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For decades, corporate media and elected officials have shown little interest in reporting by incarcerated individuals on the unchecked inhumane treatment and deplorable conditions inside U.S. jails, detention centers, and prisons.

But as a result of the Trump administration’s escalation of anti-immigrant violence and efforts to quell all dissent, professional journalists and writers, who normally are severely restricted from entering into the U.S.’s carceral facilities, are now themselves experiencing the harsh realities that nearly 2.1 million incarcerated people are subjected to daily in this country.

Inadvertently, this inside view has reaffirmed what incarcerated journalists have long reported: rampant deprivation of basic human necessities, denial of due process, medical neglect, and an unrestrained culture of blatant cruelty. It has also prompted renewed scrutiny of U.S. law enforcement, as well as both public and private prison agencies’ treatment of those under their control.

British journalist Sami Hamdi was traveling the country on a valid U.S. visa for a public speaking tour when he was abducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials at a California airport. The Trump administration revoked Hamdi’s visa in response to a campaign by far right social media influencers who didn’t like Hamdi’s criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. For more than two weeks, Hamdi endured the trauma of being held in multiple ICE jails.

“It felt unreal, almost like being in a movie,” Hamdi told Truthout in a recent interview.

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Hamdi described being treated like a subhuman during his detention by ICE officials. In addition to being held in painfully tight shackles for days, with his pleas to loosen them ignored, Hamdi said he and others were denied access to legal representation and medical treatment — people had to feign life-or-death emergencies to have a chance at seeing a medical professional.

Hamdi also told Truthout how he was forced to sleep in filthy, overcrowded cells, and to consume rotten food that made him violently ill. Others told him that experience was common for new detainees whose stomachs had not adjusted to their new diets. Since Hamdi’s time in ICE custody, many others, including 5-year old Liam Conejo Ramos and other young children, have reportedly suffered similar reactions to the contaminated food served in ICE facilities. Ramos’s case brought special attention to the conditions at the Dilley immigration jail, but those conditions are not unique, within ICE jails or the U.S. carceral system more broadly.

Hamdi’s story also resembles the account of Mario Guevara, a journalist originally from El Salvador who had resided in the U.S. legally for over 20 years. Arrested by local law enforcement officials in Georgia while covering a “No Kings” protest, ICE took him into their custody. He spent months in multiple immigration jails before being illegally deported back to the country from which he fled political prosecution decades earlier.

“I don’t know why ICE wants to continue treating me like a criminal,” Guevara wrote in a letter to the news outlet The Bitter Southerner during his detention. “It pains me to know that I have been denied every privilege and the right to be free when I have never committed any crime.”

Guevara wrote about how ICE officials unjustly held him in solitary confinement and denied him due process. Upon his release, Guevara stated he had to seek mental health treatment and start taking psychiatric medication to treat bouts of depression and recurring nightmares.

Then there’s the appalling abduction of Rümeysa Öztürk, a doctorate student at Tufts University. After co-authoring an op-ed for her campus newspaper, The Tufts Daily, that acknowledged the genocide in Gaza, Öztürk was grabbed off the streets by ICE agents. The deportation case against Öztürk was finally thrown out earlier this month, almost a year after her abduction, but the administration still could seek review of that decision.

For the next five months, Öztürk, a Fulbright scholar, was shackled and transferred to ICE jails as far away as Louisiana. While not a career journalist herself, Öztürk also shared........

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