Did These Men Deserve to Die? by William Kristol

 

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“The cruelty is the point,” Adam Serwer memorably wrote six years ago. That was during Donald Trump’s first term in office. In his second term, the cruelty remains the point. But it has now been institutionalized and routinized in key agencies of the federal government. Trump’s personal and performative indecency has become an entire administration’s sustained and systematic indecency.

Yesterday morning, NBC News reported on the sudden death earlier this year of an Afghan national in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Mohammad Nazeer Paktiawal, 41, had fought for a decade alongside U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan. He was evacuated when U.S. troops pulled out in 2021 and entered the U.S. legally. He became a truck driver, worked at a market and bakery, and had requested asylum to remain here. That claim was pending when ICE seized him for deportation at his home in Richardson, Texas, on the morning of March 13, as he was getting his children ready for school.

Paktiawal died the next day in ICE custody. His death certificate says he died from “an adverse drug reaction” to an unidentified substance which triggered anaphylaxis and exacerbated his asthma, and his death was ruled an accident. We do know from his wife that he relied on an inhaler for asthma. We also know that ICE agents rejected her attempt to give them the device when he was taken into custody. We also know that Texas authorities have refused to release his autopsy report, arguing its disclosure would interfere with a pending criminal investigation.

Mohammed Nazeer Paktiawal was not a criminal. He was not here illegally. He was a threat to no one—except perhaps the Taliban. There was no reason for ICE to detain him—except to meet its arrest and deportation quotas. There is no reason for most of the fifty deaths in ICE detention during Trump’s second term except that the Trump administration is unsparing in pursuit of its mass deportation agenda, an agenda that is as irrational as it is cruel.