Building the camps

More and more news reports are popping up, describing warehouses the administration is acquiring, with plans to convert them to detention facilities. ICE has spent nearly three-quarter of a billion dollars acquiring these formerly commercial sites. And that’s in addition to other places, like the tent city Camp East Montana, already operating around the country.

Before the election, Donald Trump said he would deport as many as 20 million U.S. residents. We are witnessing the fusion of that wish with on-the-ground efforts to meet a horrific goal.

Whatever noises Trump made about dialing back the aggressive actions from immigration enforcement agents after the killings of two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis, there has been no real halt to the ethnic cleansing project driven by Stephen Miller and blessed by the president. On the streets, the secret police’s tactics of ICE and Border Patrol are becoming more strategic. But the overall mission is moving full speed ahead.

Last April, acting ICE director Todd Lyons mentioned wanting to run deportations like a business. In my research into concentration camp systems that have existed around the world over the last 130 years, I’ve seen that when a government is dealing with scrapping due process for millions, detaining them, physically breaking them down, and removing them from society, it often comes down to a question of logistics. And by the time logistics are the focus of the questions being asked, a country is in a bad place.

I’ve mentioned before that concentration camp regimes in their early stages often make use of large open infrastructure to convert into detention spaces. Dachau was converted from a shuttered factory into a concentration camp in 1933.

Authoritarians tend to seize existing facilities while the government works on building new, more permanent structures. So you'll see stadiums, warehouses, racetracks, and the like commandeered to hold masses of people.

All over the globe for more than a century, how to detain vast numbers of individuals with the least investment in their care (and often a deliberate desire to harm them) has been a key concern of most of the world's worst leaders. Today I’ll write about this warehousing of humans—why it’s a threat and why it’s necessary for everyone to move against it as quickly as possible.

The two requirements

When I got the contract to write a history of concentration camps in 2014, I really hoped to keep the US from ending up where it is today. That part didn't work out. But now, it's critical to understand how much is already underway, and the enormity of what's coming. The sooner we act to stop it, the more people we can save, and the less infrastructure there will be to dismantle in the future.

The Trump administration is not taking these actions for border enforcement purposes. The mission has crossed over into explicit ethnic cleansing to entrench political power. But this aspiring-yet-already-halfway-there dictatorship has to manage two key things to lock in authoritarian expansion and be able to get more control over the U.S. as a whole.

First, it has to expand personnel—to expand ICE and Border Patrol numbers enough to be able to suppress dissent more effectively in many parts of the country at once. Second, it has to furnish a lot more detention beds, to establish a much larger camp system, to serve as a weapon against those the administration wants to target.

Trump and his allies are making progress at both. Though the Department of Homeland Security announced in January that it had doubled officers and agents from 10,000 to 22,000 during the first year of the second Trump administration, those gains were only possible due to the removal of age restrictions and cutting training time in half. Even so, that process and its results are under investigation right now.

Meanwhile, ICE and Border Patrol are becoming the focus of shame, with agents now pariahs to decent people. Stories of agents being forced to eat in hotel rooms when restaurants refused to serve them and other public humiliations have abounded. This work on the part of everyday folks is good and effective. It will affect hiring, will encourage people to quit, and should be continued.

Even more pressing at this particular moment is that DHS is having more success in something that regular readers of this newsletter will have heard me shouting about for a year now: the threat of the government acquiring large venues and structures around the country for conversion to camps.

Several outlets have reported purchases planned or completed in places like Kansas City, Hagerstown, San Antonio, and even smaller cities and towns. Last week, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch went to Tremont, Pennsylvania, to report on the plans for a warehouse to hold 7,500 people there. The town itself has a population of 1,672 in the last U.S. census, meaning that detainees would outnumber town residents at a ratio of 5 to 1.

