Choking on the cruelty

Over the last week, Critical Response Strategies posted a job listing for a “camp manager” in Florida at an “emergency detention facility.” The job pays sixty dollars an hour as a base rate, with a rotating schedule, working 84 hours a week (but not every week). The listing makes clear the job has “no benefits.”

Presidential advisor Stephen Miller recently issued an invitation for red state governors to “work with us to build facilities in your states.” build their own detention camps in the style of the one already open in the Everglades. President Trump has previously noted that he hopes to see a network of facilities like the one in Florida pop up around the country.

Today I want to write about the bureaucracy of detention: how systems grow, how existing institutions choke on them for a time without being able to block them, and what that means in terms of trying to stop those who want to create a concentration camp society.

I’ve called what’s happening in the Everglades a concentration camp. It’s worth taking a minute to ask where such a camp comes from.

Global camp history

Sometimes camp systems, especially in their initial stages, take inspiration from systems instituted in other countries. For instance at the turn of the twentieth century in the Philippines, the United States was suppressing an insurrection. America had won the Spanish-American War of 1898 and as a result, had taken over Spanish territories abroad.

The historical record is somewhat murky, but the U.S. appears to have promised independence for the Philippines. If it did in fact make that promise, it reneged on it. In either case, it wound up with a fierce rebellion on its hands.

The U.S. had its own brutal domestic history of violence against Native Americans and enslaved people, but at that point, had no experience running overseas concentration camps camps. In theory the U.S was against them.

In fact, Spanish camps for civilians in Cuba had been a core reason that the U.S. had made the argument for going to war against Spain there just three years before. But the U.S. repeated that history at its first opportunity, opening its own overseas concentration camps in the Philippines near the end of 1901.

Camp systems tend to proliferate and repeat themselves. After the Chinese Revolution of 1949, Mao adopted a principle of remolding individuals through hard labor in a way that very much echoed the “reforging” concept the Soviet Union had embraced over the prior two decades with the Gulag. n fact, the first minister of public security for the PRC, Luo Riquing, hung a portrait of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the first director of the Russian secret police, in his office.

A few years later, after Stalin’s death, Nikita Khrushchev denounced the cult of personality under Josef Stalin and began to move the country away from the Gulag model. But Chinese officials kept up their repressive gulag-style detention, believing they were the true torchbearers of Communism.

Cross-border concentration camp influence is real. It’s no accident that Eastern Europe, Cuba, and Vietnam all embraced Soviet-style camps systems to varying degrees at different points during the Cold War.

For its part, the West, uninterested in Soviet-style camps after World War II, instead reinvented the colonial-era camps used by imperial powers half a century before. The French in Algeria and the British in Kenya returned to turn-of-the-century concentration camps to quash independence movements that Western powers saw as not about freedom but as driven by Communism.

In other cases, emigration directly facilitated the spread of concentration camps. Decades after the end of World War II and an influx of Nazis to Argentina, the country suffered under the boot of dictatorship. Detainees in the Athletic Club of Buenos Aires during the rule of the junta were interrogated in front of a photo of Hitler and forced to salute it.

Occasionally, emigration might be involuntary: captured by the British on his way to the revolution in Russia, Leon Trotsky found himself detained in a World War I concentration camp in Canada. Russia was technically allied with Great Britain and Canada at the time, but officials knew that Lenin and Trotsky had vowed to take Russia out of the war and abandon the West.

Trotsky was released weeks later. Upon his return to Russia, he wrote a pamphlet for distribution by the Red Army to all Russian soldiers detailing his experience in a Canadian concentration camp. In the summer of 1918, years before the Soviet Union was even founded, he proposed putting internal class enemies into concentration camps, too. It was hardly the sole inspiration for the Gulag. But Trotsky’s detention in Canada underlined the degree to which governments worldwide were already preemptively detaining civilians they saw as threats, providing a fig leaf to others to take even more brutal actions.

Internal camp legacies

Sometimes with camp systems, ideas jump from country to country. At other times, a country’s own history provides the inspiration. And sometimes, the bureaucracy of detention itself lingers as a legacy that becomes the vehicle for a new kind of camp.

