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A South Florida immigrant detention center that’s been the subject of numerous allegations of poor conditions and abuse was the national leader in using physical force against detainees, according to leaked incident reports.

Use-of-force data published by The Washington Post in conjunction with a May 4 story show that staff at the Krome North Service Processing Center, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center on the western edge of Miami-Dade County, reported more uses of physical force against immigrant detainees than any other detention center over a two-year period.

The Post culled the data from hundreds of internal ICE emails, called the “Daily Detainee Assault Report,” which summarizes incidents of physical force against detainees. The reports covered 98 ICE detention facilities from January 2024 to February 2026, covering the last year of the Biden administration and the first year of President Donald Trump’s second term in office.

The data show that Krome reported 176 uses of force over 26 months, accounting for 12 percent of all 1,460 documented use-of-force incidents captured in the data. Reported use of force at Krome appeared to have decreased between the last year of the Biden administration and the first year of Trump’s second term, dropping from 109 reports to 62.

However, that drop coincides with a nationwide documentation collapse that occurred several months after Trump took office. Biden-era reports often contained short narratives of the incidents, including the circumstances and types of force used, but those narratives largely disappear from ICE reports in 2025, replaced by boilerplate language.

Detainee injuries are still reported, but not their exact cause. For example, a September 2025 report notes that a Bahamian detainee at Krome “sustained several contusions and a lacerated lip,” but all other details are omitted.

Katie Blankenship, an attorney at Sanctuary of the South, an immigrant legal aid organization that is involved in several lawsuits challenging conditions at South Florida immigration detention centers, is not surprised by the numbers.

Blankenship says Krome is the largest ICE facility in the region. The data also don’t cover county jails and other holding facilities that aren’t subject to the same reporting standards.

“Lack of transparency is the norm,” Blankenship says. “Are these numbers troubling? Absolutely, because just what they self-report is terrifying, so imagine what’s actually happening.”

Krome was also a significant outlier in its use of four-point restraint chairs, one of the most extreme methods of restraining someone.

During the Biden administration, 23 incident reports from Krome mention the use of four-point restraint chairs. There are only 38 restraint-chair uses total in the dataset, meaning that Krome accounts for 61 percent of all documented uses of restraint chairs during the two-year period. The Trump-era reports never mention restraint chairs, although that is probably due to the previously mentioned switch to boilerplate language.

“I don’t know why this is, but for some reason Krome has been using these four-point restraint chairs for years,” Blankenship says. She says she had a client at Krome during the Biden administration “who suffered basically complete nerve damage from the restraints on this chair.”

“It’s not typically used as restraint,” Blankenship says. “It’s used as corporal punishment, which is forbidden in civil detention. They shouldn’t be doing that at all.”

In one 2024 incident included in the data, a wheelchair-bound detainee in Krome’s medical unit was placed in restraints after becoming agitated: “While being transported in a wheelchair, the detainee resisted [Krome] staff, refused…instructions, became aggressive, and attempted to eject himself from the wheelchair, prompting them to use a calculated use of force to put him in a four-point restraint chair and spit mask.”

Krome has been the subject of numerous reports by civil rights groups and news outlets. A report published last July by Human Rights Watch, Americans for Immigrant Justice, and Sanctuary of the South, found that staff at Krome and two other South Florida immigrant detention centers “subjected detained individuals to dangerously substandard medical care, overcrowding, abusive treatment, and restrictions on access to legal and psychosocial support.”

The report echoed multiple news stories that similarly documented allegations of overcrowding, filth, and negligence at the Krome detention center.

As the number of people in federal immigration detention has swelled due to the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, deaths in ICE custody have reached an all-time high, and allegations of abuse and neglect continue to pour out of federal detention centers.

“You’re just seeing this level of apathy and cruelty that’s literally killing people,” Blankenship says.

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The post A Florida Detention Center Was the Harshest in the Country. Then ICE Stopped Tracking Details on Use of Force. appeared first on Reason.com.

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Please enjoy the latest edition of Short Circuit, a weekly feature written by a bunch of people at the Institute for Justice.

