i taught a baking class for 12 year olds today and we made your garden variety chocolate chip cookies, but i’m a big believer in Questioning Everything and the who/what/where/why/when/how behind things, so the first part of the class was purposely letting the kids do things the wrong way, to show and explain why we do things the way we do.
“why do we bake cookies at 180 for 9 minutes when we could do 400 for 2 minutes?”
-enter the godawful lump of coal with a still gross wet and uncooked inside
“why do we have to scoop out little cookies instead of doing the whole tray?”
-ok well that one you can technically do if the spread is even. you just end up with one giant, structurally unsound cookie.
“PLEASE CAN WE MAKE GIANT COOKIES”
(we did make 1 giant tray cookie)
we talked a lot about why consistency is important, but i don’t think it really hammered home until i said “okay everyone gets ONE cookie, that’s fair, right?” and then handed out cookies of hugely varying sizes. + baked one fat lump of a cookie that still wasn’t done at the 9 minutes, vs the regular one i put in that came out charred by the time the first was actually done.
we also made a row of cookies where each one had one single differing ingredient omitted, like a cookie with no flour, or a cookie with no butter, and laid them all out on a single tray to bake together to see how each ingredient affects the outcome.
two of the little girls added cocoa to their cookie doughs until it matched the colour of each others skin to make best friend cookies, and that almost made me tear up a bit 🥺
got briefly distracted (…for over half an hour…) talking about how eggs form when someone cracked an egg and it had 2 yolks
expertly tolerated being asked how old i am (just turned 31 the other day) which was immediately followed by asking if i watched the moon landing live on tv
was so focused on keeping track of all the kids that in the end i forgot to make a cookie for myself, but it’s ok because one of the girls gave me this
the class went well and they asked if i wanted to do another one in a couple weeks and i said yeah, and they’re taking uh… fuck, what’s the word for inventory when it’s people?? attendance?? whatever, they’re trying to see who’s interested to get a feel of if it’d be 1 three hour class again or if there’s too many kids so we’d do a couple classes. anyways, i love the emails from Concerned Parents.
“will there be knives involved?”
we are baking cookies.
“what temperatures does the oven get to/will it be hot enough to burn?”
we are baking cookies.
“will there be [insert ingredient used in cookies]?”
we are baking cookies.
“are you using fahrenheit or celsius?”
??????? d-does it matter?? it’s going to get Hot. (also celsius; this is ontario)
“are the ovens childproof?”
no?? i’m assuming you’re asking if i’m going to let your kids reach into the ovens while i’m staring out a window in another room. i will not be allowing your children to use the ovens. they will not be left unattended.Â
“why is the library baking class taking place at the high school?”
the library does not have 10 ovens. the library does not even have 1 oven. the high school has many ovens.
“what if i don’t want my child to have cookies? can you let her make muffins instead?”
this is a baking class for cookies. we are baking cookies.
“cookies aren’t healthy. why don’t you make [insert whatever]”
do you know how many cookies i can make with a $40 budget and a trip to the bulk store? we are making cookies.
“who needs a class to bake a cookie, why not teach something more valuable?”
IT’S NOT JUST ABOUT THE COOKIES, KAREN, IT’S ABOUT FAMILIARIZING CHILDREN WITH THE ART AND SCIENCE OF BAKING/COOKING/FOOD, ABOUT TRYING NEW THINGS, MAKING MISTAKES AND REALIZING THAT THE MISTAKES ARE NOT ONLY OKAY TO MAKE BUT VALUABLE IN AND OF THEMSELVES, FAMILIARIZING THEM WITH INDEPENDENCE, THE UNDERSTANDING OF HOW THINGS CAN COME TOGETHER TO FORM A NEW AND BETTER WHOLE, ALL WHILE HAVING TRYING TO INJECT A MODICUM OF JOY INTO THEIR LITTLE LIVES. SORRY THAT THERE ARE CONCEPTS AT PLAY YOU CAN’T SEEN TO UNDERSTAND HERE. MAYBE YOU SHOULD COME JOIN AND I’LL LET YOU MAKE A FUCKING COOKIE.
