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MEMPHIS— The official story is this: Memphis had the highest violent crime rate in the country in 2024. So, in the wake of the murder of Tyre Nichols a year earlier, the federal government intervened. As a result, they say, crime went down. End of story.

The reality of what’s happening on the streets of Memphis in May 2026 is far more grim, and largely underreported for months.

Today, the S.C.O.R.P.I.O.N Unit has effectively replaced with the increasingly controversial Memphis Safe Task Force. With an estimated 1,500 personnel on the ground since at least September 2025, the federal task force has brought with it more agencies, more resources, and so far more insulation from accountability.

In a city of approximately 610,000 people, by March 2026, the task force had conducted nearly 97,000 traffic stops and made more than 9,000 arrests, nearly all of them in Black or Brown neighborhoods of Memphis. It’s all part of an executive order signed by President Donald Trump in September which established the unit to address crime in the city “through the promotion and facilitation of hyper-vigilant policing, aggressive prosecution…and large-scale saturation of besieged neighborhoods with law enforcement personnel.”

The word “saturation” was not an accident. It was a policy declaration.

The 31-agency unit brings together the Memphis Police Department, the Tennessee National Guard, the Tennessee Highway Patrol, as well as the FBI, the U.S. Marshals Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. But here is where the operation really ramps up and what people are missing: within the task force is ICE.

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MIAMI— When he fell inside an immigration detention facility last December, Justo Betancourt didn’t tell his family what happened. He didn’t want them to worry. And despite his medical history and poor mental health, doctors connected to the ICE facility never bothered to tell his family either.

It wasn’t until this week when Justo walked free after months at Alligator Alcatraz that he told his daughter Ari what really happened. The fall was a near-fatal stroke.

The facility knew and never told his family.

It gets worse.

As of this morning, Betancourt was hospitalized again, presenting with stroke-like symptoms.

Betancourt’s case is not isolated.

Across the country, at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center, located roughly 90 miles northeast of Los Angeles, detainees are engaged in a hunger strike, according to multiple reports. The conditions there, as described by those with loved ones inside, amount to what one husband calls a human rights catastrophe unfolding in plain sight.

Amir Modaraei whose wife, Tanya Zamataykina has been there for weeks, says she is living through hell.

“They give them dog food to eat,” he told NVN over the phone Sunday evening.

Modaraei has filed a separate lawsuit against the facility, alleging his wife Zamataykina has been subjected to physical, emotional, and sexual abuse by a female guard. He did not identify the guard by name.

NVN has not been able to independently verify the abuse allegations, which are also part of the pending litigation.

During recent appearance on NVN’s live show, Modaraei reached for a stark comparison to describe what he believes his wife is enduring. “It’s like a concentration camp,” he said.

Adelanto has long been one of the most scrutinized facilities in the country. Located in California’s high desert, it is operated by the GEO Group, a private prison contractor. It has been the subject federal investigations, civil rights lawsuits, and repeated complaints from detainee advocates. But those complaints of inadequate medical care, unsanitary conditions, and abuse have been historically disputed by the facility and GEO Group.

The hunger strike reported this week suggests conditions inside have not improved.

The accounts are alone stark, but together form an ominous pattern of what appears to be state-sanctioned abuse. A stroke concealed from a family. A hunger strike inside a detention center. Allegations of sexual abuse by staff, each emerging at a moment when under the Trump administration ICE detention populations have swelled.

Oversight has not kept pace.

For Betancourt, the damage may already be done.

When he came directly onto NVN’s live show for his first public appearance after his release, he spoke carefully, deliberately. His daughter Ari had noticed changes in her father’s speech after the December incident but received no explanation from the facility and nothing from her father , who stayed silent to spare the fear of his daughter.

Now she knows.

Today, Ari is working to obtain her father’s medical records from the period of his detention. What those records may disclose could reveal what for more and more is becoming the reality of these for-profit private prisons. Cruelty is the point.

From the day she was taken into custody, Masuma had been asking for her medications every single day. For high blood pressure. For asthma. For prediabetes, hypothyroidism, glaucoma, back pain. She had been there a week and had received none of them.

“She was having a medical emergency,” Riya told me during a live broadcast for NVN.

Her mother’s story anchors our new documentary, How Private Prisons Get Rich Off ICE.

“I’m sure that everyone knows that shortness of breath is always a medical emergency. So then tell me why not a single staff at that facility treated it as one.”

No one at CoreCivic had a good answer for that. What they did have was a commissary, stocked with crackers, chips, and junk food priced at three times retail. They also had a policy of keeping the facility at temperatures so cold that detainees were developing rashes. Sweaters were available, too.

Always for a price. When it comes to private prisons in America, people are the product and the cruelty isn’t accidental. It’s efficient.

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Thank you, really…every dollar counts.

Let’s keep going.

“Now is not a time to be neutral. Now is a time to be truthful.”

- …

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