After immigrants are detained by ICE, there are probably records somewhere of who has an attorney, and who is calling family members or an attorney.

For the immigrants who aren’t calling any family or lawyers, the poorest of the poor, people with little to no connection to anyone, who may not even say which country they are from, if the administration were actually trying to kill as many disconnected immigrants as possible in secret, would society know?

For example, if the administration was composed of all types of conservative people, but 30 percent were secretly Nazis or wanted racial genocide, could there be a campaign to not just remove, but kill, immigrants, and the public doesn’t find out?

  • neidu3@sh.itjust.works
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    14 hours ago

    Possible, but highly unlikely.
    For starters, if that many were killed, I think it’d be really hard to keep a lid on it these days.

    Secondly, I’ve done a lot of reading on the atrocities of WW2, and two immediate constraints come to mind:

    • Bodies. While possible, disposing of that many bodies without anyone noticing will be really hard.
    • The gas chambers of ww2 were only planned during the Wannsee conference in 1942, long after the holocaust actually started. The gas chambers were built because the original plan was not sustainable: People killing other people at an industrial scale. No matter how vile a person is, the human mind was not built to deal with having to mow down swathes of humans with a gun. Even the worst SS troops largely couldn’t deal with killing that many defenseless people, even if they were convinced it was “for the greater good”. The amount of SS troops who ended up unable to continue due to the mental after effects is staggering.
    • Apytele@sh.itjust.works
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      43 minutes ago

      A lot of the times our hospital security show up to my deescalation classes after leaving a job in corrections. One of the things we often commiserate on is that they got into corrections and I into the state hospital to try and help other people grow and heal but what happened is that we got caught in a loop of “what am I going to see next that I’m going to have to report?” I’m now working for a psych unit in a regular hospital which still has it’s flaws but none comparable to the state.

      First you see a patient spit in the face of a staff member who has to be physically held back from hitting them (they actually told us we’re allowed to restrain our coworkers if that happens), then you see a staff member get called racial slurs and they get up in the patients face and yell at them and you have to get between them and tell your coworker to take a walk but it’s hard to get them to do that because it’s 2am and there’s no other techs on the unit and they know the nurse isn’t gonna come out to help you before it’s too late. And those reactions make sense and you wonder why they’re packing you in with so many patients that your coworker can’t just walk away. And then you see somebody posture and yell at a patient who’s just all around rude but again it’s 2am and you can’t make it to 7 with just one tech.

      And you also know that you’re going to need to choose the moment that it’s too much and that’ll be the end. Because if you stay after that you become the “them” in the “us vs them” and one day you’re going to face a violent patient at 2am and the tech who’s with you will leave you alone with that patient because “I don’t want you to report me too.”

      And if you’re smart, you get out before it gets that far. One day a nurse asked me what I’d seen happen and I told them (truthfully) that I’d been at lunch and had no idea what they were talking about and they cut the conversation off. And I had no idea what patient or staff member it would’ve been about (as far as I could tell all of the patients were the same as before I’d gone to lunch) so I couldn’t have reported anything anyway. But I had to ask myself if I had seen something what would I have been asked to cover up?

      I said that to that hospital security worker coming from corrections and there was this instant look of recognition. Anybody who’s worked corrections or for the state will tell me something similar happened to them, or worse. And I just… You either get out or something awful happens. I’m so grateful I was able to get out before I personally got pulled into something. You think you’ll be able to be different but that system is just so much bigger than you. And it’s not because I’m a better person it was luck. Part of it was luck that I had enough formal and informal education to know what was coming but some of it was pure grace of the universe luck.

      And people who are outside of it living their happy lives will tell you they want a better system, but they will never truly be willing to put in the work needed to change it or even give you the resources to do it yourself. Like I’d been a patient at that state hospital previously and went back as a staff member to try and help and being a staff member was just so much worse somehow. I’m grateful that it gave me the experience to do what I do now and be an authority / teacher in the management of violent patients but it was hell while it was happening (I was also in therapy for other stuff at the time and was sooo fortunate to be given that opportunity to properly contextualize the experience as it was happening). No one who’s never been through that will ever really understand.

    • tocopherol@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 hours ago

      Nazis weren’t able to fly easily over the ocean during WW2. You wouldn’t be able to reach Holocaust numbers with a plane, but I think “deporting” people but dumping them into the ocean could be possible and seems easy to hide.