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Her name is Theresa Kachindamoto, and she is a senior chief - political leader of a region with a population of about 900,000 people.
She didn’t run for election; she was appointed, without her knowledge, while she was living and working in a completely different part of the country. She just received a call one day telling her to come back to her childhood home, because she was in charge now.
So she did; and when she arrived, she discovered widespread sexual abuse of children. She browbeat 50 uncooperative local leaders into accepting her decision to annul all the marriages. She then fired four of them when they continued to allow children to be married off in their areas. She still faces widespread opposition from parents who consider it their right to sexually abuse their daughters if they want to; but Kachindamoto very evidently does not give a fuck, and is continuing to use political and legal means to protect children in the region.
She’s not just an anonymous do-gooder; she’s an effective political leader despite incredibly difficult circumstances. Theresa Kachindamoto.
[Image Description: a twitter post from user Al Jazeera English @ AJEnglish that reads “This woman has broken up 850 child marriages and banned sexual initiation camps in Malawi”
Below the text is a picture of Theresa Kachindamoto. She is a dark skinned woman with short hair. She is outside and smiling. End ID]
got worried checking the dates on this post and seeing 2016, knowing how risky this kind of political activism is
good news: Kachindamoto is still in office, and last year (2024) she received honorary doctorates from 2 universities and was given the African Genius Award 🙏
“[Keanu] Reeves said a recent conversation about “The Matrix” with a 15-year-old put things into a terrifying perspective. The actor explained to the teenager that his character, Neo, is fighting for what’s real. The teenager scoffed and said, “Who cares if it’s real?” “People are growing up with these tools: We’re listening to music already that’s made by AI in the style of Nirvana, there’s NFT digital art,” Reeves said. “It’s cool, like, Look what the cute machines can make! But there’s a corporatocracy behind it that’s looking to control those things. Culturally, socially, we’re gonna be confronted by the value of real, or the non-value. And then what’s going to be pushed on us? What’s going to be presented to us?” “It’s this sensorium. It’s spectacle. And it’s a system of control and manipulation,” Reeves continued. “We’re on our knees looking at cave walls and seeing the projections, and we’re not having the chance to look behind us.””
—
Keanu Reeves Slams Deepfakes, Film Contract Prevents Digital Edits - Variety
This is one of those true, declassified government things that always sounds made up but one of the things Henry Kissinger did with his career was use the CIA to help turn small, prosperous socialist nations into fascist dictatorships just to keep those nations powerless and possibly to keep socialist systems *looking* doomed and futile to the American public, like maybe just to scare Americans out of demanding better infrastructure or universal income. Yes it sounds like an insane conspiracy theory a maniac would invent. It also happened multiple times and several generations of people around the world are still living in misery because of it.
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I want every non-Midwesterner to know that we are drilled in tornado safety from a young age and know exactly what we should do to keep ourselves safe. And yet we do exactly as pictured in the bottom image every time a tornado comes around.
"There are people who, even now, genuinely believe, 'oh, let's get a business person, let's get someone who's good at business in government so they can run the government as efficiently as they run their business,' alright, and… the problem there is that, like, let's say Amazon, a good example, let's say Amazon makes a mistake, and they make a mistake that all of us, everyone here, can acknowledge as a mistake, and as a mistake, their stock drops because they lose some of the faith from their shareholders. Now we see that drop in the stock and, maybe the mistake they make is that they announce that all the cars from now on goin' have three wheels. Like 'oh, we're going to save so much money on tires' and we're like 'no, you goin' flip over, okay?' And so then you see--you see the stock start to dip because of that lack of confidence and then, for you as a potential investor, even a retail investor, that dip in the stock is an opportunity, you can buy in now, you can buy into that dip and then when it goes back up because they realized that four was probably best, you can ride that wave on up. Fair enough.
When you crash out a business, when you make mistakes in business, when you run a poor business, you can always start another business. The people who we even look up to as these beacons of industry were all people who, at some point, had a failed business, right? But the government is not a business, because if you crash out the government, if you make the same mistakes with a government, you don't have a country, and you can't just be like 'we goin' start new America.' 'You know, I used to have lemonade stand America and that one didn't really work out so I started, like, a tire shop America and that still really wasn't it, so then I start this hedge fund America, and now we're cookin'.'
