How does this end?

Last week, The Washington Post laid out the planned expansion of detention by the Trump administration, noting that the federal government will spend billions more than in prior years to expand its detention capacity to over 107,000 beds. That includes several very large detention camps. Their stated goal for more than a year has been to deport 20 million people, which is more undocumented immigrants than exist in the country. They are already intermittently holding those with green cards, and even U.S. citizens—though detainees with paperwork and legal representation are typically eventually released.

The government has sought (and been denied, for now) the ability in California to racially profile and target more people. If they were able to arrest and detain tens of millions of human beings, as they say they plan to, all those people wouldn’t be held simultaneously. But the process of detention and deportation would still be a logistical nightmare, with horrific backlogs and cases that could never be resolved or could only be resolved by sending people to extremely dangerous settings, often in countries where they have no history with at all. The total number they’re shooting for would surpass the number of individuals detained in the Soviet Gulag across its entire existence, which spanned more than two decades.

I’ve made passing reference before to ways that concentration camp regimes are brought down and how vast detention projects end. But it’s worth focusing on this concept in depth, because it can help indicate what might be useful for us to do at this moment. So in this post, I’ll focus on a number of the various driving forces that have ended or helped to end mass detention of civilians without trial—concentration camps.

The first thing to note is that a vast network of detention camps doesn’t close on its own. That might seem obvious, but it bears emphasizing. The ability to detain civilians is as potent a form of power as a government can have, and historically, leaders who possess that power have tried to keep it. They mean jobs, and privileges, and power for the people in charge of them. Those who are running the camps will not unilaterally close them without some kind of significant pressure being applied.

A carceral problem

One thing I’d also like to note out of the gate is that concentration camps are an addition to whatever legal system currently exists in a given country. Even when they’re officially made legal by the removal of safeguards guaranteeing rights, camps are an extralegal add-on, put in place to get around limits on who can be detained by the government and what can be done to them.

Nevertheless, by the time a country gets to concentration camps, it typically means that the preexisting society had deep flaws that allowed abuses of certain groups. In the U.S., you can’t get to the kind of camps we’re building now without decades of previous punitive border policies, as well the huge prison system we already have in place. That system has consistently delivered sky-high incarceration rates compared to the most of the industrialized world. And in the end, we aren’t going to be able to protect Americans from the use of concentration camps in any reliable, long-term sense without reforming our justice system in bigger ways.

But for today, I’m focusing on how to end this extralegal form of detention—these mass camps that the administration is currently expanding. It would be a huge step toward launching that larger, equally necessary project.

In rare cases, court battles can be the triggering event for a camp system’s demise—or can at least begin the process. But most of the time, the power exerted is a blunter tool than the courts and involves more direct confrontation with or sudden change in the existing government.

I’ll look at a handful of ways that massive extralegal detention has been massively downscaled or ended altogether: through losing a war, the death of a cult-figure leader, external pressure or intervention, court rulings, and citizen action.

Defeat in war

Losing to the Allies brought an end to the Holocaust and the heinous Nazi concentration camp system. After 1945, those camps ceased their support of Hitler’s agenda.

However, many of those camps didn’t close right away. Some were used as relocation camps by the Allies for a time, which is understandable, though conditions in them were often miserable. More disturbing is that in the immediate wake of the war, the Soviets used existing concentration camps in German territory to detain people who were seen as undesirable and deport them to the Gulag or to exile in Siberia. From this, it’s possible to draw a lesson that once camps are established, they tend to be resilient and don’t vanish overnight.

Another example of defeat in war happened during Khmer Rouge rule in Cambodia. A small nation, the country of Cambodia (then Kampuchea) had after the Khmer Rouge takeover been effectively turned into one vast forced-labor camp itself, leading to the death of a quarter of the population. Vietnam invaded and overthrew the government in late 1978 and the opening days of 1979, blocking the mass detention and mass torture project, though fighting continued for a decade afterward.