World War I internment was the first time that concentration camps existed in a simultaneous network around the world. Opposing countries had them, and because of imperial territories that were scattered around the world, camps ringed the planet.

Red Cross representatives visited these sites. Some common policies were adopted in the attempt to seem the most humane and win the public relations war. And under that pressure, those World War I camps were far less lethal than the colonial camps that had preceded them at the turn of the century.

But afterward, having that existing network helped perpetuate concentration camps around the globe. It turned out that legacy of mass civilian detention without trial creates its own bureaucracy and momentum and is very hard to undo. At the start of World War II, the U.K. had planned not to repeat the shameful mass detention of enemy aliens it had embraced during the First World War, but faced with what seemed like imminent invasion, the government panicked and proceeded to do so anyway.

In the U.S. in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, a Naval intelligence report appeared, declaring that concentration camps for Japanese American would be unnecessary and unproductive. But momentum of the past and the ways that political actors can use camps to amass power tend to be consistent, and often defeat resistance to their use again and again.

America’s past

Right now in the U.S., by erecting this new concentration camp system, the country is building on our own distant and recent past. Just as Weimar Germany segregated its Roma and Sinti populations into nighttime camps outside town—camps known as concentration camps—in the years before the Nazis took power, the U.S. is relying on its own prior cruel immigration detention system in building this new, more lethal mode.

The form the system is taking now is one impossible to get to except through our existing immigration detention, and also through Guantanamo. The naval base on the island exists in the first place because it was the beachhead established by U.S. forces during the 1898 invasion.

That invasion was carried out in part to alleviate the suffering of Cubans who had been put in concentration camps years before. President William McKinley in his call to war condemned the policy of reconcentración—mass civilian relocation behind barbed wire—saying that “it was not civilized warfare; it was extermination. The only peace it could beget was that of the wilderness and the grave.”

After the U.S. set foot on Guantanamo, the military base went from temporary to permanent and has been there for nearly 130 years. Because of that base, America conveniently had an offshore facility that could be used to intercept immigrants coming from the islands to the U.S in the 1990s.

Gitmo’s career in detention began back then as an immigrant detention facility for tens of thousands of those immigrants fleeing political and economic instability. The U.S. government created immigrant detention camps for them, in horrible conditions without medical care, creating crises that led to U.S. courts intervening.

That legacy of that gray-area immigrant detention at a site under U.S. control but not necessarily subject to all U.S. law—was horrific. After 9/11, nearly eight hundred detainees were shipped to Gitmo. It became a site of torture and indefinite internment, and has remained open in that latter capacity for more than two decades without trials for the detainees remaining there today.

America today

Now, under Trump, Guantanamo is holding immigration detainees again, too—detainees the government is once more claiming are a national threat and the worst of the worst. Though some names of detainees have been released, we don’t know the full roster of who is currently there. Gitmo is now a fusion of its recent histories: a black site and an immigrant holding facility.

All along the way at Guantanamo, from immigration detention in the 1990s to its role in war-on-terror detention, the courts have choked on executive branch policies related to government abuses there. They’ve deliberated, withholding rights and then extending them to detainees, only to limit them again. The system has struggled against itself.

Yet however unjust the prior system was, even with intermittent tensions between the judicial and executive branches of government, make no mistake that the next system can be even worse. Overall immigration enforcement spending in the U.S. as just approved by Congress currently rivals that of the military budget of Russia, a country three years into open war on Ukraine. The U.S. is now at war on its residents, and the government is just beginning to build the detention network that will shape the terms of that conflict.

In addition to worrying about what’s happening this very minute, we have to keep in mind how will could evolve and what legacy it will leave. Congressman Maxwell Frost reported that during his recent visit to the Everglades concentration camp, a detainee called out to say he was a U.S. citizen.

Countless noncitizens have been subjected to violent arrest and arbitrary deportation. Several U.S. citizens have been briefly detained that we know about. It’s likely there are many more.