It just does not work that way. And you saw what happened, you saw Elon run the government, because he's the president, you saw Elon run the government the way he ran his business. When Elon took over Twitter, right, he comes into Twitter and he immediately starts firing everybody because he's like 'you're waste, you're redundant, I don't know what you do, I don't know what that is, you're fired, you're fired, you're fired', and then, a couple days after he took over, remember that brief period where he was like 'how do you turn it on?' And then someone who still worked there who he didn't fire was like 'Oh, you fired the dude who turned it on. Yeah, yeah, you asked me for a list of people to fire, I'm not goin' put my name on the list so I just…'.
And so you see--you end up seeing Elon firing people and then, like, trying to hire them back real quick and trying to smooth over the things that he broke that didn't need breaking, you know. And then DOGE ends up working the same way, it ends up swooping in and firing a bunch of people and then trying to hire some of them back real quick and it's chaos. And Elon is the face of it. He's the face of it because we didn't know who else was working at DOGE, we didn't know who was essentially, like, hacking into Social Security, who was going around judges orders, who was breaking things, and going to places they weren't supposed to because we hadn't figured out how this whole thing was going to work--we didn't know.
And then we found out, we found out that it was children. We found out… they leaked the photos of those people that were high up in DOGE that were getting into Social Security and the IRS and everything and we were like 'what?' Fresh out of school--I saw one kid's picture who was, like, high up in DOGE doing breaking ins and stuff and I was like 'Peter Parker? I cannot believe that Spider Man goin' cut off my grandma's Social Security.'
So I don't think anyone's saying, like, there's no waste, but it's what you cut and how you cut it, you know? I think people would've appreciated, like, you know, an actual audit. They said that they did one, but… usually when you do an audit and you really account for the waste and you really account for the jobs you do and don't need, you don't have to hire anybody back.
The amount of people that they fired and then immediately tried to rehire shows that they're not actually being as careful as they should be with the process. Because I'll tell you right now, everyone that has ever fired me stood firm with their decision. I have never been fired and then someone ran out after me 'hold on, hold on, hold on, that's my bad, I was wild, I was tryin' to look good in front of the other employees, you get back in here, this never happened.' Anyone who has ever fired me has never called me again.
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She's also publicly stated that she believes that anyone who reads her books or watches her shows and films does so because they explicitly agree with her political views.
There's no "agree to disagree" with her work. Every time you pick up her work or talk about it you are saying to her "I agree with you Joanne" whether you like it or not.
It's so, SO important to share success stories like this. I know an actual JPL engineer who doesn't believe in climate change because, "you never hear about acid rain anymore."
He thinks climate change can be lumped in with acid rain and the ozone layer of "things that were overblown and not really important because no one talks about it anymore."
It didn't even occur to him that we actively fixed the problem. Here's the EPA page on acid rainfall.
From the page:
It's also important to talk about success stories tonfuel hope that we can overcome current and future conservation and environmental issues.
Holding up snarky signs doesn't seem to be working.
For me, it isn't about whether this action is appropriate or not. It's about how this kind of action is inevitable.
I'm going to let Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. explain in a quote no one seems to post during his annual holiday.
"It is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear?"
If you only speak up about a supercharger catching fire and ignore the unheard, you are prioritizing a thing over people.
There was no explanation, no warning. One minute, I was in an immigration office talking to an officer about my work visa, which had been approved months before and allowed me, a Canadian, to work in the US. The next, I was told to put my hands against the wall, and patted down like a criminal before being sent to an Ice detention center without the chance to talk to a lawyer.
I grew up in Whitehorse, Yukon, a small town in the northernmost part of Canada. I always knew I wanted to do something bigger with my life. I left home early and moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, where I built a career spanning multiple industries – acting in film and television, owning bars and restaurants, flipping condos and managing Airbnbs.
In my 30s, I found my true passion working in the health and wellness industry. I was given the opportunity to help launch an American brand of health tonics called Holy! Water – a job that would involve moving to the US.
