Independent New Hampshire Journalism · Northfield, NH

The Poisoned Chalice: Family Separation, CIA Black Sites, and the Lie of American Moral Exceptionalism

Robert Jackson warned at Nuremberg that the record we judged our enemies on would one day judge us. The record is in, and it is ours.

On the morning of November 21, 1945, an American Supreme Court justice stood in a bombed-out German courtroom and made a wager on behalf of the United States. Robert H. Jackson, opening the prosecution at Nuremberg, then said the sentence that should hang in every federal building in the country.

Eighty years later, the chalice is at our lips. The country that wrote the indictment at Nuremberg took more than 5,000 children from their parents at its own border and lost track of which child belonged to whom. It ran a secret prison network its own Senate documented as torture. It logged the phone records of millions of Americans, daily, for years, until two federal appeals courts called the program unlawful.

And through all of it, we kept telling ourselves the same story: that we are the moral exception. That the evils we fought a world war to stop are things other countries do. This piece is about that story, and about the people we tell it against — the human beings we file under the word illegal.

The dock at Nuremberg. America built the legal standard in this room. Photo: Raymond D’Addario, U.S. Army. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The word is the permission slip

Listen to how Americans talk about immigrants and you will hear a grammatical trick. A person can break a law. A person cannot be one. Yet “illegal” has become a noun in this country, a way of saying lesser without having to defend it. Once a human being becomes a category, whatever is done to the category stops feeling like something done to a person. That is the permission slip.

The Constitution does not rank people this way. Its citizenship clause is one sentence, and it was written by men who had just watched a war fought over who counts as human.

Even naturalized citizenship, the thing immigrants are told to earn, is being re-sorted into a revocable tier. On June 11, 2025, the Justice Department’s Civil Division made denaturalization a top-five enforcement priority, directing its lawyers to “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings” wherever law and evidence allow. The cases are civil, so the targets get no appointed lawyer and the government carries a lighter burden of proof. The citizenship of millions of Americans now comes with an asterisk their native-born neighbors will never carry.

The war story, and the ledger underneath it

The story goes like this: America saw absolute evil, crossed an ocean, and destroyed it. The story is true as far as it goes. But the ledger underneath it is longer than the story, and we owe the dead a full reading.

In May 1939, the German liner St. Louis carried 937 passengers, nearly all Jewish refugees fleeing the Third Reich, to the edge of American waters. Cuba turned them away. So did the United States. So did Canada. The ship sailed close enough to Florida for the passengers to see the lights of Miami, and then it turned around. By the war’s end, 254 of the people we sent back had been murdered in the Holocaust. That is the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s count, not mine.

Three years later we built camps of our own. Executive Order 9066, signed February 19, 1942, forced roughly 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry — about two-thirds of them U.S. citizens — out of their homes and into incarceration camps ringed with barbed wire and gun towers. It took the government 46 years to say sorry. The Civil Liberties Act of 1988 delivered a formal apology and $20,000 to each surviving detainee, and named the causes in the government’s own words: “race prejudice, war hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”

The Mochida family, tagged like luggage, awaiting removal to an incarceration camp. Hayward, California, May 8, 1942. Photo: Dorothea Lange, War Relocation Authority, National Archives (537505). Public domain.

Hold both facts at once. We prosecuted the architects of dehumanization at Nuremberg, and we were right to. We also turned a ship of doomed refugees back toward Europe and caged our own citizens by bloodline while we did it. The moral authority America claims from that war was never a birthright; Jackson priced it, out loud and on the record, as a standard. A standard you refuse to apply to yourself is not a standard. It is a costume.

Take the children, lose the receipts

Now run the tape forward. On April 6, 2018, the attorney general of the United States announced “zero tolerance” at the southwest border: prosecute every adult who crossed between ports of entry, and because a criminal defendant cannot keep custody of a child, take the child. Separation was not a side effect. Deterrence through the taking of children was the design, and the government built no reliable system to match the children it took to the parents it took them from.

The totals are the government’s own. Court filings and the federal reunification task force put separated children above 5,000; the Women’s Refugee Commission counts at least 5,569 from July 2017 to January 2021, roughly 100 of them under age five. More than 1,000 were still not reunited as of late November 2023. In December 2023, a federal judge approved the Ms. L v. ICE settlement, barring separations of this kind for eight years outside narrow exceptions. In 2025, the court found the government in breach of it. Then it found the government in breach again.

A nation that turned the St. Louis around in 1939 spent eight decades saying never again. Then it wrote a policy whose whole mechanism was taking children, on our soil, by our employees. The self-declared moral author of the postwar order could not tell a federal judge where the children were.

The black sites were not a rumor

Neither was the torture. On December 9, 2014, the Senate Intelligence Committee released the 525-page executive summary of its study of the CIA’s detention program: 119 people held in secret prisons overseas, at least 26 of them wrongfully, by the agency’s own records. At least 39 endured so-called enhanced interrogation. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times. Abu Zubaydah, 83. Detainees were kept awake as long as 180 hours and subjected to what the agency called “rectal feeding.” In November 2002, a detainee named Gul Rahman was left chained, partly naked, to a concrete floor at a black site near Kabul. He froze to death in American custody.

