DHS denies torture, beatings in ICE detention; deportees recount harrowing details; border czar denies terrorizing children.

As it ran on the front

The Department of Homeland Security has been unambiguous: reports of torture, beatings, and medical neglect inside immigration detention facilities are not substantiated by the department's own review. This reporter takes the department at its word, because that is what the department is for. Every facility operates under detailed standards covering medical access, use-of-force protocol, and reporting mechanisms, and any deviation from those standards would be documented, investigated, and — did I say documented? What this reporter means is that deviations would be handled internally, through channels not typically shared outside the department, which is standard practice for any law enforcement operation and is not, itself, evidence of anything being hidden, exactly.

Separately, and this reporter wants to be careful here, deportees sent to Liberia have given detailed, on-the-record accounts of their treatment during expulsion — accounts that use words like 'harrowing,' which is a strong word, an editorializing word, a word this reporter would not personally choose, except that it is the word the deportees themselves used, on the record, about their own bodies. That is not this desk's characterization. That is testimony. The department's position and the testimony occupy the same news cycle without occupying the same facts, and reconciling them is, per the department, ongoing.…