Zelenskiy Warns Ukraine May No Longer Be Able to Count on Trump

“The government has said that the data for that period was lost in a system crash apparently on the day after the lawsuit was filed,” one of the lawyers representing detainees, Alec Solotorovsky, said in a Thursday hearing about the footage, according to 404 Media. “That period we think is going to be critical … because that’s the period right before the lawsuit was filed.”

Earlier this week, the Department of Homeland Security said in court that the video footage was “irretrievably destroyed,” and on Thursday, government lawyers said that “we don’t have the resources” to keep preserving surveillance footage from the detention facility. In a seemingly flippant remark, the government’s attorneys suggested if the detainees’ lawyers provide “endless hard drives where we could save the information, that might be one solution.”

The idea that ICE doesn’t have resources to preserve video footage is absurd on its face, as the agency is receiving an astronomical amount of funding thanks to President Trump’s “big, beautiful bill.” Some $200 billion has been allocated to immigration enforcement, more than some countries allocate to their entire militaries, and at least some of that should be allocated to data preservation and I.T. maintenance.