New case! Pennsylvania requires real estate brokers to maintain a physical office space even if they don’t need one and never use it. Indeed, IJ client Kevin Gaughen’s office has been visited more often by state inspectors—who ensure there is a conference table, a landline phone, a filing cabinet, and an outdoor sign—than by actual clients. The rule chiefly serves to impose unnecessary costs that are harder for small brokers to absorb than big firms. So this week Kevin teamed up with IJ to challenge the rule under the Pennsylvania Constitution, which protects the right to earn an honest living free of unreasonable regulations. Click here to learn more.

New on the Short Circuit podcast: We take a long drink from the Fifth Circuit’s waters. Including those of the Panama Canal.

1. In 2022, New York passes the Concealed Carry Improvement Act, banning the possession of firearms (1) on private property where the owner has not given express consent to the carrying of firearms, and (2) in public parks. Gun-rights advocates sue. Second Circuit: The private property restriction violates the Second Amendment, but there’s enough of a historical basis to uphold the restriction in public parks. Dissent: No there isn’t.
2. Maryland prohibits renewable energy suppliers from advertising “green power” unless the electricity is at least 51% renewable or backed by renewable energy credits from within a specific geographic region. As a result, an energy company whose electricity is fully backed by renewable energy credits from outside that region cannot advertise its electricity as “green.” Energy companies seek a preliminary injunction. Fourth Circuit: Granted. None of the regulated terms are inherently misleading, nor has the state shown the law will clear up consumer confusion.
3. Over 100 W. Va. local gov’ts sue Express Scripts for a boatload of cash over its part in furthering opioid addiction. They want to create a fund that would then spend money on Good Things. Express Scripts: We get a jury trial! District court: No. Fourth Circuit: On the first day of kindergarten law students learn that there is law and there is equity. The Seventh Amendment guarantees juries for the first but not the second. And asking for a boatload of cash is very much the first. Mandamused!
4. “Death and taxes,” that’s what they say, amirite? What they don’t tell you is that taxes can follow you beyond the grave, or at least can follow your spouse. Learn from the Fourth Circuit about how a couple’s taxes that were both underpaid and overpaid in the early 1980s led to decades of squabbles and litigation with the IRS—something to do with the IRS accidentally overpaying interest—and how the widow now claims it was her husband’s fault anyway. Also, the IRS loses this round, so that’s nice.
5. In 2020, a fugitive evades police officers from McKinney, Tex. in a high-speed chase, then breaks into Vicki Baker’s home, where he barricades himself inside. A SWAT team tears the house apart—saturating it with noxious gas—in an effort to capture the fugitive (he commits suicide). The officers promise Ms. Baker that the city would compensate her, but the city refuses to pay. Fifth Circuit: The Texas Constitution requires the city to pay the owner the $60k it cost her to repair the house and replace damaged items. (This is an IJ case. For a lovingly crafted podcast episode on what the federal Constitution requires, click here.)
6. After learning that probationer has burglarized his ex’s Beaumont, Tex. home and threatened to murder her, federal probation officer tells the ex that she is safe at home and that the officer will seek an arrest warrant immediately. Instead, the officer does nothing for two days, and the probationer returns and stabs the ex, leaving her a quadriplegic. Fifth Circuit: When an officer decides on a proper course of action and then negligently fails to follow through, that is not the discretion excepted by the Federal Tort Claims Act’s discretionary function exception. Case undismissed. To trial this must go.
7. We don’t lightly use the f-word (“forum-shopping,” obviously), but it is curious that Starbucks’s challenge to NLRB rulings about two stores in upstate New York has landed in the Fifth Circuit. One of the employees at issue used the other f-word quite liberally in sexist remarks about his co-workers, and the court thinks the NLRB should give that a closer look before concluding that firing said potty-mouth was a labor-law violation.
8. In which the Fifth Circuit (unpublished) holds that a statute commanding pipeline companies to establish a particular maximum operating pressure for their pipelines does not implicitly require the companies to maintain records proving that they’ve done so, especially when a totally different part of the statute governs what records they have to keep.
