The Scoop
On Oct. 8 the New York Times, in a report by Hamed Aleaziz, said the Trump administration is weighing the use of ships to deport migrants to Central and South America. Two U.S. officials told the Times the discussions of recent weeks are preliminary and have identified candidates, including the Training Ship Golden Bear, a 500-foot vessel that served the Cal Poly Maritime Academy for 30 years and was retired this summer, and ferries. Defense Department officials have reached out to companies about ships in Europe. The voyages could take days and, in the officials' estimate, cost millions of dollars per trip, where deportation flights are, in the Times' words, substantially cheaper. The paper notes one possible reason for the plan: it could move some deportation costs from Homeland Security to the Pentagon.
A Homeland Security official told the Times the plan is hypothetical and no decisions have been made. The department said in a statement it is "assessing all our resources, to maximize efficiency." The Pentagon declined to comment. It is not clear under what authority the federal government could use the Golden Bear. That is the full record as of today, and the Old Goat is treating it as exactly what it is: a leak about a discussion, not a program.
What A Court Found In May
The reason the Old Goat is writing about a hypothetical is a real ruling from three days earlier. On Oct. 5, Judge Gary R. Brown of the Eastern District of New York, a Trump appointee, issued a 28-page decision on an arrest ICE made in the Bronx on May 6. Agents arrested a 26-year-old Dominican man and, in a back-to-back stop, a 19-year-old U.S. citizen, Jeury Concepcion, who suffered head injuries needing stitches after officers tackled him. Video showed a masked agent with a drawn gun. The agency said it had confused the two men with its targets.
The judge did not accept that. He wrote that the misidentification claims "prove baseless, the arrests were procedurally deficient and legally invalid, and ICE agents falsified official records trying to conceal their illegal actions." He found the agents gave "inconsistent, false and misleading testimony" and had probably perjured themselves, described an administrative arrest warrant that contained false statements about database searches and biometric confirmation as "fraudulent," and called the misidentification defense part of a "troubling" pattern. ICE did not respond to the Times. Those are findings in a habeas case, not a criminal verdict, and the agency may appeal.
The Argument About A Ship
Put the two stories side by side and you get the Old Goat's whole point, which is about records, not ships. The Bronx arrests happened on a public street, with video, a defense lawyer, a federal judge able to order testimony and a clerk's docket. Even so, it took five months and a lawsuit for a court to establish that the paperwork was false. A ship days from land has none of those things by default. There is no bystander, no camera the agency does not control and no lawyer on the gangway. The account of what happened aboard would be written by the same agency whose records Judge Brown just called falsified.
Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former top ICE official under President Biden, told the Times the idea is "functionally" prison ships and that moving people through international waters and past other countries' territory "raises hard questions about which laws apply and who has jurisdiction if something goes wrong." She said the department considered boats and trains during her years there and never pursued them seriously.
The Old Goat will say the blunt version, labeled as his: with no independent eyes aboard, nobody outside the chain of command could say what happened to a person who went over the rail. That is not an allegation that anyone plans it or would do it. It is a description of what an unobserved journey makes impossible to rule out, and the unwillingness to rule it out is the problem. The history is not reassuring. In August 1956, during the 1950s mass-deportation campaign that the government itself named with a slur, chaos erupted on a deportation ship near Tampico, Mexico. The Times reported at the time that 40 passengers jumped and five drowned. Mexico shut the operation down within weeks.
Who Gets Paid
The Old Goat looked for money, because the site's work is following it. Two honest results. First, nothing is on the public record yet: no solicitation, charter or contract has been reported, and without one there is no vendor to trace. The Golden Bear's ownership and transfer rules are unknown to the Old Goat. Second, the site's Form 4 coverage does not include the obvious private-detention names, GEO Group and CoreCivic, so the usual insider-trading check cannot be run on them. That is a gap in this site's coverage, and a silent pipeline is not the same as a quiet world.Detention → The first documents worth watching are a Defense Department or Maritime Administration solicitation for passenger-vessel charter, any contract modification at the Cal Poly Maritime campus, and a transfer notice for the Golden Bear.
If the plan is real, the first public paper trail will be a contract. If the plan is real and there is no paper trail, that is a story too.
The Old Goat will update this dispatch if DHS or the Pentagon confirms or drops the idea, if a solicitation appears, or if the Bronx ruling is appealed.