Good morning. 
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of fifty-five. Sunrise is 7:24 AM and sunset 4:27 PM, for 9h 02m 43s of daytime. The moon is a waxing crescent with 0.2% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand one hundred forty-third day.
On this day in 1776, Washington is victorious at the Battle of Trenton, defeating and capturing nearly one hundred Hessian mercenaries.
Recommended for reading in full —
Monsy Alvarado, Ashley Balcerzak, Stacey Barchenger, Jon Campbell, Rafael Carranza, Maria Clark, Alan Gomez, Daniel Gonzalez, Trevor Hughes, Rick Jervis, Dan Keemahill, Rebecca Plevin, Jeremy Schwartz, Sarah Taddeo, Lauren Villagran, Dennis Wagner, Elizabeth Weise, and Alissa Zhu report Deaths in custody. Sexual violence. Hunger strikes. What we uncovered inside ICE facilities across the US (‘A USA TODAY Network investigation revealed sex assaults, routine use of physical force, poor medical care and deaths at facilities overseen by ICE’):
Combined with an analysis by a government watchdog, the USA TODAY Network analyzed inspection reports since 2015 and identified 15,821 violations of detention standards. Yet more than 90% of those facilities received passing grades by government inspectors. Network reporters interviewed 35 former and current detainees, some conducted using video chats from inside an ICE detention center. They reviewed hundreds of documents from lawsuits, financial records and government contracts, and toured seven ICE facilities from Colorado to Texas to Florida. Such tours are extremely rare.
At least two detention centers passed inspections despite using a chemical restraint – Freeze +P – that is forbidden for use under ICE rules because it contains tear gas that produces “severe pain,” according to its manufacturer. Other centers received passing marks even after inspectors chronicled widespread use of physical force or solitary confinement. Richwood was one of the centers that passed inspections.
Vicente Raul Orozco Serguera, one of the Richwood detainees who protested after Hernandez-Diaz died, told outsiders that the death and violent confrontation with guards punctuated a terrifying stay at Richwood that began with detention center officials forcing him to sign a document listing who would recover his body if he died in custody.
“The United States has appointed itself the country of liberty, the land of opportunity, the defender of human rights and the refuge for people oppressed by their governments. All that ends once you’re detained,” Orozco Serguera wrote in a letter from Richwood that was delivered to a lawyer in hopes of finding someone to help him. “We want our freedom to fight our cases freely and leave this hell, for Louisiana is a ‘Cemetery of living men.’ ”
(In this, one does well to remember that Adam Serwer is right about Trumpism: cruelty is the point, that ‘President Trump and his supporters find community by rejoicing in the suffering of those they hate and fear.’ Repeated rights abuses of others bring Trumpism’s lumpen band – a bund, one might also say – closer together. These abuses have a secondary purpose, undoubtedly – to convince America’s majority that resistance and opposition are futile. Trump and his officials are, in this, short-sighted: they will meet a lawful reckoning individually, and political ruin collectively. A Third Reconstruction awaits, advancing – over a century – America’s liberal democratic tradition while rendering its adversaries ineffectual.)