Dehumanization as a Permission Structure for Cruelty

The image of Liam Conejo Ramos and his blue bunny hat will be with me always. And I will never forget the powerful stories of Epstein survivors who demand justice for the horrific abuses they endured as minors. There’s a connection between Liam and these women; a connection that extends to the many individuals currently held in immigration detention centers across the country — especially those who allege sexual assault — from Tacoma, Washington, to Dilley, Texas. In short, dehumanization leads to abuse.

Sexual assault in ICE detention is a rampant problem, because it is built into the structure of the system, a known risk, worsened by a lack of oversight and accountability. Just as abuse in detention facilities hides in plain sight, so do the allegations against Epstein and his associates. Powerful people decide whose bodies matter, whose stories are accepted, and whose suffering is treated as collateral damage in our quest to maintain power or avoid being overpowered.

The federal government is detaining vulnerable people and transporting them hundreds of miles away from their families, advocates, and legal aid. With almost no oversight and lawmakers facing barriers to touring local facilities, officers operate with a sense of impunity. This environment makes it easier for sexual violence to occur and much harder for victims to come forward. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) recently highlighted physical and sexual abuse perpetrated at the largest immigration detention facility in the U.S. Two detainees reported horrific instances of officers brutally assaulting them, describing officers grabbing and crushing their testicles. And in 2025, Georgia Senator Jon Ossoff published a report documenting over a thousand human rights violations in immigration detention centers, including cases of sexual abuse. These allegations are not aberrations. They are grounded in real human experiences. And the reports are not new. The Government Accountability Office published a report on serious cases of sexual abuse in ICE Detention in 2013, prompting a bipartison call for stronger protections against these abuses.

Those of us who work in sexual violence prevention and response know that confinement combined with impunity creates danger. Add systemic dehumanization, and the situation is a recipe for disaster.

The dehumanization we see across the United States forms a permission structure for cruelty. When the government labels people as “invaders,” “animals,” “aliens,” or “criminals,” it conditions the public to view their suffering as deserved and acceptable. Dehumanizing language allows cruelty to flourish.

Then, when abuse is revealed within these institutions, we resort to blaming a “bad guard.” This simple (and erroneous) explanation distracts us from the systemic issues at play. Our current system concentrates power in the hands of a few, who are then trusted to scrutinize their own failures, and who look the other way when abuse happens in their midst. Look no further than the murders of Keith Porter, Jr., Renee Nicole Good, and Alex Pretti.

What follows is a familiar and painful pattern: Those who speak out against the abuse are labeled as liars or troublemakers. They are discredited or their complaints are dismissed as unverified. Meanwhile, the detention center and the broader federal government accused of wrongdoing positions itself as the victim of false narratives. But the individuals who reported the abuse remain trapped within that same system, their safety and freedom still controlled by those they accused of harm.

When powerful entities manipulate us into believing that some people are less than human, our moral outrage becomes conditional. In other words, we tolerate these injustices because we view some lives as less valuable than others. Abuse becomes an unfortunate, but necessary, reality, and accountability becomes optional. The underlying conditions that make some people disposable remain unchanged and we are left with a system that continues to inflict and allow suffering.

Now, enter the Epstein files. Their slow, painful release represents the same dynamic playing out over and over again in communities and immigration detention facilities. Power protects power.

In late January 2026, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) began releasing a massive trove of millions of documents, emails, images, videos, and other records tied to investigations of Epstein and his associates. News coverage of this release shows how powerful and famous people remained close to Epstein even after his conviction.

Sexual exploitation thrives on secrecy and social permission.

This entire Epstein case functions as its own private border wall. The wall shields networks of powerful people from scrutiny and at the same time frames vulnerable people as opportunists. The wall allows a dichotomy. At the same time “everybody knew it” and “nobody can prove it.”

And it reveals another uncomfortable reality: Even with volumes of material, legal accountability will not follow. Todd Blanche, the US Deputy Attorney General, recently stated that no new charges would occur. The gap between what seems morally obvious and what the system will allow is not unique to Epstein. Survivors in detention know that gap intimately.

Put these stories side by side, and the pattern sharpens. In immigration detention, brown bodies are hidden from public view, physically controlled, and rendered politically expendable. In elite exploitation, powerful men socially control young girls through money, fear, NDAs, and reputational intimidation. Social control of victims grants credibility to powerful men. In both contexts, institutions manage risk, limit liability, control information, minimize reputational damage to important players, and keep the machine moving. All the while, they dishonor the basic humanity of those caught in the machine.

The mechanism is the same even when the aesthetics differ. In immigration detention facilities, the uniform and the cage signal authority. In the Epstein universe, the suit, the philanthropy, and the private jet do. But both rely on a social agreement — sometimes explicit, often silent — about whose pain matters.

It is time we start taking the conditions that enable sexual violence seriously.

For immigration detention, that means significantly reducing the number of people we are detaining, increasing independent oversight with real consequences, protecting whistleblowers and complainants, ensuring confidential reporting pathways, guaranteeing access to counsel and advocates, and ending the isolation that makes coercion so effective. Oversight findings that identify systemic deficiencies should trigger enforceable remedies.

For the Epstein revelations, it means resisting the comforting myth that exploitation is mostly about monsters. It’s about networks, gatekeepers, institutions, and social incentives. Transparency matters — but transparency without accountability can become its own kind of harm, especially when survivors watch yet another news cycle focused on famous names while the system simply shrugs potential consequences away.

And across both, it means rejecting dehumanization wherever it shows up so that we can never again look away.

If you want to connect these dots with integrity, start here: Sexual violence flourishes wherever people are made disposable. Sometimes the disposability is racialized and bureaucratic, happening behind barbed wire. Sometimes it’s gilded, happening behind the scenes with money and influence. But the moral test is the same — do we build systems that make harm easy, or systems that make accountability and safety non-negotiable?