9. Look, we understand that judicial opinions have to focus on the dispositive facts in a case, but we still think the Fifth Circuit (unpublished) could have given us at least a little more about this DNA expert who “was impeached by her training in veterinary medicine, running of an unaccredited laboratory, and involvement ‘in the DNA quest for Bigfoot.'”
10. Texas felon is convicted for possessing a firearm, challenges the conviction under the Second Amendment. Fifth Circuit (per curiam): Easy-peasy affirmance under our precedent. Concurrence (Judge Ho): But categorical lifetime disarmament for all felonies is a problem. Concurrence (Judge Oldham): This is an easy-peasy affirmance, even though our precedent is egregiously wrong.
11. Man is convicted of burying three people alive. This despite the lack of any physical evidence implicating him, and his conviction hinges on the since-recanted testimony of a snitch. He unwillingly and badly represented himself at trial, which the Tennessee Supreme Court blessed on account of his forfeiting his right to counsel. The Sixth Circuit (2018) denied habeas relief, and the state set his execution for May 21, 2026. Before that happens, he wants fingerprints and DNA from the crime scene (which don’t match him) to be tested against an alternative suspect, but the state courts refuse under Tennessee law. Sixth Circuit (2026): And those statutes are constitutional. (Ed. note: Officials called off the execution after spending more than an hour trying to find a vein while he groaned in pain. The governor has since granted the man a one-year reprieve from execution.)
12. Seventh Circuit: “We see [] sloppy work in briefs fairly often, and almost always let it pass without comment as we try to focus on the merits of appeals. But … “
13. Feds’ letter to company: Your special brake-lights are illegal; tell us all your customers so we can inform them your product makes their cars inoperative, and we will fine you up to $26.3k per day if you don’t comply. District court: That letter is rough, but it’s not a “final” agency action you can challenge. Eighth Circuit (over a dissent): Yes it is.
14. Indigent criminal defendants in Benton County, Ark., sue for an injunction requiring state-court judge to appoint them counsel before their bail hearings. Eighth Circuit: But we have no reason to think you’ll be arrested again in the future, much less brought before the same judge. No standing!
15. Black Hawk County, Iowa jail requires inmates to sign “confessions of judgment” upon their release, binding them to pay fees for booking, room, and board. Two former inmates sue, claiming that the coerced confessions of judgment violate the Due Process Clause. Eighth Circuit: And contrary to the district court’s view, they do indeed have standing, since they say the confession-of-judgment workaround short-circuited their right to process. (Without the confessions, the jail would actually have to litigate a reimbursement action against them.) Case undismissed.
16. Eleventh Circuit (unpublished): Alabama state law does not immunize police officers from suit for making bogus arrests or filing made-up charges if the officer was acting out of personal animus. So the case against this officer, who is alleged to have arrested and charged the plaintiffs for complaining about him, can proceed.
17. And in en banc news, the Fourth Circuit will reconsider its decision allowing the military not to enlist people with undetectable viral levels of HIV. (With modern medication, such people can take a daily pill and be otherwise healthy.) A prior Fourth Circuit decision had held that the military could not discharge such people because of their HIV status, and the two decisions are, in technical legal terms, conflict-y.
18. And in more en banc news, the Sixth Circuit will not reconsider its decision that the owner of an Ohio-based trucking company lacked standing to sue his insurance company over racial discrimination related to a small-business grant program open only to black-owned businesses. The panel held that the owner should have applied for the grant even after learning his company was ineligible for it. Dissental (Judge Thapar): “If a hungry black customer—ready and willing to purchase lunch—walks up to a restaurant with a sign reading ‘Whites Only,’ does he need to open the door, request a table, and get thrown out to be harmed?”

New case! The federal gov’t is demanding that IJ client Tuncay Saydam—an 88-year-old retired computer-science professor (and truly delightful human)—pay $437,564 in penalties for unwittingly failing to file a short form identifying bank accounts he kept in his native Turkey. The feds say that not only are the penalties not “excessive,” but they’re not even “fines,” meaning the Eighth Amendment’s Excessive Fines Clause doesn’t apply at all. Which is gale-force bananapants. Click here to learn more.

The post Short Circuit: An inexhaustive weekly compendium of rulings from the federal courts of appeal appeared first on Reason.com.

