Emmanuel Damas was fifty-six years old, from Haiti, and he had a toothache.
He entered the United States in 2024 through a parole program that has since been terminated. He was detained. Over the course of about a week he sought medical care repeatedly for an infection in his tooth that was getting worse. He was given ibuprofen. The infection spread. He went into septic shock and died.
A tooth infection is one of the most reliably treatable conditions in medicine. It has been treatable since 1928. It requires an antibiotic that costs a few dollars and is stocked in every pharmacy in the country. There is no version of this in which Emmanuel Damas had to die, and there is no version in which the people around him did not know he was in pain, because he told them, for a week.
He is one of fifty-two.
The count, while there still is one
Between January 20, 2025 and June 4, 2026, fifty-two people died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. That figure comes from a seventy-two page joint report by Human Rights Watch and Physicians for Human Rights published on June 25.
The mortality rate in immigration detention is now the highest recorded in more than a decade. It has more than doubled since the start of this term. It is nearly four times the rate under the previous administration and more than two and a half times the rate during the first Trump term. It is higher than it was during the COVID-19 pandemic.
It is not simply a function of more people being held, although more people are being held, over seventy-one thousand at the January peak. Deaths rose substantially faster than the population did. The ACLU calculated the rate at roughly one death every six days. Senator Ossoff’s ongoing investigation has now received or identified 1,037 credible reports of human rights abuses in that system.
Then, in June of this year, the agency stopped reporting deaths that occur within thirty days of a person’s release from custody. Families who want to know what happened must now file a Freedom of Information Act request, which takes months, and often longer.
Hold that sequence in your mind, because everything else in this piece is a variation on it. The deaths went up. The reporting went down. Somebody had to write that rule. Somebody drafted it, and somebody reviewed it, and somebody signed it.
The pattern, in four other places
Measles. There have been 2,371 confirmed cases in the United States this year, the most since 1991, in forty-five jurisdictions, with about ninety-three percent of the infected unvaccinated. Last year three people died, including two unvaccinated children in West Texas, the first measles deaths in this country in a decade. The first was an eight-year-old girl. The day after she died, the Secretary of Health and Human Services told a White House meeting that measles outbreaks are not unusual and happen every year, and recommended vitamin A, and some parents administered it in quantities that damaged their children’s livers. This week the administration cut the childhood vaccine schedule from eighteen diseases to eleven, and ordered the MMR split into three separate shots that are not manufactured in the United States and cannot currently be purchased.
The president’s description of the reasoning was that vats of vaccine are being pumped into children and that the body needs time to handle the massive amount of fluid. He added that nothing bad can happen from what we are doing.
The carrier. More than five thousand sailors and Marines aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln have been at sea for over 260 days, in the ninth month of a deployment scheduled to end in May, with two days ashore since November. Families have told Military Times and Stars and Stripes about moldy showers, broken toilets, shortages of soap and toothpaste, food arriving rotten, no milk for three months, and multiple crew members attempting to go overboard. The Secretary of War called the reports fake news. The Navy’s statement is that it has not identified an increase in reported suicidal ideation.
Read that adverb. It is doing a great deal of work and it was chosen by somebody.
Disaster response. FEMA has lost roughly fourteen percent of its workforce and is carrying a backlog of more than three hundred thousand projects across six hundred open disaster declarations. The threshold at which the Secretary must personally approve a disaster payment was lowered from twenty-five million dollars to one hundred thousand, which paralyzed the agency’s ability to move money in the name of preventing waste. In 2025 the president denied sixteen major disaster requests, nearly double the annual average of his first term.
Munitions. Last week, when reporters documented that American interceptor stocks were badly depleted and that commanders had begun declining to shoot down incoming missiles over unpopulated areas of American bases, the president posted at midnight that the reporting was treasonous and the leakers would be hunted down and imprisoned.
Five domains. One reflex. In every case, when information arrives showing that people are being harmed, the response is directed at the information.
So what kind of person does this
Here is where I have to disappoint anyone hoping for a diagnosis, and then explain why the disappointment is the point.
They are not psychopaths. Clinical psychopathy runs at roughly one percent of the population, and you cannot staff a government with it. More importantly, the diagnosis is unfalsifiable from a distance, which makes it useless, and it is emotionally convenient in a way that should make us suspicious of ourselves for reaching toward it. If these are aberrant people with a rare disorder, then the rest of us are safe, and this could not happen anywhere else, and there is nothing to examine. That is a bedtime story.
