There are so many ways to kill a man in America, and most of them don’t require a weapon. Some don’t even require intent. Some are performed politely through envelopes stamped with the seal of the State of Texas. This is the genius behind American violence: its ability to disguise itself as procedure. As Arendt warned, the most dangerous forms of harm are not committed by monsters but by clerks, officers, civil servants,¹ people “just following policy.” The American bureaucratic machine does not need hatred to destroy a life; it only needs indifference, paperwork, and the confidence that no one is watching. To die at the hands of a State agent is tragic. To die at the hands of a State form is statistical.

Foucault argued that power in advanced societies flows not from guns but from the quiet, administrative rituals that determine who is visible and who is disposable.2 In America, those rituals take the form of denial letters, case closures, voicemail recordings, and guidelines that value institutional risk over human life. A denial letter can be as lethal as a weapon, but far more respectable.

We praise ourselves as a nation of laws and procedures, yet those procedures often function as instruments of abandonment. Wacquant calls this the “bureaucratic management of misery,” where social institutions maintain the appearance of order while systematically manufacturing suffering.3 

The cruelty is not loud; it is clerical. And what is more American than clerical cruelty? A government employee that clicks “deny” on a screen, and a man that starves in an empty apartment not because of the product of poverty, misfortune, or the harsh arithmetic of low-wage labor, but because his wages have been held hostage for over two months as a deliberate strategy of control to force him to confess to crimes he did not commit. Or a public agency sends a letter requesting proof of “substantial threat of personal injury or death,” and a barely living recipient must confront the reality that, perhaps for the first time, survival itself has become a liability.

This is why philosopher Mbembe’s theory of necropolitics is so disturbingly relevant to the United States: the idea that modern states do not simply govern life, but regulate who is allowed to die, and under what conditions.4 America’s bureaucratic architecture does not kill directly; it simply refuses to intervene until the dying is complete. The State is never responsible for your death. It merely “regrets” that you did not submit the proper documentation beforehand. And because bureaucracy is inherently impersonal, it grants everyone involved the luxury of innocence. No one feels responsible. Everyone played by the rules. No malicious intent was present. No hate, no rage, no violence, only boxes checked, protocols followed, signatures placed in blue ink.

Baldwin observed, “innocence” in America is often the most dangerous form of violence: the harm done without awareness, without accountability, without memory.5 Bureaucratic murder is the purest form of innocent cruelty, because it requires no recognition of the victim as human. All that is required is the quiet assumption that the system knows best. Thus the State does not have to shoot you. It only has to doubt you. It does not have to lock you in a room. It merely needs to close your case. It does not have to poison your food. It only has to make assistance impossible to obtain.

This is the violence of paperwork; clean, odorless, bloodless, and completely untraceable. A violence that leaves no fingerprints, only timestamps. A violence that kills not by force, but by omission; not by brutality, but by delay. The gun of the modern American State is a PDF. Its bullet is a denial letter. Its trigger is a policy no one wants to take responsibility for. And its most common casualties are the people it pretends to protect.

So let us imagine, for the sake of giving the State of Texas exactly the evidence it demands:

• (Anchor 1) The body of a young man was found earlier today in an advanced state of decomposition.

• (Anchor 2) Neighbors contacted authorities after noticing a strong odor coming from the apartment in the west side of El Paso, Texas. An odor some residents say had been lingering for weeks.

• (Anchor 3) Investigators have not yet released the young man's identity and the cause of death remains undetermined as the medical examiner continues the evaluation.

• (Anchor 4) Authorities are investigating the discovery of a young man found deceased inside an unfurnished unit at the Terrace Hills Apartments, Unit 87, on the west side of El Paso. Police say the body was discovered earlier today. The cause of death remains undetermined, but investigators say early indications suggest it may have been self-inflicted.

The neighbors report the smell. The police enter an empty unit: no signs of forced entry, no signs of struggle, no documented employment, no paper trail, no witnesses, no medical history, no employer on record, no wages ever formally owed. Inside the unit, officers step lightly around the silence as if it were evidence itself. The apartment was empty. No furniture, no food, no recent activity, only absence, clinical and intentional. The only things found were a body of a young man, a mattress, and a notebook filled with entries in broken English describing starvation, unpaid labor, coercion, threats, and fear.

The notebook is the only narrative left behind:

• May 11, 2022: “I’m hungry.”

• May 18, 2022: "This motherfucker says he doesn’t have my money. I’ve worked hard. I don't deserve this."

• May 19, 2022: “I thought I was empty. Ha. I'm a walking wide hole now. Is it because I’m hungry or because there’s nothing good inside me? I wish I could find a way to die without leaving a corpse behind. Wish somebody handed me a gun. I’d shoot myself right here in my stomach where the hunger hurts.

• May 21, 2022: “I wish I could die right now.”

• May 24, 2022: "Someone wake me up from this nightmare."