I was granted my trade Nafta work visa, which allows Canadian and Mexican citizens to work in the US in specific professional occupations, on my second attempt. It goes without saying, then, that I have no criminal record. I also love the US and consider myself to be a kind, hard-working person.
I started working in California and travelled back and forth between Canada and the US multiple times without any complications – until one day, upon returning to the US, a border officer questioned me about my initial visa denial and subsequent visa approval. He asked why I had gone to the San Diego border the second time to apply. I explained that that was where my lawyer’s offices were, and that he had wanted to accompany me to ensure there were no issues.
After a long interrogation, the officer told me it seemed “shady” and that my visa hadn’t been properly processed. He claimed I also couldn’t work for a company in the US that made use of hemp – one of the beverage ingredients. He revoked my visa, and told me I could still work for the company from Canada, but if I wanted to return to the US, I would need to reapply.
I was devastated; I had just started building a life in California. I stayed in Canada for the next few months, and was eventually offered a similar position with a different health and wellness brand.
I restarted the visa process and returned to the same immigration office at the San Diego border, since they had processed my visa before and I was familiar with it. Hours passed, with many confused opinions about my case. The officer I spoke to was kind but told me that, due to my previous issues, I needed to apply for my visa through the consulate. I told her I hadn’t been aware I needed to apply that way, but had no problem doing it.
Then she said something strange: “You didn’t do anything wrong. You are not in trouble, you are not a criminal.”
I remember thinking: Why would she say that? Of course I’m not a criminal!
She then told me they had to send me back to Canada. That didn’t concern me; I assumed I would simply book a flight home. But as I sat searching for flights, a man approached me.
“Come with me,” he said.
There was no explanation, no warning. He led me to a room, took my belongings from my hands and ordered me to put my hands against the wall. A woman immediately began patting me down. The commands came rapid-fire, one after another, too fast to process.
They took my shoes and pulled out my shoelaces.
“What are you doing? What is happening?” I asked.
“You are being detained.”
“I don’t understand. What does that mean? For how long?”
“I don’t know.”
That would be the response to nearly every question I would ask over the next two weeks: “I don’t know.”
They brought me downstairs for a series of interviews and medical questions, searched my bags and told me I had to get rid of half my belongings because I couldn’t take everything with me.
“Take everything with me where?” I asked.
A woman asked me for the name of someone they could contact on my behalf. In moments like this, you realize you don’t actually know anyone’s phone number anymore. By some miracle, I had recently memorized my best friend Britt’s number because I had been putting my grocery points on her account.
I gave them her phone number.
They handed me a mat and a folded-up sheet of aluminum foil.
“What is this?”
“Your blanket.”
“I don’t understand.”
I was taken to a tiny, freezing cement cell with bright fluorescent lights and a toilet. There were five other women lying on their mats with the aluminum sheets wrapped over them, looking like dead bodies. The guard locked the door behind me.
For two days, we remained in that cell, only leaving briefly for food. The lights never turned off, we never knew what time it was and no one answered our questions. No one in the cell spoke English, so I either tried to sleep or meditate to keep from having a breakdown. I didn’t trust the food, so I fasted, assuming I wouldn’t be there long.
On the third day, I was finally allowed to make a phone call. I called Britt and told her that I didn’t understand what was happening, that no one would tell me when I was going home, and that she was my only contact.
They gave me a stack of paperwork to sign and told me I was being given a five-year ban unless I applied for re-entry through the consulate. The officer also said it didn’t matter whether I signed the papers or not; it was happening regardless.
I was so delirious that I just signed. I told them I would pay for my flight home and asked when I could leave.
No answer.
Then they moved me to another cell – this time with no mat or blanket. I sat on the freezing cement floor for hours. That’s when I realized they were processing me into real jail: the Otay Mesa Detention Center.
I was told to shower, given a jail uniform, fingerprinted and interviewed. I begged for information.
“How long will I be here?”
“I don’t know your case,” the man said. “Could be days. Could be weeks. But I’m telling you right now – you need to mentally prepare yourself for months.”
Months.
I felt like I was going to throw up.
