Into the abyss

Events are moving so quickly that it’s worth stopping to assess where we are. The U.S. government is currently building massive detention facilities, already detaining tens of thousands of people there and elsewhere, with incompetent and deeply racist secret police sweeping undocumented all kinds of people—immigrants, those with their paperwork in order, and US citizens alike—off the street.

We’re hearing grass-roots calls to abolish ICE, while opposition leadership instead speaks mostly about affordability issues. When they do address the current crisis, as House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries did recently on MS NOW, they’re prone to saying things like “we need massive reform to the way in which ICE and DHS are currently conducting themselves.” Note that the “massive reform” mentioned is to the way that the agencies conduct themselves, not to the bad-faith mission of these agencies.

I’ve looked at mass civilian detention around the world. I’ve visited the facilities where people were held. I’ve talked to the people involved—those detained and tortured, those who supported camps, and those who stood idly by. It’s critical to recognize that each of the societies that has had camps underwent a lengthy process. This process is often easier to see happening in your own country if you first look at an example in another one.

My goal today is to warn you that the U.S. has already been seized by the same camp dynamic. It’s not that I’m trying to tell you that bad things are coming, and you have to look out for them. What I’m saying is that the camps have already taken root and are on a fast-track to get exponentially worse. We’re already deep inside the process.

Yet there is power in that knowledge, because in some big ways, we can know what will happen next. We have models for how other societies have moved out of our current perilous state. And we have a ton of tactics we can use to fight back against the expanding harm directed at all of us.

I’ll add right up front that nobody sane now thinks the answer to abuses at Dachau was to give the guards more training.

Today I’ll write about how a society comes to concentration camps, the process we’re already deep into, why the ways we’re talking about events in the U.S. may be unhelpful, and how we can undo it this mess.

By the numbers 

As far as we know at present, seven people have died in immigration detention this year. Two died by suicide (despite facility responsibility to prevent self-harm). Two died of heart issues. One is said to have died from fentanyl withdrawal, and one was reportedly choked to death by guards. One more was found unconscious and unresponsive, with details of his death yet to come.

A recent report from the American Immigration Council counts some 66,000 people in immigration detention at the end of 2025. That’s an increase of almost 75% since Trump returned to office. But it falls far short of the goal the government had hoped to reach, having planned to expand capacity to more than 100,000 beds and fill them.

So you should remember that the administration is just getting started on its broader detention plan. And also keep in mind that the U.S. is currently holding three times as many people as were detained in the Nazi concentration camp system in spring 1939—six years into the Third Reich and just before the start of World War II. In addition, the Department of Homeland Security, in its language and images in press releases and on social media, is directly aping Nazi propaganda.

It’s a process

Because I wrote a history of concentration camps, I tend to use the phrase. I understand that not everyone will want to label our expanding detention network as concentration camps. By adopting that term, I’m not trying to force a moral equivalence that A is the same as B, or that A is better or worse than B, or that, for instance, the United States in 2026 is Nazi Germany in 1942.

And for those not already familiar with my work, I’ll make clear that not all concentration camps are death camps. The Nazi death camps were a handful of facilities and projects established mid-war for the Third Reich’s mass-extermination campaign. Nazi extermination camps focused overwhelmingly on Jewish and Roma and Sinti genocide, though others were also murdered there.

The death camps were launched after almost a decade after the Nazi concentration camp system was first created. Before, during, and after the Nazi era, other concentration camp systems have existed around the world.

Concentration camps involve the mass detention of civilians without due process on the basis of political, racial, ethnic, or religious identity. And that is where we’re at right now.

 Three- to five-year window

As I’ve mentioned before, rounding up people outside the existing legal system to put them in a vast network of camps doesn’t happen overnight. In a lot of the systems I’ve studied, the country had some form of dubious detention to begin with.

In some places, like Russia, detention and exile were cornerstones of the penal system for centuries. Katorga combined exile, hard labor, and arbitrary punishment long before modern concentration camps existed.

