April 10 Friday roundup

First, a quick note about the rest of April: Long-term subscribers might remember that I took a break last spring to crew a ship headed to the Arctic. This year’s spring sabbatical will commence tonight. I’m revising a manuscript for Snowblind, my forthcoming book with St. Martin’s. It’s due at the end of the month, which is why I’m pausing work on Degenerate Art until then, stepping aside from the current crises briefly to focus on the Arctic.

I’ve paused all paid subscriptions starting today, so supporters of this newsletter won’t be billed for the time I’m away. I’ve been on the concentration camp beat for more than a decade now—and unfortunately, this crisis isn’t going to end before May gets here. So you can be sure that I’ll be back.

If you’re new to the newsletter, some key past posts worth checking out include “Into the abyss,” “Building the camps,” “What counts as a concentration camp?” and “You don’t have to swallow frogs.” If you’re an ongoing reader worried about a news and opinion deficit while I’m gone, see the end of this post for links to several recent media interviews I’ve done on concentration camp developments, as well as actions you can take about camp detention in the U.S. in the coming days and weeks.

As for links to this week’s podcast, in the latest episode, I look at the expansion of domestic U.S. concentration camps for immigrants and how agreements with other countries to receive deportees are creating an international networks of camps as well. You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen to it on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the linked material in the written version, you can read Tuesday’s post.

Before my hiatus, I want to take stock of where we’re at now. I decided to write a global history of concentration camps covering the entire twentieth century back in 2011, because no such book existed. As I did more research for it, I came to believe that the U.S. had crossed over into being a concentration-camp society, and that given the right political conditions, the country was poised to expand its extrajudicial detention exponentially.

I pitched my camps book One Long Night to publishers more than a decade ago, when Barack Obama was still president. When it came out in 2017, it wasn’t a book that reviewers or much of the public was ready for. That shifted somewhat after Trump’s family separation policy debacle and other performative public cruelties against immigrants in 2018 and 2019. But a lot of people still had a hard time seeing what was going on as part of a longer process that was likely to lead to much worse conditions without a radical restructuring of immigration policy and public conversations about immigrants.

It wasn’t until the RNC gave out signs reading “Mass Deportation Now” and Stephen Miller announced “America is for Americans and Americans only" that a larger, general horror at our national state started to wind its way through communities that had minimized the situation just a year or two before.

At this moment, we’re confronted with additional threats of warehouse conversions to camps. Forty-six people have died in immigrant detention since Trump’s return to office. The number of children in immigrant detention has increased tenfold in the same period.

But I see such a difference in awareness now. Millions and millions of people understand where we’re at, and are getting a clearer and clearer idea of the risks that we’re facing as a country. There’s so much great work going on—and more organizing coming together every day—to stop Trump and Miller’s agenda of hate.

I hope you’re doing things close to home to push back against whatever slice of the current buffet of authoritarianism you’ve decided to take a stab at stopping, because it’s all part of the same larger cruelty that we’re being force-fed.

While I’m out, you can check out my conversation with former Chicago Sun-Times CEO and city alderman Edwin Eisendrath over at “It’s the Democracy, Stupid” (warning, there were some intermittent connectivity issues!). Or you can listen to my discussion with former Somali-pirate hostage Michael Scott Moore at “Radio Free Mike,” who has long been devoted to issues of justice around detention and human rights.

Or you can try to keep up with political strategist Michael Podhorzer, messaging expert Anat Shenker-Osorio, and me during our talk on Wednesday, where we discussed why the U.S. is where it is now with regard to detention and how to close the camps.

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Sometimes the bad news can seem endless, but it’s critical to understand that you personally aren’t responsible for stopping everything. Believing that is a recipe for despair. Just reach out and make sure you’re engaged in some part of resistance in your community.

In April’s remaining days, there are lots of opportunities for bigger actions and building awareness. You can register to join a nationwide training call on April 14 at 8pm ET for people organizing to fight warehouse conversions to concentration camps. That call will get you ready for Saturday, April 25th, the “Communities Not Cages” National Day of Action to Stop ICE Warehouse Detention. In between, Indivisible will host a “Train the Trainer” virtual session in tandem with the ACLU to help know your rights and immigrants’ rights and how to teach others about them.

And May 1st will be be May Day, celebrating workers worldwide. Countless groups are coming together to host May Day Strong events across the country, calling for a day of shutting down business as usual and reclaiming not only our power but also the many things that Trump and his billionaire cronies have stolen from us. You can check out the map over at the No Kings site to see which new events are being planned that day around the country.

I’ll see you again in May!