BYLINE TIMES IMPACT: Find out about the changes you made happen
This week, I celebrated my 10th anniversary of working as an independent investigative reporter during the Trumpocene. On 17 September 2016, I wrote my first public post, warning about the danger of electing Donald Trump, who I called a “pageant guy.” The thought of elevating someone who rated women on a numbers’ scale to the highest office was unfathomable.
Having elected him twice despite felony convictions, Russian mob ties, and a long history of criminal behaviors spelled doom for a once heralded country.
As I wrote in my column on the book “American Overthrow”, which documents the acceleration in Trump’s second term to remake America into West Russia, Trump is engaging in what author Keir Giles calls a “crash programme of state capture”.
But a torrent of headlines is causing terrible amnesia:
AI Could Kill All Humans!
Senator Kennedy Presses Kash Patel on Bestiality!
Melania Denies Link to Oligarch ‘Involved in Child Abductions!’
Trump Tthreatens to Demolish keep Kennedy Center shut if His Name Not Added!
The daily deluge will only increase as the upcoming midterm elections approach, and yet it masks the real horror already taking root in America.
As global attention is diverted to AI’s kill threat, the media has largely forgotten that the Trump regime is already engaged in mass murder.
State-Sponsored Deaths
The US military killed at least 230 people in boat strikes, offering no public evidence of narcotics on the 79 boats hit, nor any evidence of any affiliation with drug cartels or any trials.
In its illegal war in Iran, the US-Israeli war is estimated to have killed between 9,000 to 18,000 people, including women and children.
At least 57 people have died in ICE custody since the start of the second Trump administration, according to ICE’s internal reporting. The January 2025 to January 2026 deaths is a 140 percent increase in the annual mortality rate compared to the prior year. That figure doesn’t include deaths upon release from ICE custody, which the agency said it would no longer report to the public.
Elon Musk and Donald Trump’s butchering of USAID funding has led to an estimated 700,000 deaths, as of mid-July.
Tracking food and disease-related deaths during Trump’s second term is difficult due to the downsizing of critical agencies: the FDA lost nearly 20% of its staff; and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention faced a reduction of 25%, with the number of CDC scientists who tracked food parasites down from 11 to three. But the regime’s campaign against vaccines led by the US secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert Kennedy Jr, is linked to four recent deaths from measles.
“Donald Trump and RFK Jr. remain on a suicide mission to scare America families away from vaccines without cause or evidence,” said Brad Woodhouse, the president of Protect Our Care, a healthcare advocacy group. “What they’ve accomplished is a huge dip in vaccination rates and the worst measles crisis in 35 years.”
Liar Liar World On Fire
“It’s hard to know where to start with Donald Trump,” said a man carrying a sign that read: “Liar Liar World On Fire.” We were at last Saturday’s anti-Trump protest in Dublin, Ireland, and he was responding to my question on why he chose to carry that particular message.
He said: “I suppose the Big Lie is one thing. And also the world is on fire because of the illegal and unjustified war in Iran. And the killing of fishermen in the Caribbean. Those are war crimes. He’s flouting international law.”
I was relieved to hear that someone remembered the extrajudicial boat murders in all the chaos, and how those murders parallel the killings that the former president of the Philippines Rodrigo Duterte openly engaged in in his so-called war on drugs. Duterte is in detention in The Hague awaiting his November trial by the International Criminal Court for crimes against humanity.
Overpaying and Offloading
I think it’s very dangerous to be distracted from the concentration camps being built in Trump’s second term and the fact that detention in ICE facilities saw a 75 percent increase since his return to power in January 2025.
In February, I reported that the US Department of Homeland Security overpaid by a hundred million dollars for a concentration camp shell to a Russian-based group, in the City of Social Circle, Georgia, about 45 miles from Atlanta.
Two years earlier, the same warehouse sold for $29 million. The DHS bought it from PNK, for $128.5 million, according to multiple reports. PNK is a Russian-based real estate developer that specializes in large-scale industrial, logistics, and data center projects, primarily in Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Novosibirsk.
And in an all-cash deal, DHS paid $70 million for a large warehouse in Surprise, Arizona, according to Maricopa County records. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is also named on the deed of the 418,000-square-foot property.
The recipient of the cash was the Rockefeller Group, a real estate developer owned by the Mitsubishi Group, which has a Russian-based LLC that deals in energy, chemicals, minerals, infrastructure and industrial projects, among other holdings.
ICE confirmed a $66 million purchase of another building in San Antonio, Texas, valued at $37 million; in January, ICE bought a facility in Upper Bern Township, Pennsylvania, near Philadelphia, for $87.4 million; In Williamsport, Maryland, ICE paid $102 million for a 54-acre plot — money coming from the $75 billion in funding from the Orwellian-named, ‘big, beautiful bill.’
In an interesting twist, after massively overpaying for warehouses, the agency is now trying to offload them, including the one they overpaid the Russian-based developer in Social Circle, Georgia, by nearly five times its assessed value. In total, the Government spent $1.074 billion on 11 warehouses, and are now planning to get rid of seven of them.
Multiple reports cite community and bi-partisan pushback as the reason, but the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that it is “moving swiftly to utilize EXISTING detention space.”
Reports coming in from the recently shuttered “Alligator Alcatraz” reveal inhumane conditions, where people were forced into cramped, chain-linked cages at the South Florida detention center, where fecal matter leaking from overflowing toilets to where people were sleeping was also reported.
These reports on how workers inside the US are being treated mirror how prisoners were tortured in open air-cages at Guantánamo Bay during the US “war on terror”.
Democrat-led states are now forced to fight for the right to inspect ICE facilities. Washington state is suing the Florida-based GEO Group, which operates detention facilities nationwide. State health inspectors have been repeatedly denied access to a Tacoma facility after thousands of reports of medical maltreatment, abuse, rotten food, and two working bathrooms per 100 people.
Ignoring Evil
Anyone who reads history knows about concentration camps, from Stalin’s Russia to Hitler’s Germany, which ran an elaborate network of death factories in occupied countries.
“This reminds me very much of the situation in the early years of the Nazi regime,” philosophy professor and author David Livingstone Smith told Byline Times. “Information about the first concentration camps was quite public, described in the media of the day and they enjoyed a great deal of public support as ways of dealing with criminals and other sorts of social outsiders.”
Smith, who has written multiple books on the subject of dehumanization, offered a quote from the book, What We Knew by Eric A Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband, which is based on interviews with Germans who were alive during the Nazi regime.
“One respondent said, ‘So people didn’t believe it, or didn’t know about it, or pretended not to know. As long as their lives were not touched by it, fine.’”
He said: “In a way it’s like here, with the people who don’t know about discrimination against Blacks and Hispanics. To them it doesn’t exist. They close their eyes to it.”
Smith cautioned: “Lots of Americans are behind the camps. Many of them have swallowed the ‘law and order’ propaganda describing undocumented immigrants as monstrous predators. Many others are not behind them, but close their eyes to reality, because reality exacts too great a moral strain. But in doing this, they are complicit.”
His words make me think of another sign I saw in the Dublin protest against Trump’s golf visit, held up by a young woman.
“To Ignore Evil Is To Become An Accomplice To It”
Emmy award-winning investigative reporter, Heidi Siegmund Cuda is an American correspondent for Byline Times and her Hot Type column runs bimonthly. She is a #1 Amazon bestselling author, and her Bette Dangerous Substack is read in 102 countries.