In the U.S., we currently have the existing brutality of the carceral system, cultural acceptance of disparate treatment for people of color, forced Native American exile to reservations, the long echoes Japanese American internment during World War II, the continuing operation of places like Guantanamo, and the willingness of both major political parties to use a detention-based punitive approach to immigration. These are the domestic weaknesses that helped to make the country susceptible to becoming a concentration camp regime.

In most cases, there’s a three-to-five-year window after a ruling party or leader or revolutionary brigade comes to power and asserts the right to arbitrarily detain and punish civilians. At some point toward the end of that window, a struggle typically begins over whether to massively expand the quasi-legal sites of detention into a more permanent system.

Sometimes the power struggle that determines the future of a camp system is external—for instance, defeat in war. Four years into the Khmer Rouge’s complete destabilization of Cambodia, Vietnam invaded.

In other cases, the external pressure applied is different. Three years into mass detentions in Chile in the 1970s, the situation was volatile enough that the U.S.—the major state supporting Pinochet’s dictatorship there—pressed for changes to DINA, the Chilean secret police. The organization was eliminated and replaced. That subsequent force was still abhorrent and continued to practice arbitrary detention. But one byproduct of the shift was that any expansion of mass detention into a broader, permanent camp system was halted.

More often, as in the early years of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, the struggle over concentration camps took place between competing powers within the solidifying police state. Under Hitler, nearly three years into Nazi rule, the pro-camps faction of that struggle won, leading to an expanded camp system, which eventually blanketed the country then the continent.

Trump 2.0

Concentration camps are typically the means by which a police state maintains or extends its power. In the U.S., our system was already extremely vulnerable, because of the things I mentioned before—especially the ongoing brutality of immigration detention and the legacy of the War on Terror at Guantanamo.

Attempts in Trump’s first administration to expand arbitrary detention and create official undesirable groups included efforts to institute a Muslim ban, the embrace of warehousing immigrants in cages, and family separations. Each got pushback from the public, from institutionally-minded Republicans working for Trump, or from Congress—which was controlled by Democrats by the time the country approached that three-year anniversary of Trump being in power.

Some data suggests that Joe Biden’s 2020 victory appears to have happened in part due to the Black Lives Matter protests that resisted arbitrary police violence and institutional racism. In another slightly different timeline, this progress could have been the moment that permanently derailed the potential for the U.S. to become an established concentration camp regime.

But Trump has since returned to office. And if we count the Biden administration as simply a pause on the Trump agenda in several ways, the U.S. is currently approaching the end of that three-to-five year window. We may already be living in a concentration-camp regime, but it hasn’t yet hardened into the kind of vast system that becomes the controlling factor in the country’s political future.

Still, we’re on the verge of entrenching a massive system, which is a very bad place to be. It’s my opinion that we have a limited window in which to act. What happens this year will be critical for significantly dismantling the existence of and any future capacity for building the extrajudicial camp network the government is constructing today.

Again, we need to do more than stop the construction of additional facilities, more than just get ICE agents to behave more politely. We need to dismantle the current system and remove the possibility for it to exist again. In my opinion, that is what “Abolish ICE” should mean. 

Secret police and facilities

In every concentration-camp regime there’s a network of camps in which both illness and abuses are allowed to flourish. And there also exists a secret police—sometimes more than one—with loyalty to the supreme leader.

In Soviet Russia, over time the secret police transformed from the Cheka to the OGPU and the NKVD. In Nazi Germany, the secret police were the Gestapo, and the fanatical Hitler loyalists were the SS. A little after a year after Hitler came to power, it was a section of the SS that took over running the Nazi concentration camp system.

In the U.S., we have the longtime Trump-supporting Customs and Border Protection agency—also known as Border Patrol. We also have ICE, which is bad enough to start with in terms of its role. Now ICE is expanding rapidly and taking on the more violent and extrajudicial culture of Border Patrol agents as it grows.

Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino has become the public face of ICE raids as various agencies combine their efforts. He’s aware of this role and relishes it. You often find him on the front lines of confrontation, egging on the most brutal and illegal tactics. He overtly dresses like a Nazi.

Camp vs Klan model

Sometimes people who know U.S. history well talk about the ways in which we don’t need to look to European fascism or its horrors to understand what’s happening in the U.S. today. I think, however that both the international history of camps and domestic U.S. history are critical to understanding what’s going on and where we are in the current process.

In terms of U.S. history, organizations like the Ku Klux Klan have long committed extrajudicial violence against people of color and immigrants in the U.S. Members often held public positions but used a hood to keep their public and private actions nominally separate.

Slave patrols combined a quasi-official role with citizen vigilantism. At the far end of the spectrum, the U.S. government has had an overt and vicious history of harming civilians from its founding, with Native genocide and chattel slavery.

So a government or citizens willing to harm targeted groups is hardly a new phenomenon in the U.S. But the rise of the modern form of concentration camps that I wrote my book about relied on two technological advances—the patenting and mass production of barbed wire and automatic weapons. Those two developments took earlier forms of arbitrary civilian detention and revolutionized the ability of a small guard force to control a lot of people. One way to think of it is to picture prior forms of detention as an atomic bomb, and concentration camps as a hydrogen bomb.

The situation we’re careening toward right now is building on prior and existing abusive systems of detention, immigration, and policing in the U.S. We are effectively lifting up the Klan and slave patrols and putting them not adjacent to law enforcement officials but in charge of the systems themselves.

Congress has already allocated funding that will create a camp system that could, on its own, surpass our existing (massive) prison system. The state is already trying to use modern surveillance methods to control communities both outside and inside the camps. Concentration camp systems take the worst abuses of the existing system then expand and weaponize them.

What are you waiting for?

People always ask for worst-case scenarios. But I don’t like to make a most-terrifying-possibilities list, because people seem to want to scare themselves with them. And there’s really so much we can do to stop the situation from getting worse, or even to end this nightmare completely—there’s not much point to obsessing over the grimmest scenarios.

But if you’re one of those people who are waiting for that nightmare list to come to pass before you act, I would ask what you’re waiting for.

Last week, Miami police showed up at the house of a woman who criticized the mayor. Random civilians on the street appear to have been deliberately blinded by immigration enforcement officers in response to their disapproval of ICE and its tactics. The secretary of defense has put 1500 troops on standby for the possible deployment to Minneapolis, while the DOJ has made clear there will be no investigation of the officer who shot and killed Renee Good.

Lawyers are unable to access their clients at Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building. One attorney shared that they were told, “If we let you see your clients, we would have to let all the attorneys see their clients, and imagine the chaos.” This kind of denial of rights and refusal of access counter to existing law have happened at a number of cities across the country, as federal buildings were turned into holding facilities. There’s the apparent homicide I mentioned earlier, by guards at Camp East Montana at Fort Bliss in El Paso, Texas. Citizens in Minneapolis are in hiding, with church networks delivering food to them.

Repeating history

A woman from Minneapolis reported that agents came to her house asking where Hmong and Asian people lived in her neighborhood. Within days, a squad of agents broke down the front door of a home before handcuffing an older Hmong man named ChongLy Scott Thao and marching him out into the cold wearing only boxers, crocs, and a blanket. They detained him despite his U.S. citizenship. (He has since been released.)

The way camps work is that they come into being in a police state and help the police state to become more of a police state. Camps ratchet up the speed and the efficiency of harm the state does, particularly killing.

People often think the Nazi system was a single static thing. But it evolved over time, just as our system of detention is evolving right now. It was in November 1938, just over five years into Nazi rule and Dachau’s existence, that the Nazis first swept tens of thousands of Jews en masse into camps in Germany and its territories during Kristallnacht.

Many of those arrests happened at night, with people dragged out in their pajamas, underwear, or slippers, just as ChongLy Scott Thao was marched out in the video any one of us can watch on our screens this week.