They are not a cult, either. The most useful thirty seconds in the documentary record of this decade is the Senate Republican caucus lunch where they gave the president a standing ovation and then burst out laughing the instant the door closed. Cults do not laugh when the leader leaves the room. That is the one thing genuine belief cannot do. Everybody clapping knew exactly what they were clapping for, and then went out and voted for all of it anyway.
Coercion is real and it deserves an honest hearing. After January 6 a congressman told Mitt Romney he had wanted to vote for impeachment and did not, out of fear for his family. A member of Republican leadership said he was leaning toward conviction, and colleagues told him to think of his personal safety, to think of his children, and he decided they were right. Romney was paying five thousand dollars a day for private security and understood that his colleagues could not.
That is genuine, and it explains a vote. It does not explain a career. It does not explain drafting a memo that ends the reporting of deaths in custody. Nobody’s children are threatened by a paperwork requirement.
The actual mechanism, which is duller and much worse
What is operating here has been documented for fifty years and it does not require a single unusual person.
It requires distance. It is difficult to be cruel to a face and effortless to be cruel to a coordinate. Nobody in the chain that killed Emmanuel Damas watched him die. The person who wrote the detention standards never met him. The person who set the facility’s medical budget never met him. The contractor who declined to send him to a hospital did meet him, and had been trained for years to understand him as a category rather than a man, and the category has a word, and the word is detainee.
It requires euphemism. Processing. Removal. Facility. Bed space. Every one of those words exists to allow a sentence to be spoken without a person appearing in it.
It requires the diffusion of responsibility across enough hands that no single pair of them did it. The great insight of bureaucratic atrocity, established well before any of these people were born, is that you never need anyone who is willing to kill. You need a hundred people each willing to perform one administratively unremarkable act.
And it requires, above all, that the people harmed already belong to categories that had been designated as not counting. Detainees. The unvaccinated poor. Sailors, who volunteered. The uninsured, who should have gotten jobs. Every death in this piece happened to somebody whose suffering had been pre-classified as either deserved or acceptable, and the classification was done in advance, in public, with enthusiasm, by people who were applauded for it.
Where hatred is real
I have argued against most of the emotional explanations, so let me be direct about the one that survives.
The dehumanizing language is not incidental and it is not a style choice. When a government describes human beings as animals, as vermin, as an invasion, as poisoning the blood of the country, it is not being colorful. It is performing the specific psychological operation that makes the rest of this possible, and it is doing it deliberately, because it works, and because it has always worked, and because the people doing it have studied the history in which it worked before.
That is where the word evil is doing real work rather than venting. Not as a diagnosis of anyone’s soul. As a description of a choice that is made, repeatedly, in daylight, with full knowledge of what it is for.
The answer
You asked whether they are evil, or coerced, or in a cult. The honest answer is that the question has a hidden assumption in it, which is that indifference to human life requires some special interior condition, some hollowness where the feeling ought to be.
It does not. That is the finding, and it is the darkest thing in this entire file.
Ordinary people, with ordinary consciences, who love their own children, will preside over preventable death indefinitely, provided three conditions hold. They must not have to watch. The dead must belong to a category. And nobody with standing must be permitted to tell them, out loud, in a document, with a number attached.
The first two conditions have been in place for a long time and are not unique to this administration or this country.
The third is what has changed, and it is what the last eighteen months have actually been about. Three judge advocates general removed in a single afternoon. The intelligence officer whose agency contradicted the president. The analysts who wrote the unwelcome assessment. The election-threat offices closed across four separate agencies. And now the reporting rule for deaths in custody, quietly amended in June, so that a category of dying person simply stops appearing in the record.
Negligence is passive. You can be negligent by accident, in your sleep, by doing nothing at all.
Rewriting the rule so that the deaths are no longer counted is work. It takes a draft, and a review, and a signature, and a person who read the whole thing and thought it was fine.
That is not apathy. Apathy would have left the count alone.
If you or someone you know is a service member or veteran in crisis, the Veterans Crisis Line is available by dialing 988 and pressing 1, or texting 838255.
Inherent spite and evilness comes with human nature. Now some have been encouraged to just let flow. Trump has a knack or a talent for that.
No, not apathy but an insidious and diabolical plan to keep this country White at all costs, and Christian; a pathetic oxymoron.
Steven Miller is the face that springs to my own mind; the author of the 3000 detainees-a-day rule...or whatever the number is. A certifiable hate-filled ghoul who has always been what we now see. AND...there are soooo many (ie. Josh Hawley, self-proclaimed Christian Nationalist; Hegseth and his warped pastor, Doug Wilson; Tom Cotton, Ak.and his myopic views, etc.)- this revelation renders me sleepless. When a country's government is infested with human vermin, who are themselves the exterminators, what is the solution ?