I was taken to the nurse’s office for a medical check. She asked what had happened to me. She had never seen a Canadian there before. When I told her my story, she grabbed my hand and said: “Do you believe in God?”
I told her I had only recently found God, but that I now believed in God more than anything.
“I believe God brought you here for a reason,” she said. “I know it feels like your life is in a million pieces, but you will be OK. Through this, I think you are going to find a way to help others.”
At the time, I didn’t know what that meant. She asked if she could pray for me. I held her hands and wept.
I felt like I had been sent an angel.
I was then placed in a real jail unit: two levels of cells surrounding a common area, just like in the movies. I was put in a tiny cell alone with a bunk bed and a toilet.
The best part: there were blankets. After three days without one, I wrapped myself in mine and finally felt some comfort.
For the first day, I didn’t leave my cell. I continued fasting, terrified that the food might make me sick. The only available water came from the tap attached to the toilet in our cells or a sink in the common area, neither of which felt safe to drink.
Eventually, I forced myself to step out, meet the guards and learn the rules. One of them told me: “No fighting.”
“I’m a lover, not a fighter,” I joked. He laughed.
I asked if there had ever been a fight here.
“In this unit? No,” he said. “No one in this unit has a criminal record.”
That’s when I started meeting the other women.
That’s when I started hearing their stories.
And that’s when I made a decision: I would never allow myself to feel sorry for my situation again. No matter how hard this was, I had to be grateful. Because every woman I met was in an even more difficult position than mine.
There were around 140 of us in our unit. Many women had lived and worked in the US legally for years but had overstayed their visas – often after reapplying and being denied. They had all been detained without warning.
If someone is a criminal, I agree they should be taken off the streets. But not one of these women had a criminal record. These women acknowledged that they shouldn’t have overstayed and took responsibility for their actions. But their frustration wasn’t about being held accountable; it was about the endless, bureaucratic limbo they had been trapped in.
The real issue was how long it took to get out of the system, with no clear answers, no timeline and no way to move forward. Once deported, many have no choice but to abandon everything they own because the cost of shipping their belongings back is too high.
I met a woman who had been on a road trip with her husband. She said they had 10-year work visas. While driving near the San Diego border, they mistakenly got into a lane leading to Mexico. They stopped and told the agent they didn’t have their passports on them, expecting to be redirected. Instead, they were detained. They are both pastors.
I met a family of three who had been living in the US for 11 years with work authorizations. They paid taxes and were waiting for their green cards. Every year, the mother had to undergo a background check, but this time, she was told to bring her whole family. When they arrived, they were taken into custody and told their status would now be processed from within the detention center.
Another woman from Canada had been living in the US with her husband who was detained after a traffic stop. She admitted she had overstayed her visa and accepted that she would be deported. But she had been stuck in the system for almost six weeks because she hadn’t had her passport. Who runs casual errands with their passport?
One woman had a 10-year visa. When it expired, she moved back to her home country, Venezuela. She admitted she had overstayed by one month before leaving. Later, she returned for a vacation and entered the US without issue. But when she took a domestic flight from Miami to Los Angeles, she was picked up by Ice and detained. She couldn’t be deported because Venezuela wasn’t accepting deportees. She didn’t know when she was getting out.
There was a girl from India who had overstayed her student visa for three days before heading back home. She then came back to the US on a new, valid visa to finish her master’s degree and was handed over to Ice due to the three days she had overstayed on her previous visa.
There were women who had been picked up off the street, from outside their workplaces, from their homes. All of these women told me that they had been detained for time spans ranging from a few weeks to 10 months. One woman’s daughter was outside the detention center protesting for her release.
That night, the pastor invited me to a service she was holding. A girl who spoke English translated for me as the women took turns sharing their prayers – prayers for their sick parents, for the children they hadn’t seen in weeks, for the loved ones they had been torn away from.
Then, unexpectedly, they asked if they could pray for me. I was new here, and they wanted to welcome me. They formed a circle around me, took my hands and prayed. I had never felt so much love, energy and compassion from a group of strangers in my life. Everyone was crying.
At 3am the next day, I was woken up in my cell.