Death of a cult leader

By contrast, in countries where a cult of personality has taken hold, when a leader dies, the country can sit at an inflection point for major change that’s driven by internal forces. The most famous example of this category is the 1953 death of Stalin in the Soviet Union. When Nikita Khrushchev took power in Stalin’s wake and eliminated Lavrenty Beria—the head of Russia’s secret police—he moved quickly to begin dismantling the massive Gulag apparatus.

The Soviet Union continued as a repressive state, but it did change in significant ways, including undoing its multigenerational project of preemptive detention and reeducation. Even with Beria and Stalin gone, it took several years to undo the larger Gulag infrastructure. Yet even after the extrajudicial camps were eliminated, abuses remained, from forced psychiatric detention to hard labor after conviction through regular legal channels.

International intervention

Something between international intervention and all-out war took place in Argentina in 1982, when the government claimed sovereignty of the Falkland Islands. Control of the island territories had long been a matter of disagreement between the U.K. and Argentina.

The loss of that conflict helped to trigger instability in Buenos Aires as well, bringing about the 1983 fall of the military dictatorship that had held power since 1976. Accountability remained elusive for decades. But the collapse of the dictatorship began to close the door on the secret detention, torture, and murder of tens of thousands of civilians.

If conflict with an unfriendly nation helped speed an end to detention and repression in Argentina, it was action from a friendly government that created pressure to end mass detentions in Chile in the 1970s. Chile’s generals received support from the U.S. government in the wake of their 1973 military coup, despite widespread detention camps and murders of those they targeted as opponents. The Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA) had likewise been encouraged by the U.S. during its reign over camps and torture sites.

But that dynamic changed in 1976 when DINA orchestrated the Washington, DC, assassination of Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier, which also killed his assistant, Ronni Moffitt, a U.S. citizen. DINA lost U.S. support and was officially disbanded by the junta. Significant repression in Chile continued for more than a decade, but the mass detention-camp phase of the dictatorship largely ended with the fall of DINA.

Internal pressure

Actual change often comes from a combination of both international and internal pressure. In the case of Chile, the Catholic Church played a role in pushing back on government abuse. So sometimes even when a country has fallen into authoritarianism, civic or religious institutions have mitigated lethal conditions in camps or helped to end mass detention. Outside of outright invasion and defeat in wartime, internal pressure of some kind nearly always plays a role, with other factors creating openings for those who are willing to act.

Action from the courts

In rare cases, courts have ended camps or the threat of them. This is one of the reasons that keeping even a semi-independent judiciary, as we have now in the U.S. is important. The same U.S. Supreme Court that gave America the Korematsu decision allowing the mass detention of Japanese Americans also gave us the Endo decision, which acknowledged there was no legal basis to detain California state employee Mitsuye Endo. Even as a court hands down unjust rulings, it’s sometimes also possible for litigants to press for and secure justice in other cases before the same court.

But even the judges who make an honest effort to uphold the law are limited in their scope. Court systems are typically passive receivers of actions launched by other branches of government or by the public. They’re designed to play a role when cases come before them.

Being able to bring a case often involves a tremendous amount of work. The right plaintiff has to emerge. The case has to be deemed worthy of consideration. Sufficient legal and financial resources have to be in hand to research the matter, bring the issue before a court, and pursue it through any appeals. All of which means there’s often an internal dissent movement required—one active enough to make sure that detention issues even reach the courts.

The long tail of authoritarianism

Concentration camps are one of the favorite tools of repressive governments, but they’re also one of the most visible. Sometimes they become casualties of that visibility. But as in the case of Chile or Soviet Russia, even after peak of mass detention has passed, and most or all concentration camps in a country are dismantled, it doesn’t mean that the society is no longer facing significant oppression.

What stops authoritarianism is a broader question. It can be ended by some of the same factors, but also crises like an economic collapse. But in societies where democratic principles or human rights haven’t been sufficiently bulwarked through institutions, without a massive reorientation of society, an end to one authoritarian ruler is likely to lead to the next one.

Across the last century, concentration camp detention usually comes into existence once a regime’s opponents can be openly targeted. But where authoritarians have managed to become the governing party or leaders in regimes without concentration camps, political actors may still be able to intervene to halt or undo authoritarianism, as happened recently in South Korea and in Brazil.

