Welcome to El Paso, the dusty, sun-bleached waiting room of the American Empire, where the only thing more persistent than the heat is the stench of administrative indifference. We find ourselves today contemplating the case of Geraldo Lunas Campos, a Cuban immigrant who discovered—rather abruptly—that the grass is not greener on the other side of the Florida Straits; it is merely replaced by the institutional gray of an ICE detention center. According to a recent legal filing by his family, Campos didn't just 'pass away' in federal custody this month; he was reportedly assisted into the afterlife by the firm, choking grip of facility guards. Of course, the official narrative from the federal authorities is far more convenient: it was a suicide. Because, obviously, when one travels hundreds of miles across treacherous waters and through the bureaucratic hellscape of the U.S. immigration system, the first thing one wants to do upon arrival is provide the government with a clean, paperwork-friendly exit.

Let’s analyze the players in this tragicomedy of errors. On one side, we have the family and their witness, claiming a man was throttled into silence. On the other, we have the state, clutching a clipboard and insisting that Campos simply decided he had seen enough of our majestic democracy. The beauty of a detention center is its inherent opacity; it is a black hole where human rights go to be compressed into billable hours for private contractors. Whether he was choked or whether he 'chose' to end his stay is almost a pedantic distinction in a system designed to strip a person of their agency long before their heart stops beating. ICE, that post-9/11 Frankenstein’s monster of an agency, operates with the accountability of a medieval fiefdom but the PR budget of a Fortune 500 company. They don’t see people; they see processing numbers that occasionally stop breathing.

The political reaction to this will be as predictable as it is nauseating. The Right will adjust their mahogany-framed glasses and mutter about 'law and order' and 'illegal status,' as if a lack of a visa is a valid medical reason for a crushed windpipe. To them, Campos is not a man but a data point in a fear-mongering campaign about 'invasions'—an invader who, apparently, was so dangerous he had to be contained in a cage until he magically expired. They love the 'security' of the border until it costs them a cent of tax revenue, at which point they prefer the cheap labor of a dead man who can't file for overtime.

Meanwhile, the Left will engage in their favorite pastime: performative weeping. They will draft sternly worded letters, tweet hashtags with the fury of a thousand suns, and then quietly approve the next massive spending bill that keeps these very facilities running. They love the immigrant as a concept, a mascot for their supposed moral superiority, but heaven forbid they actually dismantle the machine that processed Campos into a corpse. For the liberal establishment, a death in custody is a fundraising opportunity, a chance to point a finger at the 'cruelty' of their opponents while maintaining the exact same carceral infrastructure that makes such cruelty inevitable. They want 'humane' detention centers, which is like asking for a 'polite' firing squad.

The legal filing itself is a masterpiece of futility. Suing the federal government for the death of an immigrant is like suing the ocean for being wet. The system is rigged so that the state is both the defendant and the judge, protected by layers of qualified immunity and 'administrative protocols' that treat human life as a rounding error. If the witness is right and he was choked, the guards will likely receive a week of paid leave to manage their 'stress.' If the state is right and it was suicide, then the system worked exactly as intended: it broke a man so thoroughly that he did their job for them.

We are living in an era where the banality of evil has been replaced by the banality of the spreadsheet. Campos is gone, his 'American Dream' condensed into a lawsuit that will linger in the courts for a decade before being settled for a sum that wouldn't cover the cost of a new wing at a private prison. Everyone involved—the guards, the politicians, the activists—will move on to the next tragedy with the short-term memory of a goldfish. Humanity remains a stagnant pond of stupidity, and Geraldo Lunas Campos was just another ripple that the surface quickly smoothed over. Don't worry, though; I'm sure the next 'unfortunate incident' will be handled with the exact same level of exquisite, soul-crushing incompetence.