Protesting a concentration camp in Nebraska

Estamos aquí por ustedes

Luke O'Neil

18 Aug 2026 • 15 min read

Today Tynan Stewart reports from a protest in McCook, Nebraska against one of our many concentration camps.

"But rather than rallying the base in any meaningful sense, the naked barbarism of the Trump administration has galvanized even people here in the rural heart of the Midwest. The so-called 'Real America.'"

Stewart previously reported for Hell World on the Stop Cop City movement in Dallas.

First a new piece by me. Then some more stuff after that.

My ailments

I spent like five or ten minutes trying to coax a little spider out of the bathtub so I could get in to soak in peace. On account of my ailments.

I always hate the dawning recognition that I’m inside of a metaphor but even more so when I can tell it’s a pedestrian one. This spider's life or death wasn't even creatively inspiring. I already did a whole spider routine last time.

How are the people who kill us walking around out there not constantly bedeviled? I am routinely bedeviled and I haven’t even done anything evil. I can barely kill a spider without having an existential crisis over it. I am sometimes overcome by weltschmerz whenever I throw out an old toothbrush.

You’ve served me well old friend but now it is your time to go to the trash dump. We have the watch.

That type of thing.

And yet these people whose job it is to represent our interests seem to float freely through the world unbothered and unmolested by either conscience or grief. What has it got to be like to be able to live like that?

I saved it anyway. The spider. Insisted upon it the emancipation of the open screen window like Simba’s annunciation whereafter it presumably went on to live a long and fulfilling life as a spider however long that is on average. Eating as many bugs as it cared to.

Ok well I looked it up and it’s between thirty years on the upper end if you're a tarantula which is fucking crazy to think about and a few months on the low end if you’re a common household spider which sounds about right and which this guy surely was. I guess there is a species called a trapdoor spider than can live up to forty or thereabouts. The oldest one they ever knew of was forty three. That spider was losing its spider hair and had joint pain.

So many joints too.

The spider women live longer than the spider men obviously. No hyphens. Pretty much across the board. I don’t know why that also tends to be true in most species including ours. Probably because God wants them to have a little respite at the end there to be left alone. To not have someone in their house.

Every now and again you hear about a type of insect mating where the gal lets the guy hit it and then chops his head off and you go lol I wish that were me.

Which part though? Which part do we long for more?

I just remembered the song about spiders and water spouts and now I feel stupid. I didn’t have to do anything to help in the first place. It would have lived a happy life whether I had ever come along or not and so would you.

Estamos aquí por ustedes

by Tynan Stewart

Drive north from the city of McCook in southwest Nebraska and you'll soon see the signs. There are five along the roadside, all painted in black and white and most with text large enough to be visible from passing cars.

"How much is enough?" asks one. "Shame on Pillen" reads another in a callout of our state's conservative governor. And then a message in Spanish.

"Somos amigos de los inmigrantes."

Another sign has a long list of names including Leo Cruz Silva, Victor Manuel Diaz, Renee Nicole Good, Alex Pretti, and many others. All were people killed — directly or indirectly — by ICE or the Border Patrol.

The final sign, added later than the others, reads "We have not forgotten." It's a message intended not just for motorists, but also for the people being held in the immigration detention center just up the road.

"There's so much suffering going on inside," Deborah Walters told me.

She and her husband John are longtime residents of McCook, and they own the field in which the signs are planted. I was one of hundreds who arrived by the literal busload on Saturday for a rally and vigil on their land.

For me it was a grueling journey — a seven hour round trip in a friend's truck with no AC in the middle of August — but I was determined to be there. The detention center, which opened late last year and housed immigrants kidnapped from Minnesota during Operation Metro Surge, is an ugly blight on the state's conscience. I wanted to see how Nebraskans would respond to that moral injury. More than anything I was curious what local residents thought about this concentration camp that had been foisted on them by the federal government and Governor Jim Pillen, a man who worked closely with the Trump administration to bring it to the Cornhusker State.

"We just felt so helpless," Deborah told me. "How can we help these people? We don't know who they are. We see on the news that families are being separated. They're taking the husband and father and locking them up somewhere, and families don't even know where they went. And we thought, well, maybe we should protest. And since my husband owned this land, he said, ‘We can protest out here.’”

Saturday's rally was the third such event organized on their property, though the Walters said this was the biggest by far. Previous protests were mostly attended by locals. But this time folks came from Omaha and Lincoln, North Platte and Kearney. There were pastors and poets, musicians and lawyers and farmers and even a group of women who dress themselves as Margaret Atwood-esque Handmaids.

From where we stood you could just make out the layers of razor wire that have sprung up on the detention center's fences like some noxious silver weed. But less than a year ago the nearby prison was a markedly different place. The so-called Work Ethic Camp was a state-run rehabilitation facility for nonviolent offenders. There was a garden tended by inmates who, according to locals I spoke with, often served the community by working at the food bank, putting up Christmas lights, and cleaning the fairgrounds.