In Brazil, the courts took the lead in upholding institutions of democracy. In South Korea, a combination of public protest, courts, and legislators acted to preserve the country from an attempt to entrench power via martial law.

The United States today

The U.S. right now is in worse shape democratically in terms of its institutions than South Korea or Brazil. Yet the courts are still an important avenue to address the president’s illegitimate seizures of power, and the lower courts are doing tremendous amounts to uphold the rule of law.

But the Supreme Court is corrupt and compromised with its unchecked ethics crisis and increasing use of the shadow docket for major constitutional questions. In any high-profile case directly related to Presidential authority on extrajudicial detention systems being expanded now, the odds are that the current majority is likely to side with Trump as he tries to accumulate more power. (To be clear, we should nonetheless force them to rule on issues as often as we can.)

And while it’s already clear that lower court rulings will likely do a lot to mitigate the harm being done, we can’t count on the highest court in the land to protect democracy. Despite some notable exceptions, Democratic legislators seem to likewise be struggling in that effort.

At this point, the U.S. is unlikely to face invasion or defeat in war. There are few outside nations with the power to influence U.S. policy away from developing a national (and even international) network of concentration camps. And most countries that Trump would be inclined to listen to at the moment have themselves embraced arbitrary police-state detention. It may, however, be a good idea for democratic countries to consider banding together to impose sanctions on the U.S. over its human rights violations.

Considering the “death of the cult leader” endgame, if Trump were to die in office, his death would provide an opening for a massive shift in political power. But we’re already far down the road to authoritarianism; it won’t be simple to undo. And once the infrastructure and bureaucracy of a system of the kind the administration has described as its goal is fully in place, it will be much harder to get rid of camps. The project typically takes years and is prone to backsliding, as other political figures find convenient and even new uses for the camps.

The role of the people

In my opinion, the fate of the country in our case will depend heavily on the actions of the people. As I note almost every week, here is our grand opportunity. Our courts are still semi-functional, we still have access to our legislators, and elections. But most of all, unlike so many concentration-camp systems I’ve researched, dissent has not been effectively crushed in the U.S. at this point. The government doesn’t yet have what it needs in place to fully lock in authoritarianism. Most of us can act, and the more of us who do, the more we’ll limit the future actions and capabilities of the administration.

We need only look at North Korea, with a concentration camp system in place for more than a half-century, to recall that some camp systems that began have not ended.

We shouldn’t wait for all this to pass. We need to educate ourselves and our friends on how to push back on the role of ICE in our communities. My post from two weeks ago on how to get ICE out of your town lists exactly how to do that.

We need to support every immigrant in detention or going before a judge—making sure that they have legal counsel and their families have support. We need to pressure national and local officials to stand up for due process and human rights—immigrant rights, trans rights, and yours and mine as well.

And on one point, I want to be clear: there seems to be some kind of misunderstanding among Democrats about what it means to stand up for trans rights. A candidate publicly embracing LGBTQ rights does not mean throwing out all strategy about what issues to highlight at any given moment. It does not preclude them from spending the majority of their ad dollars or their speeches on economic issues or health issues of their constituents as a whole.

But here in the U.S., it’s looking like the bulk of the work of standing up for others in the country will fall to us, the people, as a whole. Those who have already been doing that work will have to be joined by those who have been sitting things out thus far. Together, we need to insist that no one deserves the blunt-force hatred and abuse we see our government inflicting on a daily basis across America. Our money, our infrastructure, and our authority are being borrowed and even stolen to commit these abominations.

So if you oppose what’s happening, reach out to two or three friends. Connect with immigrant services, or legal aid organizations, or even local mutual aid groups. Or form your own network that fills a need you see close at hand today, no matter how small it is.

This moment—right now—is your best and safest time to act. Six months from now, on our current trajectory, it will be harder and more dangerous to start. You need to find people close to home that you can trust and work with. We’re in for a long haul, and harder times lie ahead.

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