From Epstein Files to ICE Camps: How America Is Enabling a New Era of Trafficking

You want to talk about vulnerability? The detention system is a traffickers' dream.

We can play “gotcha” with the people named in the Epstein files, or we can investigate power. The files don’t just reveal a slew of individual predators; they map an entire ecosystem of money, power, abuse and access that protected Jeffrey Epstein for decades—an ecosystem is still here.

The same billionaires, the same political players, the same financiers and fixers who took Epstein’s calls, flew on his planes, and benefited from his introductions are still operating at the top of our power pyramid today. No one can look at that web and say with confidence, “Well, that is over now.”

While you hold that creepy image in your mind, put it next to another: a sprawling network of secretive immigration jails and camps, from the heartland, to the border to places like “Alligator Alcatraz,” filled with hard-to-track people, including tens of thousands of women and children, invisible and inaudible by design. Then picture them moved at night, from cage to cage, and state to state, without documents, phones, lawyers, even language, or anyone to hear their calls.

We don’t come to this moment uninformed. We already know about sexual abuse in detention.¹ We already know about coerced medical procedures, guards retaliating against women who speak up², children separated and lost forever,³ and trans people shoved into solitary “for their own good.”⁴

We also know that misogynists don’t come wearing Klan hoods or slave patrol garb. They look like anyone raised in our patriarchal culture who thinks they can get away with being cruel. And we know that a culture of impunity has been cultivated —agents told they are the thin blue line, that “toughness” is the point, that oversight is an attack.

Congress needs to act. Alongside criminal prosecution of the powerful people in the Epstein ring (many of whom we see, thriving, every day), we need Congress to haul every DHS, DOJ, and detention center contractor into the light and while the cameras roll, they need to be asked under oath:

Who has unchecked power to move detainees, especially women and children? Where are they taken, and who tracks that? How many complaints of sexual abuse, of trafficking, of “lost” detainees have been filed — and what happened to the people who filed them? Which names from the Epstein files show up anywhere in the world of detention contracts, security firms, shell companies?

If prosecutors refuse to prosecute, and lawmakers refuse to get answers, then they are all not just failing to prevent the next Epstein from picking up where Jeffrey left off — they are using federal policy to build and supply his trafficking machine.

Learn more about the ways in which misogyny fuels fascism and why feminism frightens authoritarians on this week’s episode of Laura Flanders & Friends, premiering Friday at 5:00 p.m. Eastern on YouTube, and all across the country on PBS stations this weekend. Also available as a free podcast.

1. https://www.fmreview.org/brane-wang/

2. https://www.apha.org/policy-and-advocacy/public-health-policy-briefs/policy-database/2022/01/07/preventing-violations-of-sexual-and-reproductive-health-rights-in-immigration-detention

3. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/separated-families-border-trump-zero-tolerance-immigration.html

4. https://www.vera.org/news/ice-is-excluding-data-on-transgender-people-in-detention