The Statue Weeps December 12, 2025 “Give me your tired, your poor . . . your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . .” Or, to update it . . . “You’re garbage — get the hell out of our harbor.” This NPR story will get you in the mood: Report finds ‘inhuman’ conditions at two Florida immigration facilities (4 minutes). Disappeared to a Foreign Prison, by Sarah Stillman in The New Yorker, goes into more detail. It begins: One Saturday morning in early September, I got a WhatsApp video call from eleven strangers locked inside a secretive detention camp in a forest in Ghana. Their faces looked glazed with sweat and stricken with fear. In the background, I could hear birdsong and the drone of insects. An armed guard watched over the group as they huddled around a shared cellphone. “There are big snakes here, and scorpions!” a male voice with an American accent called out. “My stomach is really hurting, and we have to beg for food,” another man said. A third added, “We fear we’ll be tortured and killed.” One of the men, a car salesman and a real-estate agent from Miami, whom I’ll call Jim, gave me a tour of the scene: an open-air military complex known as Bundase Training Camp, some forty miles from Accra. “I have five U.S.-citizen children, and they don’t know where their father is,” Jim said. Just months earlier, one of these men had a job with UPS in Chicago. Another had lived in Houston, where he worked for his mother’s catering business, composed R. & B. music, and babysat his little brothers. Some had lived in the U.S. from an early age. Jim, a political refugee, had come to Miami from Liberia in the early nineties, when he was twenty-three, after his parents were murdered for their tribal and political affiliations during the country’s civil war. Others, including a twenty-one-year-old woman who had fled Togo fearing genital mutilation, had arrived in the U.S. recently, seeking asylum. All of them had been taken from the United States against their will. . . . More and more people are concluding this isn’t the country we want to be. On so many levels. (Hundreds Quarantined in South Carolina as Measles Spreads.) (Desperate Farmers Say the System Is Broken.) (Local food banks face new strains amid cuts to SNAP benefits.) (Billionaires growing richer faster than ever . . . while 44% of humanity lives on less than $6.85 per day.) As previously mentioned, a Democrat won the mayoralty Tuesday for the first time in 30 years — in a blow-out, 59.4% to 40.6%. Here’s another flip — in a Georgia district that Trump won by 12 points. The tide is turning. ANIX For those of us taking this flyer with money we can truly afford to lose: Anixa Biosciences Announces Positive Phase 1 Data for Investigational Breast Cancer Vaccine; Primary Endpoints Were Met and Immune Response Observed in 74% of Participants