“Pack your bag. You’re leaving.”
I jolted upright. “I get to go home?”
The officer shrugged. “I don’t know where you’re going.”
Of course. No one ever knew anything.
I grabbed my things and went downstairs, where 10 other women stood in silence, tears streaming down their faces. But these weren’t happy tears. That was the moment I learned the term “transferred”.
For many of these women, detention centers had become a twisted version of home. They had formed bonds, established routines and found slivers of comfort in the friendships they had built. Now, without warning, they were being torn apart and sent somewhere new. Watching them say goodbye, clinging to each other, was gut-wrenching.
I had no idea what was waiting for me next. In hindsight, that was probably for the best.
Our next stop was Arizona, the San Luis Regional Detention Center. The transfer process lasted 24 hours, a sleepless, grueling ordeal. This time, men were transported with us. Roughly 50 of us were crammed into a prison bus for the next five hours, packed together – women in the front, men in the back. We were bound in chains that wrapped tightly around our waists, with our cuffed hands secured to our bodies and shackles restraining our feet, forcing every movement into a slow, clinking struggle.
When we arrived at our next destination, we were forced to go through the entire intake process all over again, with medical exams, fingerprinting – and pregnancy tests; they lined us up in a filthy cell, squatting over a communal toilet, holding Dixie cups of urine while the nurse dropped pregnancy tests in each of our cups. It was disgusting.
We sat in freezing-cold jail cells for hours, waiting for everyone to be processed. Across the room, one of the women suddenly spotted her husband. They had both been detained and were now seeing each other for the first time in weeks.
The look on her face – pure love, relief and longing – was something I’ll never forget.
We were beyond exhausted. I felt like I was hallucinating.
The guard tossed us each a blanket: “Find a bed.”
There were no pillows. The room was ice cold, and one blanket wasn’t enough. Around me, women lay curled into themselves, heads covered, looking like a room full of corpses. This place made the last jail feel like the Four Seasons.
I kept telling myself: Do not let this break you.
Thirty of us shared one room. We were given one Styrofoam cup for water and one plastic spoon that we had to reuse for every meal. I eventually had to start trying to eat and, sure enough, I got sick. None of the uniforms fit, and everyone had men’s shoes on. The towels they gave us to shower were hand towels. They wouldn’t give us more blankets. The fluorescent lights shined on us 24/7.
Everything felt like it was meant to break you. Nothing was explained to us. I wasn’t given a phone call. We were locked in a room, no daylight, with no idea when we would get out.
I tried to stay calm as every fiber of my being raged towards panic mode. I didn’t know how I would tell Britt where I was. Then, as if sent from God, one of the women showed me a tablet attached to the wall where I could send emails. I only remembered my CEO’s email from memory. I typed out a message, praying he would see it.
He responded.
Through him, I was able to connect with Britt. She told me that they were working around the clock trying to get me out. But no one had any answers; the system made it next to impossible. I told her about the conditions in this new place, and that was when we decided to go to the media.
She started working with a reporter and asked whether I would be able to call her so she could loop him in. The international phone account that Britt had previously tried to set up for me wasn’t working, so one of the other women offered to let me use her phone account to make the call.
We were all in this together.
With nothing to do in my cell but talk, I made new friends – women who had risked everything for the chance at a better life for themselves and their families.
Through them, I learned the harsh reality of seeking asylum. Showing me their physical scars, they explained how they had paid smugglers anywhere from $20,000 to $60,000 to reach the US border, enduring brutal jungles and horrendous conditions.
One woman had been offered asylum in Mexico within two weeks but had been encouraged to keep going to the US. Now, she was stuck, living in a nightmare, separated from her young children for months. She sobbed, telling me how she felt like the worst mother in the world.
Many of these women were highly educated and spoke multiple languages. Yet, they had been advised to pretend they didn’t speak English because it would supposedly increase their chances of asylum.
Some believed they were being used as examples, as warnings to others not to try to come.
Women were starting to panic in this new facility, and knowing I was most likely the first person to get out, they wrote letters and messages for me to send to their families.
It felt like we had all been kidnapped, thrown into some sort of sick psychological experiment meant to strip us of every ounce of strength and dignity.