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Rumors about the astonishing weight loss potential of Eli Lilly’s triple hormone drug retatrutide have been circulating for months. The results of its Phase 3 clinical trial, just released by the drugmaker, amply justify the buzz. The company reports that “participants on 12 mg retatrutide lost an average of 70.3 lbs (28.3%) over 80 weeks with 45.3% of participants achieving ≥30% weight loss, a level long associated with bariatric surgery.”

Retatrutide is the latest compound to emerge from the revolution in hormonal treatment begun with the introduction of semaglutides like Ozempic in 2018 to treat Type 2 diabetes. Rebranded as Wegovy, the compound was approved for weight loss in June 2021.

Perhaps it’s just a coincidence, but adult obesity peaked at around the same time.

Besides helping people to control their diabetes and to lose substantial amounts of fat, these compounds appear to offer many additional health benefits. These include improved outcomes in people with cardiovascular, kidney, liver, arthritis, sleep apnea, and substance abuse disorders, along with reducing inflammation generally. More recent data suggest that these compounds also significantly reduce the risk of cancer overall and lower the risk of cancer spread. Recent research somewhat allays concerns that taking the compounds not only reduces fat but also muscle mass.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. initially disparaged the compounds for treating diabetes and obesity, instead insisting that Americans eat better. He declared that the drug companies are “counting on selling it to Americans because we’re so stupid and so addicted to drugs.” However, when President Donald Trump endorsed the drugs, the secretary adroitly reversed course.

The uptake of these compounds by Americans already seems to be reshaping aspects of the economy. Specifically, demand for higher protein foods is up, and demand for alcoholic beverages is down. As it happens, the drugs encourage people to improve their diets just as RFK Jr. has been demanding.

The post Is the End of the Obesity Epidemic Near? People Lost Up to 85 Pounds Using New Weight Loss Drug appeared first on Reason.com.

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On Thursday, an effort to eliminate gun-free zones on New Hampshire college campuses fizzled out in the state Legislature, when the Senate voted against a committee of conference to renegotiate the bill with House leaders. Despite the setback, proponents of the legislation say they’re not done.

“We’ll be pursuing this with a legal challenge,” says state Rep. Sam Farrington (R–Rochester), who sponsored the bill, which would have also allowed students to carry nonlethal weapons such as pepper spray and mace. Farrington, who graduated from the University of New Hampshire (UNH) last Saturday, says the challenge will be under New Hampshire’s “pre-emption statute,” which prohibits any “political subdivision” other than the state Legislature from regulating firearms. He thinks that policies that ban guns from campus, imposed by “unelected administrators at public universities,” fall into that category.

UNH says that its restrictions were “adopted under authority granted by the Legislature to the Board of Trustees and campus presidents to govern university property.”

For now, New Hampshire is one of 37 states where college campuses are gun-free zones. This includes Rhode Island and Virginia, where Brown University and Old Dominion University, respectively, were each sites of deadly shootings this school year. Indeed, according to the Crime Prevention Research Center, more than 80 percent of mass public shootings since 1998 “have occurred in places where guns are banned.” (Other estimates, using different criteria for “gun-free zone” and “mass shooting,” have arrived at lower figures: 48 percent, even 10 percent.)

So as much as Farrington wrote his bill to protect students’ Second Amendment rights, “it’s also a safety issue,” he says. “At UNH, for example…doors are left wide open, buildings are wide open. Anybody can walk in at any point in time.”

“Gun-free zones,” Farrington tells Reason, “leave victims defenseless and vulnerable.”

High-quality research on the question is sparse, but the only study on gun-free zones that met the RAND Corporation’s inclusion criteria for its “Gun Policy Research Review” found “that campus carry laws are not significantly related to violent or property crime on campus” between 2005 and 2014, meaning they neither made students safer nor endangered them. However, it did show that “campuses located in states that allow unpermitted concealed carry”—like New Hampshire—had “lower property crime rates,” suggesting that some positive relationship exists between firearm access and campus safety.

