Trump’s mass deportation agenda has quickly reproduced all the characteristics of a brutal police state, including unlawful disappearances in which ordinary people, including children, are swept up into the system and no one knows what happened to them. Then, if these people are released, they are routinely dumped in isolated areas without notification. One of them just died.
The Guardian reports:
A nearly blind Burmese refugee who was abandoned by border patrol agents has been found dead in Buffalo, New York, city officials confirmed. …
[Nural] Shah Alam had been in the Erie county holding center for the past year, after being arrested by Buffalo police in 2025 on charges of assault, trespassing and possession of a weapon. The arrest stemmed from an incident in which Shah Alam got lost while on a walk and ended up on the porch of a woman’s home. He had been using a curtain rod as a walking stick, according to his attorney.
The woman called the police, and when Shah Alam did not follow police commands to drop his curtain rod, they Tasered and beat him, his attorney said.
He was released on bail, and then transferred to border patrol custody.
Border patrol agents then dropped him off at a Tim Hortons about five miles from his home. Neither his attorney nor his family were notified of his release.
“We are saddened to learn that our client, Nurul Amin Shah Alam, was found deceased last night in the City of Buffalo,” the Legal Aid Bureau of Buffalo said in a statement shared with the Guardian.
The negligence and indifference to human life in this case is so systematic it cannot be attributed to accident. Cruelty and lawlessness toward anyone even suspected of being an immigrant is the openly declared policy of this administration. The result: Nural Shah Alam came to the U.S. as a refugee fleeing oppression and brutality—and found it all over again here in America.
The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.
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