We were from different countries, spoke different languages and practiced different religions. Yet, in this place, none of that mattered. Everyone took care of each other. Everyone shared food. Everyone held each other when someone broke down. Everyone fought to keep each other’s hope alive.
I got a message from Britt. My story had started to blow up in the media.
Almost immediately after, I was told I was being released.
My Ice agent, who had never spoken to me, told my lawyer I could have left sooner if I had signed a withdrawal form, and that they hadn’t known I would pay for my own flight home.
From the moment I arrived, I begged every officer I saw to let me pay for my own ticket home. Not a single one of them ever spoke to me about my case.
To put things into perspective: I had a Canadian passport, lawyers, resources, media attention, friends, family and even politicians advocating for me. Yet, I was still detained for nearly two weeks.
Imagine what this system is like for every other person in there.
A small group of us were transferred back to San Diego at 2am – one last road trip, once again shackled in chains. I was then taken to the airport, where two officers were waiting for me. The media was there, so the officers snuck me in through a side door, trying to avoid anyone seeing me in restraints. I was beyond grateful that, at the very least, I didn’t have to walk through the airport in chains.
To my surprise, the officers escorting me were incredibly kind, and even funny. It was the first time I had laughed in weeks.
I asked if I could put my shoelaces back on.
“Yes,” one of them said with a grin. “But you better not run.”
“Yeah,” the other added. “Or we’ll have to tackle you in the airport. That’ll really make the headlines.”
I laughed, then told them I had spent a lot of time observing the guards during my detention and I couldn’t believe how often I saw humans treating other humans with such disregard. “But don’t worry,” I joked. “You two get five stars.”
When I finally landed in Canada, my mom and two best friends were waiting for me. So was the media. I spoke to them briefly, numb and delusional from exhaustion.
It was surreal listening to my friends recount everything they had done to get me out: working with lawyers, reaching out to the media, making endless calls to detention centers, desperately trying to get through to Ice or anyone who could help. They said the entire system felt rigged, designed to make it nearly impossible for anyone to get out.
The reality became clear: Ice detention isn’t just a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s a business. These facilities are privately owned and run for profit.
Companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group receive government funding based on the number of people they detain, which is why they lobby for stricter immigration policies. It’s a lucrative business: CoreCivic made over $560m from Ice contracts in a single year. In 2024, GEO Group made more than $763m from Ice contracts.
The more detainees, the more money they make. It stands to reason that these companies have no incentive to release people quickly. What I had experienced was finally starting to make sense.
The reality became clear: Ice detention isn’t just a bureaucratic nightmare. It’s a business. These facilities are privately owned and run for profit.
Companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group receive government funding based on the number of people they detain, which is why they lobby for stricter immigration policies. It’s a lucrative business: CoreCivic made over $560m from Ice contracts in a single year. In 2024, GEO Group made more than $763m from Ice contracts.
The more detainees, the more money they make. It stands to reason that these companies have no incentive to release people quickly. What I had experienced was finally starting to make sense.
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theres bikes around the city you can rent but you have to use an app that needs your drivers license. theres buses that drive right to your destination, but if you dont have change you need the app. you can wash your car here if you sign into the app. you can go to the bathroom here you just have to unlock it with the app that needs your location on. you can order at this restaurant if you scan the code and download the app. im losing my freaking mind
I got my phone and wallet stolen once and the amount of things I couldn’t fucking do without The App was bonkers. I couldn’t order an Uber or the bus home because no phone or wallet, so I had to walk home based on directions written on a sticky note. I couldn’t do my laundry even though I had change in my apartment because my building’s laundry machines required The App. I couldn’t log into my school email because my school’s email requires two factor authentication and will ONLY take a phone number, not another email address. I had a hard as fuck time getting new cards set up with my bank because in order to do that I needed to log into The App. I couldn’t get any packages that were delivered to me because my building’s locker system was app based. So on and so forth.
We should not have this fucking single point of failure like this.
how individualistic of capitalism to not only innovate a singular point of failure, but to put it directly in your hand and render it Your Problem if anything goes wrong