a chalked letter on their backs containing a different code for each disability, so it would be easier to exclude them. “X” was the mark given to people with “possible mental illness” and “X” with a circle for “definite mental illness.” (Ancestry.com, March 2006)

The Disability Ginger exposé offers a fight-back prescription: “We can bring about change. We can choose to be inspired by people like Alma and Rodney. People who spoke up at great personal risk and cost. … We too can refuse to be silent. We can raise our voices in whatever way we can.”

Edward Yudelovich is an organizer with neurodivergent and auditory disabilities for the Disability Justice and Rights Caucus of Workers World Party.