The Red Cloak Over the Shadows - and the Dead Travel Along

There are images that reveal more about a society than any statistic ever could. In the United States, sometimes a glance into an ICE detention center is enough to understand how far reality, delusion, and unreality have already merged. Officially it is about law and order - in truth, more than 75 percent of the people held there have committed no crime and pose no real danger. They are bargaining chips in a political game in which humanity has long since slipped from the hands. The authorities wrap it in sterile terms: "processing", "detention", "removal". Words meant to smell like disinfectant but that cannot mask the stench of injustice. Behind them lies a system that stacks people like file folders, reduces their life stories to case numbers, and degrades their right to a fair trial to a matter of discretion. ICE likes to present itself to the public in immaculate uniforms - but anyone who has spoken with those affected knows that behind this facade lies a practice built on deterrence, humiliation, and isolation.

For us, who try to help, the fight begins long before a name appears on a list. Every contact with detainees must be fought for - against locked doors, opaque regulations, and an administration that seems to rely on helpers eventually giving up. But anyone working on this front knows: giving up is not an option. The real marathon begins when those affected are deported. Then the fight shifts to places where the law often exists only on paper - to El Salvador, for example, to the CECOT, one of the largest and toughest prisons in the world. Without the work of local NGOs, who on the ground provide not only legal aid but also organize humanitarian support, much of what we achieve would simply be impossible. They know the paths through the thicket of regulations, they often risk their own safety, and they maintain the connection to the people who would otherwise disappear into the system. For that we can only say "Bravo" - people almost no one knows, whose efforts save lives.

Anyone who thinks the nightmare ends at the prison wall has never been to El Salvador to see an inmate there. Already at the border another game begins - one that can only be played if you put the right amounts into the right hands of the right people. Without bribes, nothing moves: no permission, no access, no conversation. Even for lawyers, the path to their clients is an obstacle course through corrupt hierarchies, informal power structures, and a wall of silence. Prisoners returning from the United States are often doubly broken: by the months in ICE detention and by the certainty that they must now survive in a country where the state itself is part of the problem. And yet there are moments when all that cracks - when a mother finally receives a letter from prison after weeks, when a lawyer brings a case to court that had long been thought buried, or when an NGO manages to smuggle medicine past the guards' censorship. These are the quiet victories that make no headlines but change entire lives.

Anyone who thinks from a safe distance that these are only isolated cases has not understood how systemic the problem is. It is not about individual mistakes, but about a political and social construct that thrives on depriving people of their rights. ICE in the United States, corrupt structures in El Salvador - they are two sides of the same coin. One shines in official PR language, the other bears the rust of open brutality. And somewhere in between stand we: as witnesses, as helpers, as journalists trying to make visible the creeping axe with which social values are being undermined piece by piece by a delusional religion and its political network - and as part of those collaborative productions that expose this danger and confront it with determination.

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