    • Strider@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      I think you underestimate the creativity and power of these people.

      It’s exactly like ww2. People just didn’t want to see it. It will come out at some point. I am certain the USA is already using German KZ methods.

    • Taniwha420@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      It’s worth remembering that something like 5% of the population is sociopathic. That’s a lot of people who are morally compromised.

    • Diplomjodler@lemmy.world
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      14 hours ago

      I’d like to add that these people are evil, but also monumentally stupid. If anything like that happened you could be sure that the perpetrators would brag about it on social media.

    • solrize@lemmy.ml
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      11 hours ago

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasily_Blokhin

      Blokhin was selected for the position by Joseph Stalin in 1926 and led a company of executioners that performed and supervised numerous mass killings in the Soviet Union during Stalin’s reign, mostly during the Great Purge and Eastern Front of World War II.[1] Blokhin is recorded as having executed tens of thousands of prisoners by his own hand, including his killing of about 7,000 Polish prisoners of war during the Katyn massacre in spring 1940, making him the most prolific official executioner in recorded world history.[1][2][3] Blokhin was forced into retirement in 1953 after the death of Stalin and condemned during de-Stalinization shortly before his death in 1955.

    • bearboiblake@pawb.social
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      14 hours ago

      The amount of SS troops who ended up unable to continue due to the mental after effects is staggering.

      I’m interested to learn more about this, could you point me in the right direction?

      • FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website
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        13 hours ago

        It’s not just the SS, the Wehrmacht also “suffered” from having to shoot all these people. Read up on Babij Jar, Ukraine. Even Himmler is on record expressing sympathy for his killers. That’s why the bullet based plan turns into a gas based one. Because it’s “easier” to flip a switch on a room full of people than to shoot naked people to fall on other corpses already in the ditch.

        • bearboiblake@pawb.social
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          13 hours ago

          I was taught that the original plan was scrapped because it was seen as wasteful of ammunition, which was more and more of a problem in the late war

          • 4am@lemmy.zip
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            11 hours ago

            Both are probably true. Not many classes teach about how badly the Nazis felt; while I’m sure many of them, especially the lower ranks, suffered immense mental trauma - you really can’t explain that without sounding a bit like a sympathizer.

            • Soulg@ani.social
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              10 hours ago

              Maybe I’m the weird one, but it doesn’t make much sense to me to be unable to talk about them experiencing mental trauma for what they’re doing without being able to separate the fact that it doesn’t make them sympathetic or absolve them of the crimes. Life is way too complicated to try and simplify things like that.

              I felt the same way a year or two back when some story broke about an IDF soldier who committed suicide because of what they did to Palestinians. I can recognize that it would absolutely cause an immense toll on their psyche but also say that they deserved to feel that bad for it, though I’m not gonna celebrate the suicide personally

    • notabot@piefed.social
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      12 hours ago

      two immediate constraints come to mind:

      • Bodies. While possible, disposing of that many bodies without anyone noticing will be really hard.

      They’re already using military cargo planes for “deportation” flights. Maybe some don’t have any live passengers, and they just dump the bodies mid-ocean. No need for mass graves, just load cargo containers onto a cargo plane and off it goes. If it lands with one or two fewer than it started with, that’s just a paperwork issue.

      • dan1101@lemmy.world
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        11 hours ago

        Yes. And based on everything else that MAGA and billionaires have been caught doing and defending, I think there is almost certainly widespread sex trafficking and abuse of the detainees. Why else would the administration try so hard to prevent Congress from observing the facilities?

        If the Trump thugs act this badly on the streets then how horribly much worse do you think people are being treated I’m these secret detention facilities completely hidden from public view? This IMO will be seen as one of the worst chapters of our country once all the truth comes out.

        Bad enough to end the Republican party in the long run? Hopefully.

    • black_flag@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      11 hours ago

      I’m not sure that your second point is still a constant, though this is just an opinion and I’m open to discussion on this. They seem to have solved the problem of people not being up to mass killings, through desensitization through social media (I’m thinking of telegram groups specifically). There have been a lot of cases shown recently of people taking outright glee in their and others’ grotesque murders, en masse.