Committee chair Dianne Feinstein called the program “a stain on our values and on our history,” from the floor of the Senate that ratified the Geneva Conventions. Those treaties were drafted in the shadow of the Second World War, with American lawyers at the table, precisely so no state could do to prisoners what had been done in the war we are proudest of winning.

What accountability followed? On August 1, 2014, President Obama said it plainly at a White House podium: “We tortured some folks.” Two years earlier, on August 30, 2012, the Justice Department had closed prosecutor John Durham’s review of 101 detainee cases, the two deaths included, without charging anyone. A man froze to death shackled to a floor in a prison our taxes built, and the ledger closed at zero indictments. At Nuremberg we hanged men for building systems like this. Here, the architects wrote memoirs.

Then we pointed the apparatus at ourselves

If you thought the machinery was reserved for foreigners, June 2013 corrected you. The Snowden disclosures revealed that under Section 215 of the Patriot Act, the NSA had been collecting the telephone metadata of millions of Americans — who called whom, when, for how long — in bulk, daily, for years. Not suspects. Everyone.

The courts eventually said what the government would not. On May 7, 2015, the Second Circuit ruled in ACLU v. Clapper that the program exceeded anything Congress had authorized; the USA Freedom Act ended bulk collection weeks later. On September 2, 2020, the Ninth Circuit held in United States v. Moalin that the collection violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and may have violated the Fourth Amendment. Nobody at the NSA was disciplined for any of it.

NSA headquarters, Fort Meade. Two federal appeals courts held its bulk phone-records program unlawful. Photo: National Security Agency. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Here is the opinion part, labeled as opinion. Name the terrorist organization that ever had the reach to log a whole nation’s phone records, run a global network of secret prisons, and seize five thousand children with the stroke of a memo. There is not one. Terror cells murder people, and we are right to fight them. But harm at scale belongs to states, and for two decades the American state turned that capacity against the very rules it claims make it exceptional. A country cannot torture its way to moral authority, or surveil its way to freedom.

New Hampshire is inside the line

If this feels like a Washington story, look at a map. Federal rules let Border Patrol run checkpoints within 100 air miles of any land or sea border, and every square inch of New Hampshire sits inside that zone. In August 2017, agents set up on Interstate 93 in Woodstock, roughly 90 miles from Canada, drug dogs circling the stopped cars. Sixteen travelers were charged with possessing small amounts of drugs. Per the ACLU’s complaint, not one person from that operation was charged with unlawfully crossing the border.

On May 1, 2018, a Plymouth Circuit Court judge found the checkpoint’s primary purpose was drug detection, held it unconstitutional under both state and federal law, and suppressed the evidence. The state dropped all 16 cases. A 2023 settlement barred Woodstock checkpoints through January 1, 2025. That date has passed, and the claimed authority to stop you on I-93 without suspicion still stands.

Meanwhile the detention machine has never been bigger. In mid-January 2026, the single-day count in immigration detention passed 73,000, the highest ever recorded, per ICE’s own data as compiled by the Vera Institute. About seven in ten of the people held this spring had no criminal conviction of any kind. Congress handed the system $45 billion last July, and the American Immigration Council says detention is on track to rival the entire federal prison system. Every checkpoint on I-93 runs on the same legal theory: near a border, which in New Hampshire means everywhere, your rights shrink.

The mirror test

I am not equating this country with the regime it destroyed in 1945, and America is more than its worst acts. My argument is simpler and harder. Exceptionalism, if it means anything, is an obligation: we volunteered for a higher standard, publicly, at Nuremberg, and the standard binds us most exactly when it is inconvenient. Every new citizen swears an oath to defend the Constitution. The state that administers that oath separated children, froze a shackled man to death, and read the nation’s phone logs, then investigated itself and found no one to charge.

The people we call illegal did not do any of that. We did. Jackson’s wager was that America would drink from the same cup it poured for its enemies. History is watching to see whether we meant it. The record is public, and I have linked every line of it below.

— Dexter Dow, Granite State Report

Fact check

Editor’s note. Every factual claim above was verified against primary sources before publication; see the fact-check table. Every hyperlink was opened and confirmed live on July 18, 2026. Congress.gov and the Justia case reporters block automated retrieval, so the CRS report and two court opinions are cited in plain text and corroborated through the court-hosted PDF, the ACLU case pages, and the ICRC casebook. Detention figures are the latest public releases and change monthly. The Jackson passage exceeds the house 15-word quote cap deliberately; it is a verbatim, attributed institutional quotation whose exact wording carries the argument. Opinion passages are labeled as opinion. Corrections: Granite State Report corrects verified errors promptly and appends a note identifying what changed and when.