Little Gitmos everywhere

Last week, I got a message from journalist Charles Davis. He asked me to comment for an article about a call for contractors he’d noticed on Sam.gov. The U.S. government, it seemed, was looking for businesses to partner with the Department of Homeland Security and ICE, and to fulfill other U.S. Government operational needs overseas.

This particular search for partners to collaborate with DHS was framed as maintaining a fleet of aircraft for use in its operations. But the “Statement of Work” also mentions creating facilities outside the U.S. that might hold as many as 1,000 people.

For the most part, these overseas hubs are referred to as “International Staging Areas” or ISAs. But one paragraph in the solicitation refers to a “detention facility, or facilities,” as well as “detainees.” The description is ambiguous, but it appears these sites will host what may become transit camps for some detainees, and endpoint detention camps for others.

If you’re thinking that all this is starting to sound like a global network of concentration camps run by the U.S., you’re not alone. Davis quotes me in the piece he posted over on the Redoubt (which is worth reading, too). But I want to address this document directly and at greater length from the vantage point of camp history. I’ll use some information from my book One Long Night (which traces the global establishment of concentration camps from the late nineteenth century into the twenty-first century) to explain the tremendous danger that such a network would represent.

For more than a year, in this newsletter and various articles, I’ve been laying out how the United States government under Trump has been launching just such a network. Yet this solicitation on Sam.gov is a tremendous escalation in the world of concentration camp red flags.

The good news is that this massive expansion is still in the planning stages. So there are ways to intervene, as well as a window in which to do so. Today, I want to address what’s being explored in this Statement of Work, what that would look like on the ground, and the importance of stopping it.

This document is titled “Operational Support for Aircraft Maintenance and Services” and was posted last week. Responses are due the middle of next week, with a plan to launch the proposed collaborations a year from now.

The primary missions of the project, the authors write, “include removal operations for deportations, voluntary repatriation, high-risk charter operations, deployment of crisis response personnel, medical evacuations, and movement of senior officials to support continuity directives and diplomatic engagement. DHS will maximize utilization of the aircraft and maintenance enterprise to fulfill DHS and interagency requirements.”

And it appears that the U.S. is looking to expand its deportation footprint and add detention into the mix in some new capacities. Contractors will be responsible for air crews, refueling, permits, and dealing with landing sites, as well as interacting with the host countries. The government says it will provide two “C-37B or equivalent Gulfstream 650ERs” and seven “Boeing 737-700’s or equivalent” as aircraft.

The contractor will be expected to submit a plan to “establish international staging at designated locations within host nations.  The international staging areas (ISAs) are dependent upon diplomatic relations with host nations.  ISAs may be up to 1,000 bed facilities with wrap around services which may include: power, water, sanitation, food service, security, and manpower and able to support various demographics.” 

I wrote in April about the fact that dozens of countries currently have agreements with the U.S. to hold detainees from other countries (third-country detainees). And I’ve written often about the abuses that have already occurred outside the continental U.S. as a result of deportation operations or detention abroad.

The New York Times covered the deportation of nearly 100 immigrants to Panama last year (which I also wrote about here). In hew newsletter, former Washington Post reporter (and former flight attendant) Gillian Brockell has been covering the abuses inherent in the ICE air fleet as it currently operates. Some nightmarish plans involving third countries appear to have been interrupted—such as the attempt to send deportees to Libya, which was foiled in May 2025, when a lawyer was notified of the impending flight and quickly filed an emergency motion that led to a court blocking the transfer.

The highest profile example—highly relevant to the DHS proposal put out this month—happened in March 2025, with the government’s unlawful deportations of Venezuelan and El Salvadoran detainees to CECOT, the notorious prison in El Salvador. Their deportation took place in the same time frame as the release of photos showing of then-DHS secretary Kristi Noem in El Salvador doing a photo op in front of jail cells crowded with men. CECOT detention led to abuses against those detainees, many of whom were eventually sent on to Venezuela.

In the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was initially sent to El Salvador in the face of a court order not to do so, the Trump administration argued that the CECOT detainees were no longer in U.S. custody. Therefore, it argued, the deported men were beyond the reach of DHS and government control. But a judge decided that the agency could not ignore its duty so easily, and Abrego Garcia was returned to the U.S.

The administration has been harassing him ever since. And this May, Judge Waverly Crenshaw, Jr. dismissed criminal charges against Abrego Garcia and characterized its crusade against him as an “abuse of prosecuting power.”

In the “Statement of Work” posted this month, despite contractors being hired to run these facilities, detainees are described as remaining “in the host government’s care and custody.” It seems likely that the U.S. government is trying to set these foreign detention camps up in such a way that they will again make the argument that detainees are actually under the control of the host governments and not the United States—a disastrous situation for human rights.