Though universities might point to their campus security teams or cooperations with local law enforcement as evidence of their commitment to student safety, Farrington is skeptical. “You can’t trust the government police officers to defend you,” he says, referencing the 2005 Castle Rock v. Gonzales decision, in which the Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement cannot be held liable for failing or refusing to protect citizens from threats they did not create. “You need to take it upon yourself, and that’s why this right is so important,” says Farrington.

In the wake of this year’s campus shootings, more students around the country are beginning to share Farrington’s skepticism. Notable is a spate of op-eds that appeared shortly after the Brown shooting in the Yale Daily News, decrying flaws in Yale’s security approach.

One student pointed out that campus security officers—who outnumber Yale Police Department officers 140 to 93—are unarmed. In the case of an emergency, they’re tasked with simply telling students to hide and then calling the police, who are actually equipped to deal with a threat. He recommended that Yale, which is a gun-free campus, provide its security officers with some kind of incapacitating weaponry, or at the very least, expand its armed police department.

Of course, mass shootings are a much rarer threat than everyday robberies and assaults. But even then, many campus security solutions are ill-equipped to protect students. In another op-ed, Yale student and active-duty U.S. Marine Timothy Riemann noted that Yale’s campus-wide safety alerts—which report all muggings, robberies, or shots fired on campus—always omit the perpetrator’s race, providing “deliberately incomplete information” to students who might be in danger.

“To me,” Riemann wrote, “it signals that the University prioritizes the potential or theoretical harm caused by including race as an identifying characteristic over the very real safety of its own students, faculty and staff.”

But in the months since these criticisms were levied, Yale has indicated no plans to change course, leaving its security approach stuck in the same rut as other universities nationwide. Pending the outcome of Farrington’s legal action, things could change for students enrolled at public New Hampshire colleges. But for now, they—along with other students around the country—have no choice but to put their trust in a flawed campus security paradigm.

The post In New Hampshire, a Setback for Second Amendment Rights on Campus appeared first on Reason.com.

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From the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education Wednesday:

After spending 37 days in jail for nothing more than posting a meme, retired Tennessee law enforcement officer Larry Bushart has won a substantial settlement from the county and sheriff behind his arrest.

Represented by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and Phillips & Phillips, PLLC, Larry Bushart filed a federal civil rights lawsuit last December against Sheriff Nick Weems, Investigator Jason Morrow, and Perry County, Tennessee, for violating his constitutional rights in retaliation for his protected speech.

Today, the parties announced in a joint statement that Larry will receive $835,000 in exchange for dismissing his complaint.

“I am pleased my First Amendment rights have been vindicated,” said Larry. “The people’s freedom to participate in civil discourse is crucial to a healthy democracy. I am looking forward to moving on and spending time with my family.”

After the September 2025 assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Larry commented on a Facebook post promoting a vigil in nearby Perry County by sharing a meme that accurately quoted Donald Trump’s statement after a school shooting:  “We have to get over it.”

That meme — which Larry didn’t create or alter — included a reference to the 2024 school shooting at Perry High School in Perry, Iowa. But that did not stop Weems from seeking and obtaining a warrant for Larry’s arrest, based on the absurd notion that the meme could be interpreted as a threat against Perry County High School in Tennessee. Video of the arrest shows Larry informed the arresting officer (not a defendant in the case) that he had never made a threat….

Weems admitted in a later interview that he knew at the time of the arrest that Larry’s Facebook post was a pre-existing meme that referred to an actual shooting that took place in a different state, over 500 miles away. But Weems and Morrow left out that extremely important context from their warrant application. Not that it should have mattered; the Supreme Court has long held that heated political rhetoric is fully protected by the First Amendment.

Larry spent over a month behind bars on a $2 million bond. Perry County released him from jail only after his plight went viral nationwide and prompted outrage. During his stay in jail, Larry lost his post-retirement job and missed his anniversary — as well as the birth of his grandchild. After his release, he teamed up with FIRE to hold those who violated his constitutional rights accountable…. (FIRE) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending and sustaining the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought — the most essential qualities of liberty. FIRE educates Americans about the importance of these inalienable rights, promotes a culture of respect for these rights, and provides the means to preserve them.

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