How to respond

Some people will say to lie low and try to wait for things to pass, to not push back publicly when the Supreme Court seems compromised and even corrupt. But historically speaking, doing nothing and leaving camps to their own momentum without even trying to apply the brakes is rarely a good approach.

As I wrote in my book One Long Night, while court cases unfold and the system is choking on itself, there is still hope to limit the expansion of a concentration camp system. It is not the only way to oppose authoritarian overreach on detention, but it’s still a worthwhile one.

Trying to keep the system choking on its obvious cruelty and illegality can point out to the public exactly what’s happening and the ways that it’s wrong. It’s sometimes the only hope to have a system that will do anything at all. Many times, rulings will go against those pressing for democracy. But the system isn’t exercised at all, it will atrophy even more quickly.

We have to push back at every point. But we are likely to lose a lot of the cases that reach the Supreme Court, as happened a week ago with eight men sent to South Sudan. Even in these cases, the unjust rulings nevertheless create a road map of accountability for future legal proceedings, as well as highlighting what needs to be undone or bulldozed to rebuild the country.

Take wins where you can get them

Some things can actually be stopped through these kind of efforts. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was brought back from El Salvador against the clear wishes of the president and his allies. This week, Dr. Jonathan Caravello, a U.S. citizen and California Faculty United union member was released from federal custody after days of detention following his protest at an immigration raid. The Miami Herald was able to acquire a list of more than 700 detainees held at the Everglades concentration camp.

Court hearings can feel very far away and removed from the lives of everyday people. But keep in mind that these kinds of successes unfold every day, and some of them you may never even hear about.

You can help with those fights by doing what you can to keep arbitrary detention from becoming legal. You can do this through local and national organizations working against raids and sweeps and deportations without due process. You can raise public awareness of and increase pressure for the return or release of detainees that are still held.

You can encourage your representatives to visit detention facilities in your area, as with that visit referenced above by Representative Frost. Representatives Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Darren Soto, and Jared Moskowitz also visited the Everglades Camp with him, as did several state representatives. Though officials surely get only a sanitized view of what’s happening, even the conditions they saw were dismal. And their condemnations keep the facilities in the news.

Just like the protesters pressing the the L.A. Dodgers ownership to keep ICE from using their parking lots, you can work to keep local businessowners from giving ground on ICE raids when not required to by law. By knowing your rights and others’, you can help everyone to stay safe and, as much as possible, to avoid arrest in the first place.

ICE officers are apparently demoralized just as the agency needs to do massive recruitment. Government attorneys are quitting rather than represent Trump’s policies in this second administration. Encouraging further despair among those who are carrying out Trump’s agenda is work we can all help with.

And where principles of democracy lose in courts, we can press on in the court of public opinion, and use the vast majority of Americans’ unhappiness with what’s happening. Remember, 79% percent of Americans now favor immigration and think it’s good. We can take that reaction to Trump’s overreach and use it to educate and mobilize more people to take action in turn.

On July 16—which is tomorrow, or probably even today if you’re reading this on a Wednesday!—No Kings will launch a trio of sessions, “One Million Rising: Strategic Non-Cooperation to Fight Authoritarianism,” at two-week intervals. The first will be devoted to strategic non-cooperation, while later sessions will teach attendees on how to become trainers themselves and how to launch events of their own. On July 17, the next day, “Good Trouble Lives On” demonstrations will take place across the country, supported by dozens of nonprofit groups.

Help those representing immigrants and defending democracy in the courtroom, just as activists in Minneapolis did on Monday, when they held an “ICE out of the Courts” rally. Press on close to your home, too. And be in the streets if you can, carrying signs and handing out flyers, so that people know what’s actually happening. Take advantage of this window in which the system is choking on itself to do as much as possible to limit the current growth of the U.S. concentration camp system.

Grave offenses are going to happen. Some have already happened; more are underway. But each person who is released, each person who is returned to their family, each individual who is never arrested or detained represents a victory.

We have to work to keep our system from even worse possible futures that we can’t yet imagine. Just as a history of harm builds a legacy, resisting what’s happening in concrete ways shapes the future, too.

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