The contractor is also required to provide a ”mechanism to procure equipment, materials, and/or supplies for DHS donation to Host Governments.” This donation clause seems to further reveal the government’s plan to deny responsibility or accountability, leaving the host government as technically responsible for detention, even as the U.S. establishes the concentration camp setting and staffs it.

Some 21,000 people have been deported into this kind of third-country detention during the second Trump administration, according to Third Country Deportation Watch. The U.S. was reported to have paid $4.7 million for the detention of just three planeloads of deportees at CECOT. As Davis noted in his piece today, the tiny nation of Eswatini agreed to accept 11 third-country deportees as part of a $5.1 million agreement with the administration earlier this month. This current call for plans will involve exponentially vaster sums of money.

Echoes of the past

The perpetrators of each generation of camps has innovated in awful, degrading, and often more lethal ways, while building on practices from prior camps. After a decade of writing about this long arc, my sense is that what the U.S. is now proposing represents a significant shift that will open doors to horrors both new and familiar.

Looking back at some parallel phenomena from camp history, Guantanamo detention began as an offshore site for thousands of immigrants (see my posts on Gitmo here, here, and here). The gray area in which it existed—a kind of legal no-man’s land for a decade or so—meant that after 9/11, officials under George W. Bush could not only hide abuses of detainees and unlawful attempts to prosecute them, but also delay any pushback as courts struggled to determine what, if any, jurisdiction they had.

To be clear, I’m not a lawyer. But the proposed arrangement for offshore indefinite mass detention would appear to raise many of the same issues and several new ones.

I’ve also previously addressed Australia’s use of third-country detention on Manus and Nauru for asylum seekers trying to reach its shores. Conditions in those detention camps led to illness, contagious diseases, and suicide. They became a nightmare experiment—one which was dialed back through public pressure but has yet to fully end.

Just-in-time detention efficiencies developed in the Americas under dictatorships that collaborated on Operation Condor in the 1970s and early ‘80s. For that program, the U.S. supported and helped train a number of military leaders and political figures from the collaborating nations. Today, the U.S. government will be running and funding the entire multinational detention operation as part of a larger domestic ethnic purge underway nationwide.

This next-stage worsening of prior conditions creates a parallel to contractor-run or -staffed facilities the U.S. created at black sites around the world after 9/11—ostensibly to fight terror. But now, the government is bringing the black sites above board to institutionalize and entrench mass detention of noncriminal civilians without due process. 

Such a detention network would also launch another free-for-all in which those who don’t have the experience or skills to carry out assigned tasks humanely aim to secure contracts. The DHS currently has a vast network of domestic sites with partners nationwide, which it uses to shuffle around and sometimes hide immigrants it sweeps off the streets, keeping their legal representatives from finding them. Through this proposed third-country detention network, the agency is likely to create a dispersed network that can even more effectively disappear people, while handing corrupt contracts to friends and political allies.

These camps also represent a threat to democracy at home, much as current ICE facilities do. Yet the overseas network would be much more conducive to letting human beings rot in detention settings with little or no oversight. And as with the “War on Terror” black sites, the U.S. would be corrupting its allies, explicitly destabilizing the rule of law and democracy alike around the globe. Once the facilities are in place, even if a future administration ends the project, the U.S. will have provided an extrajudicial detention site as a donation to the host country—the gift of a concentration camp. 

The Statement of Work describes what will happen to contractors with regard to emergencies, disasters, or a cut in appropriations or funding: the contractor may receive a stop work order. Absent adequate funding required by the blanket purchase agreement, “the Government is not liable for any expense incurred and the Contractor proceeds at its own risk.” The fate of those detained is not mentioned.

And if the U.S. government doesn’t abandon the site, the Trump administration will leave a legacy of a global network of concentration camps in place for use by subsequent presidents. Such a network wouldn’t even have the fig-leaf excuse of a war or other emergency to pretend to legitimize its existence. Its only reasons for existence are punishment of the vulnerable and the the ethnic purging of the continental U.S.—all in an attempt to maintain and expand political power.

What can be done

It’s critical that political leaders and the public find out this plan exists. Raise awareness however you can: at political meetings you attend, in churches, book groups, volunteer gatherings, and community events. This is a case in which calling your representatives can be very useful, because they’re likely not yet aware of this plan for overseas detention. If you do call, ask for the staffer who deals with immigration policy and DHS. Let them know this is happening and that you want them to call people to account for this plan. Offer to email a link to the document itself (and perhaps also send a link to this post).

Encourage your senators and member of Congress to investigate the government’s intention to develop new global detention facilities under such convoluted terms with foreign governments. If you live in an area with DHS deportation facilities nearby, particularly if your area is a hub for overseas flights, demand that your local representatives also ask questions.

Organize outside ICE and DHS facilities to bring the issue more into public view today. Rarely do those who oppose the mistreatment of vulnerable communities have so much lead time to help stop a disaster from taking place. But once the new camps are built and detainees are overseas, our ability to intervene through both public pressure and the courts will be far more limited. It’s important to act now.

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