• May 24, 2022: “Sometimes I wish the clients would give me food just because.”

• May 26, 2022: "Wish I knew how much I need to get into myself to overdose. I'd do twice the amount: to make the pain of this hunger go away, and if it doesn’t work, to kill myself."

• May 28, 2022: "I keep on thinking about the same thing. Which one is the best way to kill myself, where and when?"

• June 8, 2022: “Starving feels like burning. Pain has become more than what I can handle overall. Or maybe it is that I’m hungry and it feels like pain too. I don’t know. What I am sure of if that if I had a gun, I would shoot myself twice to not miss."

• June 16, 2022: "I FUCKING HATE MY LIFE"

• June 23, 2022: “Starving fucking burns.”

• June 30, 2022: “I look sick. Like if I were dead. If someone handed me a gun, I'd shoot myself twice: to kill this hunger inside me in hopes that I can make it go away, but if it doesn’t work, to kill myself."

The investigators read each entry as testimony smuggled through desperation, not casual diary notes. They murmur: “possible labor exploitation… possible coercion… possible immigration-based threats…” The word possible becomes a shield for their hesitation, a bureaucratic buffer against facing the raw reality.

One officer whispers, “Why didn’t he report it?"

Another answers, “Who would he even report it to?”

There is no paycheck to trace. No employer officially on record. No formal work history. No emergency calls. Only his own fingerprints on the notebook. The apartment lease is not under the victim’s name. It belongs to someone else, "Deondre Andres Patrick" with a scheduled termination at the end of June, four months after it started. 

The partner who shared the unit disappeared months earlier, leaving no forwarding address, no record of departure, no traceable accountability. And the employer, if “employer” is even the correct word, it lives only in the pages of the notebook. No timesheets. No contract. No W-2. No pay stubs. No legal identity that a police department can enter into a database.

A system built on documentation collapses the moment it encounters the undocumented. So this is the scene authorities must interpret: a body, no food, no signs of forced entry, no items of value, no bank statements, no employment record, no last-known paycheck, no one legally responsible for his welfare. And here, in this imagined yet terrifyingly plausible crime scene, the truth becomes unbearable: there is a body, finally. There is physical proof of starvation, finally. A living victim has become a bureaucratic ghost. And still, no one can be held accountable.

A detective kneels beside the mattress, flipping through the journal with gloved hands. The entries paint a timeline so clear it borders on forensic: starvation to desperation, desperation to psychological collapse, psychological collapse to physical deterioration, and physical deterioration to death—or was it suicide? The detectives will almost certainly label it that way, as if a line on a form could erase who starved him. But clarity is irrelevant in a system that only recognizes what can be entered into a box, signed off, filed, and archived.

The detective mutters quietly to his partner: “Without documents, there’s no perpetrator. And without paperwork, nothing happened.”

His partner nods.

Eyes sliding over the empty apartment, the hollow fridge, the bare glue-down vinyl floor, the mattress, the notebook. The crime is visible. The evidence is literal. The motive is spelled out in the victim’s own handwriting. The harm is medically undeniable. Starvation is measurable. The timeline is exact. And still, still, the investigation stalls in the same institutional cul-de-sac:

• “No record of employer found.”

• “No corroborating witnesses.”

• “Insufficient evidence for labor trafficking.”

• “Unable to confirm wage withholding.”

• “Unable to establish coercion without documentation.”

• “Victim did not report prior to death.”

The officers whisper among themselves:

• “How do we investigate a job that doesn’t exist on paper?”

• “How do we charge someone who isn’t registered as an employer?”

• “How do we prove coercion when the only proof is the victim’s own words?”

• “How do we assign blame when there’s no official record of exploitation?”

Every question leads back to the same bureaucratic chokehold: If the victim had survived, he would have been denied help for “lack of sufficient evidence.” Now that he is dead, he is denied justice for “lack of sufficient documentation.” Every official step, from the missing lease to the lack of pay stubs, from the absent employer records to the silenced 911 calls, becomes a reason to delay, a reason to shrug. The system measures harm only when it fits its forms. Otherwise, the dead remain ghosts, and the living remain invisible.

In America, even tragedy must come with paperwork. The journals describe starvation. The apartment shows starvation. The body confirms starvation. But the bureaucracy sees only one thing: A man with no file. And without a file, there is no case. Without a case, there is no crime. Without a crime, there is no justice.

Back in June 2022, the lived reality was far harsher: the immigrant was alive. Starving. Threatened. Unpaid. Coerced. Because he survived, agencies responded as if nothing had happened: “We need proof of major bodily injury or death.” The fictionalized scene becomes a mirror for the State: If the victim had died, they would say there was no one to blame. If he lived, they said there was nothing wrong. In both cases, the procedure is identical, absolution through bureaucracy.

This is the story my journal documents: the lived suffering of human trafficking, labor exploitation, forced starvation, coercion, and fear, made invisible unless a body can be presented as evidence.