Now the garden has been bulldozed and replaced by an encircling road constantly patrolled by white pickup trucks. The new immigrant detainees are never seen in town.

The transformation is fitting because the new detention center — like all the other manifestations of Stephen Miller's mass deportation agenda — has cruelty baked into its DNA. I haven't even mentioned its unholy, alliterative nickname yet because typing it out makes me feel a bit sick. But it's an important part of the story and I can't avoid it. The (ugh) "Cornhusker Clink," much like "Alligator Alcatraz" and "Speedway Slammer," doesn't just represent the physical infrastructure of fascism, it's also a piece of agit-slop, a weapon of propaganda designed to help the dehumanization and state-sponsored suffering go down more easily. The names are simultaneously a grotesque little gift for too-online members of the MAGA faithful and a “haha fuck you” to kind of person who cares about human dignity.

As I wrote last August, when news of the prison first broke, “If you're the type of person who wants to defend the systematic mass deportation of immigrants — but would rather not have to think about the unpleasant details of what it looks like in practice — having a cute little nickname you can use to trigger the libs is a useful shield against reality.”

But rather than rallying the base in any meaningful sense, the naked barbarism of the Trump administration has galvanized even people here in the rural heart of the Midwest. The so-called “Real America.” Saturday's protest wasn't just a gathering of leftists. Sure, the Lincoln chapter of the DSA had a table, but I saw many faces (and costumes) I recognized from previous No Kings protests. The Pissed Off Grandmas, a group whose political advocacy includes singing anthems like "This Little Vote Of Mine" and wearing silly hats, were included in the rally’s lineup of speakers. The gathering felt like the textbook definition of a big tent opposition party.

As someone who’s attended protest after protest in Lincoln, where I live, the turnout was invigorating. The last time Lincoln activists tried to agitate against the McCook detention center, nearly a year ago, the showing was depressingly meagre and disorganized — and that rally happened down the street, not three-and-a-half hours away. Yet despite suffering under a political system meant to wear us down, the last year of incessant horrors, including the imprisonment of one of our immigrant neighbors, has seemingly had the opposite effect.

But as I've said, it was the folks from McCook — the people living in a county that voted 83% for Trump three times in a row — who most interested me. People living in this part of the country are told, often, that whatever terrible consequences are inflicted on their communities are what they deserve. After all, they keep electing Republicans. But what about the people loudly and visibly resisting, not to mention the people they are rallying for? What do they deserve?

At the rally, I talked to Mary Haller, a retired physician assistant who used to work part-time in the detention center's clinic. Her employment predated its transformation and she, like others I spoke to, praised the Work Ethic Camp and the incarcerated people who used to work in the community. But the changes implemented by the Trump administration, including the drastic tightening of security, made it harder and harder for her to care for her patients.

"I finally just had to walk away. I didn't feel like a good person," she said.

I don't want to mislead you. It's not as though all of McCook is unhappy about the detention center. Every reporter who visits the city does their obligatory visit to a local cafe (or if you're the New York Times, an Arby's for some reason) and finds that one guy willing to defend the indefensible.

“We finally have a governor with a backbone,” one such man told a Nebraska News Service reporter earlier this year.

Diane Lyons, a McCook resident, told the crowd on Saturday that locals opposed to the center have staged other events, including a local No Kings protest. And every time they do, people online start blaming outside agitators from Colorado or Kansas, as though local resistance couldn’t possibly be organic.

"It's always on Facebook that buses and buses and buses are coming in with people from outside the community," she said. "So you guys have ruined it today because you brought the damn bus."

It's easy to mouth off to a reporter or post shit on the Internet. It's much harder to actively support a symbol of injustice. And despite weeks of advance organizing and prior warning from the groups behind the rally, there were no counter-protesters on Saturday. I heard a single chud yell "I love ICE!" from his truck window, but many more passing drivers honked and waved in apparent support.

Whether the rally's message of solidarity reached the immigrants being held in the McCook detention center I do not know. But it's possible that future victims of Trump's crackdown, as they arrive at the prison via the highway, will see the three new signs protesters left behind. "We are fighting for you," they read. "Estamos aquí por ustedes."

Tynan Stewart is a writer and journalist based in Lincoln, NE. He writes This Week In Lincoln, a newsletter about local politics, music and culture, and also blogs about many other things on his website.

Our beloved niece stayed over the other night and we had a lovely time but when she got here she said oh that's the same shirt you had on last time I saw you. Fucking cooked me.

I do wear the t-shirt in question a lot but in my defense I no longer care about that sort of thing. Is this what being chopped unc is?