A shift in detention

One huge reason that this should alarm everyone in the country is that second half of the twentieth century, in most industrialized countries, the push in mass civilian detention shifted to more atomized detention, where people were held in smaller places of confinement, often secretly, then killed, exiled, or released so a new batch of people could be brought in. This was largely in order to be able to carry out state detention a little more quietly and invisibly, so as not to sow unrest among the domestic population or draw condemnation from other countries.

But now the U.S. government isn’t even pretending to espouse human rights and democracy, and is willing to behave criminally in public more often to more people. The shift back toward ongoing massive detention began early in the twenty-first century in the war on terror, when the fig leaf of anti-terror operations led the U.S. to lock up large numbers of those they deemed terrorist suspects at overseas detention sites and at Guantanamo.

That rhetoric of anti-terror operations is what we’ve seen adopted since, by the Chinese government in Xinjiang, by the generals detaining Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, by India, which has been carrying out “counter-terror” operations in Jammu and Kashmir and meanwhile created the country’s largest detention center in the state of Assam.

The U.S. is now fully embracing the large detention camp model for those who by and large—according to its own agency reports—have committed no crime, save for crossing the border without papers. (And many who are documented or whose documentation was summarily stripped by this administration are often finding themselves in detention these days.)

The fact that the U.S. is currently planning an ongoing and expansive network of camps holding 5,000, 7,500, or even 9,500 people at a single site is beyond concerning. It’s not just part of the larger shift made possible by the war on terror. But when you consider the number—again, in the tens of millions—that the administration is promising to detain or deport, and when you look at the network of planned facilities that we already know about, what we’re witnessing is the express repetition of a project on the scale of the larger concentration camp systems in history—the Soviet Gulag, the Nazi concentration camps, and Chinese labor camps in the People’s Republic of China. The administration is actively aspiring to a system of that magnitude to reshape society to its racial, political and cultural preferences for generations to come.

This is not just a fantasy. It is something for which the administration has acquired the funding and a path forward. It lacks only the personnel and enough detention spaces.

The sweep of resistance

Yet this push for human warehousing, too, is meeting greater opposition, sometimes from unusual places. Even Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman, who has publicly praised immigrant enforcement operations and allowing ICE to wear masks, has recently called for Kristi Noem’s removal. In a letter made public on Saturday, Fetterman asked DHS to halt development of detention centers in Bern and Tremont townships in his state, expressing concern for the strain it will put on the local community.

Here, finally, is a worthy use of the NIMBY impulse that is so easy to activate for worse reasons. Activists fighting a similar warehouse got even more unlikely support from Roger Wicker, the Republican senator from Mississippi who also happens to be the chairman of the Armed Services Committee. Wicker wrote a letter to DHS secretary Kristi Noem a week ago, and Noem has since reportedly agreed to halt work toward that detention site.

In New Mexico, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham signed the Immigrant Safety Act into law on February 5, which keeps state and local governments from signing agreements to detain individuals for civil immigration violations, stops the use of public land for immigration detention, and forbids the 287(g) agreements that let local law enforcement act as immigration agents.

These kinds of agreements will not solve the problem of warehouses, but they are the first steps on a path in which states can set themselves against the federal government on these issues and begin to lay the groundwork for more expansive opposition.

Even if opposition is critical and creative, and sometimes successful, it will not always be possible to stop the sale of property or even the opening of the facilities themselves. In some cases, sales have already gone through, with little regard for the will of local communities.

Just as in Minnesota, despite the heroics and successes of city residents and supporters, the federal government remains committed to its cruel agenda and continues to arrest residents. These actions affect everything in daily life. (Minnesota Public Radio reported that fully one quarter of kids were missing school last week in St. Paul.)

Walking to Neuengamme

When I was researching my first book, about Russian American novelist Vladimir Nabokov, I went to the site of the former Nazi camp at Neuengamme, outside Hamburg, in northern Germany. I went to that particular camp because Nabokov’s younger brother Sergei had died there in 1945, just months before it was liberated.