And if you find yourself saying, “Well, that gentleman was let go,” I will share with you that some 95 percent of the 30,000 German and Austrian Jews who were arrested in Kristallnacht sweeps in 1938 were eventually released by the Nazis as well. But some died in captivity. And meanwhile, a reign of terror was established. Abuses continued with impunity, until more unthinkable possibilities began to be considered for the camps.

And if you happen to be thinking, “Well, Japanese American detention camps were stopped. America refused all that,” I would answer that in that case, the camps were stopped within that critical three-to-five year period I’ve been discussing today. (And that camp system was never quite dismantled even then, but for decades continued to remain a closer call than you might imagine.)

And even after those camps were gone for good, the seeds remained. It wasn’t until 2018 during the first Trump administration—when the conservative majority Trump created on the Supreme Court was trying to whitewash the president’s attempt to create a Muslim ban—that Chief Justice John Roberts tried to insist that the current case was nothing like the Korematsu case. (The Court’s shameful decision in Korematsu had approved the framework for Japanese American detention.)

Under pressure to approve the Muslim ban, Roberts distinguished it from Korematsu, which he said was a “gravely wrong” decision with no place in law. But that legacy as a whole is not really gone. In recent days, federal courts in Alabama have been using a law last applied during the U.S. internment of Japanese Americans during World War II to charge immigrants who don’t register themselves.

Onward

We’ll continue to see people arguing over whether or not the phrase “Abolish ICE” is the right slogan. But some of the advocates against it have their own interests at heart. Just this week, one of the people making the case against the phrase was discovered to be a corporate consultant at a shadow lobbyist for defense and tech firms.

That is just one more example of how all this money and these facilities create a self-perpetuating bureaucracy with its own stakeholders whose main interest is its continuation. Politicians back mass detention for the expanded power it brings them; money interests back camps because they have financial stakes in building or maintaining them.

And to be clear, any approach that slows this process down is good to the degree that it gives us more time to act. Yet we know from history around the world, and in America’s own past, that without a complete dismantling of the targeting and detention systems we’ve created, we’re bound to return to this again and again. If it isn’t stopped, it can and will get much worse.

Still, just as the U.S. has a heritage of oppression, it also has a vast inheritance from those who believed and worked for the best that the country could become. From Reconstruction to Native American resistance, the fight against the KKK, the Underground Railroad, and the labor and the Civil Rights movements, we have ancestors and role models in this work.

Countless communities are already rising to the occasion, in Chicago and Minneapolis, in L.A. and D.C., in churches and synagogues and mosques, in PTA meetings, and neighborhood anti-ICE groups.

 Reject, don’t refine

Remember how, at the top of this post, I suggested that the real answer to sloppy and violent cowboy ICE guys isn’t to give them more training? In 1934, after a year and a half in power, the Nazis decided to put a stop to the abuses that had come to light from the same kind of out-of-control guards taking matters into their own hands.

That was the point at which the SS was given control of the concentration camps. Formal training was instituted. Dachau became the model camp, at the head of a regimented and more structured camp system. While certain kinds of abuse ended, more training did not prevent the much worse atrocities that followed on a larger scale.

You can’t reform a concentration camp regime. You have to dismantle it and replace it. We have a thousand ways to do it. And most U.S. citizens—particularly white ones—have the freedom to act, for now, with far less risk than the many people currently targeted.

City councils are debating cutting ties with ICE. Hotels in the Twin Cities hosting ICE agents are closing down temporarily. Lawyers are working to represent those in detention. Constituents are working to elect politicians who are willing to end collaboration with ICE. Whistle brigades have formed. Safety patrols deliver food to families or walk their children to school.

If ICE hasn’t been on the move where you live yet, then you should use this time to get ready. And in the meantime, join your neighbors and elected officials (current or potential) who want to keep as much of this harm as possible from ever arriving in your hometown.

All you have to do is pick one small task that you think you could do—one step toward ending the brutality sweeping the country. Build community close to home. Connect to larger networks to share and learn from one other. We can do this, if we’re willing to act.

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