The president has a lady Renfield that sleeps in the White House crawlspace and travels in the wheel-well of Air Force One so she can print out his posts for him on a portable printer and wipes the poopoo off of his giant ass and that's supposed to be funny?

Look I don't like the guy either but let's not take low blow shots at the gal just because she crawls out of the earth every day like the end of The Descent and washes most of the blood off before printing out the posts.

People have lost their minds man. Look at my college dean dog. I'm gonna flunk him out of school.

Did I type the final piece? For the most part, no. Did AI generate almost all of its wording? Yes. To describe that merely as light AI assistance would be dishonest. Was AI my ghostwriter? Yes. Plainly so. It did not merely correct my spelling, tidy my grammar or suggest the occasional sentence. It did almost all of the writing in the final piece.

That means the detectors were not wrong about the prose. What they could not detect was where the ideas came from, whose experience informed them, who directed the argument and who was prepared to take responsibility for it.

A good thread on using "AI" in universities

Shout out to these ladies on America Says who got zero correct answers on the Harry Potter question. They are free. Their minds are free. (I only got one by the way.)

Did you ever read this one of mine about California and game shows?

It goes in part like so:

The game shows though. There’s this one called America Says hosted by John Michael Higgins who is an absolute pro and a delight (and from Boston by the way). You will know him from the Christopher Guest movies and more recently from everyone being mad that his character in Licorice Pizza was racist. I don’t particularly have a take on that movie besides that it was some real California shit.

America Says is kind of like Family Feud in which teams called THE DOG PEOPLE or CHURCH PALS or THE UNEMPLOYED LA ACTORS TRYING TO GET ON TAPE have to answer questions based on surveys. Family Feud has more money so they can fly contestants in from around the country to showcase how uncanny America is on the macro level but the other shows like this just have to recruit people at the Glendale Galleria or whatever so it’s mostly the Californians.

In the final round the teams often get caught up on one of the clues like they were so close to winning the fifteen grand but they just could not clean the board and there’s this moment when the mean sounding buzzer goes off and they all stand there frowning and feeling dumb doing the aw shucks motions like you’d expect someone who just lost to do but more than that more than anything else they’re waiting for our man to turn over the missed answers so they can understand just how it was that they lost.

So they’re standing there dejected on TV thinking that if they learn the mistake that they had just made it will make it easier to accept the losing after the fact. Needing to comprehend what went wrong despite not being able to go back and change anything either way.

It’s like when you hear about someone dying that you only kind of know or used to know and you want to be able grasp how their passing transpired which has happened to me more times than I care to reflect on right now in the past few years like to my old musician friend in California a couple months ago for example. People you know enough to mourn but not enough to be officially looped in on the specifics. HOW DID HE DIE WHAT WAS IT? you want to scream at everyone but you can’t always ask that. You can’t walk into the room they died inside of like a doctor and look at the chart and frown.

The impulse is to want to understand whether or not you have to worry about losing in the same way as these poor assholes did or if you would have known the correct answer to counteract the riddle. If you would have survived long enough to show up on the next episode.

I’m not really a “now that’s real rock and roll” guy but that’s some real rock and roll. RIP Frank Beard.

RIYL going "ah hell" and "oh come on" a lot.

In somewhat related news this is good and appropriately maddening.

THERE'S A CRIMINAL culture tolerated within the Department of Homeland Security, the post-9/11 creation and bureaucratic parent of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). It has its roots in the century-long history of the abuse-ridden Border Patrol, and now it's metastasized to ICE. Their agents, kitted up like soldiers in warzones and wearing masks like criminals out for a score, kidnap and kill people in the name of enforcing civil—not criminal—law. As conspicuous as that criminal culture has become over the past year and a half, far less visible is its specific tolerance of sexual crime, including against children.

A new report by the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, released today, pulls back the curtain on a stunning level of sexual criminal behavior within ICE and CBP. Out of 152 cases of identified immigration officials or contractors accused or convicted of criminal behavior, 131 of them, or 86.2 percent, were charged with sex offenses. Seventy-eight of them—51 percent of the entire cohort—"committed sex offenses against children—the single largest category on the list," the report states. Cases involving a CBP officer, the report finds, "are more likely to involve underage victims" than those of an ICE officer. Yet fully half of ICE officers accused or convicted of sex offenses (12 of 24) had a minor as their victim.

And, again, these are just the agents known to be connected to such crimes. Indictments are rare. ICE and CBP officers who commit sex crimes are at the intersection of two different strains of impunity: the impunity typically extended to men for violence against women; and the impunity typically extended to officers of the law.

Please do not have them look like that.

Could be I'm too precious about this song but do we like this? Much to think about. It's a cover sure so do your thing but you kind of want the singer to be straining to belt it out like it's killing them not be sort of effortless.

I suppose all my favorite singers couldn't sing as the fella said. All my favorite singers couldn't sing.