Sergei wasn’t Jewish, but he was an immigrant. He’d first been targeted as a homosexual. Later, other reasons were found to detain him. It didn’t take much to get sent to a camp at that point.

When I visited the camp memorial, I traveled on foot for the five miles or so that early detainees would have had to walk from the train station to where the camp had stood—though later, tracks were laid so that the train went all the way there.

The little houses I passed right along the road near the big camp facility took me aback. Many were obviously quite old. I thought of the people who lived there as the camp was established and as it expanded, eventually becoming the hub for a whole constellation of subcamps. I thought of the people who went about their lives, as the life expectancy for new detainees at Neuengamme grew shorter and shorter, until death came on average just 12 weeks after arrival.

I wanted those people who lived on those houses to have done something, to have stopped what unfolded inside the camp walls. But of course most didn’t, and doing so had become so difficult. The Gestapo were so established and the camp system so entrenched that the hurdles to be able to build solidarity and do any public resistance became extraordinarily high, and the consequences severe.

We are seeing a push to build that kind of camp network now. We do not, on the whole, face the same risks yet. But we need to act.

What we can do

A lot depends on what stage a given facility is at. We should continue to push our elected representatives to not just ask for modifications of ICE and Border Patrol behavior, but to demand funding clawback and to actively bar use of federal funds to the current ends.

When possible, localities can preemptively bar all cooperation with ICE and immigrant detention from your community when it comes to law enforcement. Confer with public officials and companies that own local facilities to collaboratively bar any active cooperation and establish penalties.

Where negotiations for facilities are underway, fight the leases, fight the purchases of the facility by getting the word out on the ground and demanding response from elected officials at every level. Use the example of accommodations made for Mississippi to demand similar treatment. As I noted, red-state residents have particular leverage here, because Republican officials are the ones most likely to be heard by the administration. Address the infrastructure problems large camps create, and ask your representatives if they want the name of the town to become infamous in history for being the next Dachau, the next Vorkuta—the site of a concentration camp, joining a terrible league of cities worldwide.

Where the acquisitions can’t be blocked—and the federal government does have staggering powers in this arena—communities are looking into ways to target the employees and contractors, from security services, food services, and maintenance. Cities, counties, and even states can create local ordinances that make clear that company that has provided services to the detention facility cannot get other municipal contracts, that any state or county licenses may be revoked, and that employees will not be able to work in schools or government positions going forward.

If a given facility comes online, documenting activity at these facilities is critical, and keeping up a presence that shows local opposition as well. Whatever infrastructure serves that facility, work to deny the detention camp support from it. If you are in one of the towns or cities nearby, document as much as possible what is happening. Municipalities can create their own investigative commissions to track abuses and lawbreaking involved in the acquiring and running of these camps.

Work to find out who is detained in the facility. Organize the town to stand against it publicly and often. There will likely be people in any given town who support the facility and the administration’s goals. Try to keep everyone aware of what is actually happening inside, and you may decrease that support. Share personal stories of the detainees as you are able to get them. Enter those into the public record, along with public health accounts of the diseases, like measles and tuberculosis, that are already rising in the camps.

Networking with other areas around the country that are similarly affected can share ideas and develop strategies to fight this kind of desecration of healthy communities, as the government tries to force them into hosting concentration camps. So few people understand exactly what’s happening—this is one of the reasons I encourage the use of the term concentration camp. People recognize that term as an escalation of the usual state of detention. And the current potential for harm is vast.

We’re in a race now. We need to act before the administration has the personnel and the detention facilities to broaden the scope of its actions. It’s up to us to break the existing momentum on this front. For many, this has been a faraway issue debated conceptually in the mind, something a person can take a side on, as with the Super Bowl.

But faced with whole communities being upended and strong-armed into hosting concentration camps, many will begin to see this mass deportation movement for what it is. Something abhorrent, something truly vile, and something we have to stop.

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