Planet of the camps

The malicious fools who captured the United States government have tipped the world into chaos with their reckless, inane war against Iran. Our president is both hateful and unhinged, and his lackeys are either too afraid to stand up to him, or actively goading him on in the evil he does.

Despite the fact that wars abroad and concentration camps at home have long been linked in history, that’s not what I’ll write about today (although I do think these two themes of Trump’s return are related). Instead, I want to focus on a related evil that Donald Trump and Stephen Miller are currently perpetrating outside U.S. borders: the creation of an international network of concentration camps around the world.

When I think of ICE violence and detention at home, what first comes to mind for me is people being kidnapped and detained nationwide. Then I think of children being used as bait for their parents. Then I think of U.S. citizens being shot and killed outright. And I think about how even when their targets survive despite the murderous tactics of law enforcement, people like Montessori teaching assistant Marimar Martinez in Chicago wind up ludicrously portrayed as a “domestic terrorist.”

It’s important to track each of these kinds of abuses. At the same time, there’s another phenomenon I don’t want to lose sight of. Just as violence surged on the streets of cities and towns across America in an attempt to send people to a network of domestic concentration camps, the Trump apparatchiks have been busy exporting parallel cruelties around the world.

In a previous post, I mentioned that the U.S. government was negotiating with dozens of countries to set up detention agreements to hold those flown from U.S. soil. And now, via the very useful Third Country Deportation Watch website, it’s possible to examine what we know about the discussions or agreements that the U.S. has carried out with at least 27 countries now.

Today, I want to consider this still-forming network of camps, some precedents for them in the past, the larger threat they represent to both the US and the world, and what can be done to push back against them.

One of the challenges for Trump and Miller right now is that they can’t deport everyone they want where and when they want. In some cases, courts have forbidden sending detainees born in a country back to that same country, often due to a particular detainee’s risk of persecution there. In other cases, countries simply refuse to take detainees who do not wish to return.

A recent New York Times feature told the story of 17 men and women accused of crossing the U.S. border without papers. Those deported were sent to Cameroon, though none of the detainees were from there. The Times’ reporting suggested that Cameroon had accepted the men in exchange for implicit or explicit benefits, including the U.S. fostering corruption and looking the other way on human rights abuses following the October presidential election there.

The same story referenced at least 25 countries with which the U.S. has made similar agreements, getting them to accept detainees from third countries, even if deportees have no historical connection or ties of citizenship with the destination country. In the case of those sent to Cameroon, video footage reportedly exists of an official telling the detainees that they will be sent back to their home countries. Two of the 17 deportees have already been re-deported “home.” As of late March, the rest were enduring one of the hallmarks of concentration camp systems: indefinite detention.

CECOT trauma

I’ve written before (and did an entire piece for New York magazine) about the Venezuelan and El Salvadoran detainees Trump deported to the prison known as CECOT more than a year ago. There, they faced permanent detention without due process, and reported beatings, sexual assaults, and daily conditions designed to inflict harm.

Following the lead of lower courts, last summer the Supreme Court ruled against the president’s attempt to use the Alien Enemy Act of 1798 to declare the immigrants part of an “invasion,” an argument that Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council called “one of the worst abuses of government power in generations.” But despite the Supreme Court ruling, the damage from Trump’s illegal actions continues to have repercussions: Though more than 250 Venezuelans sent to CECOT prison, who had been accused of being gang members despite no formal charges or proof, were returned to their home country, many remain traumatized by their captivity, and now threatened again by the kind of persecution that led many to flee the country for the U.S. in the first place.

Even more disturbing are the 36 Salvadoran men the U.S. sent to CECOT, whose whereabouts remain “unconfirmed”, with their families remain unable to contact them. Prior reporting has suggested that several men from El Salvador were returned so that Bukele could keep them from testifying about his alleged collaboration with gangs as he solidified his hold on power. And all this is just what we know so far, a partial story. But the U.S. is creating populations of the disappeared abroad.

In that case, the country’s president Nayib Bukele had already subverted his country’s legal system and accountability on human rights by building the CECOT prison. But Trump’s actions furthered corruption there by reportedly agreeing to pay millions in a lucrative detention deal to take the men, and by helping to further entrench Bukele’s rule by delivering up witnesses to his corruption who could then be silenced.

Though many partner countries haven’t yet received anywhere near the numbers of immigrants who were rendered to El Salvador, the nonprofit Mobile Pathways has identified more than 13,000 immigrants to the U.S. who are facing deportation to third countries.

In most cases, a combination of what effectively appear to be bribes, threats, and rewards pressure less-wealthy countries to partner with the U.S. Which means that along with the harm done to detainees and international law, the U.S. is destabilizing less-powerful countries around the globe, undermining human rights, and furthering criminal behavior abroad. And Trump is doing it via the path of one of the most dangerous human institutions in human history: the kind of civilian detention without due process done in an end run around existing law that characterizes concentration camps.

Even where countries have limited traditions of irregular detention, or where a few detainees are held, the U.S. is still encouraging, and in many cases, paying, host countries to hold deportees in extralegal conditions. It is as if the U.S., in the wake of the destruction of lifesaving USAID programs, is starting to replace it with something poisonous and lethal.

International camp regimes

Multinational and international detention networks have existed in the past, often set up by some of history’s worst actors. During World War II, Nazi Germany made use of transit camps and hubs to deport targeted populations (especially Jewish detainees but also members of various Resistance groups) eastward from (and often to) occupied territory.

After the Nazis were defeated, the Soviet Union converted many former Nazi camps under their control to use for deportation purposes, transporting dissidents opposing the weight of the Iron Curtain to meet their death, wind up in camps, or remote exile inside the borders of the U.S.S.R. This pattern was part of a larger effort of deportation and dislocation. In the Baltic states, Operation Priboi tore more than 90,000 people from their homes in the spring of 1949. Tens of thousands of those counted as “enemies of the state” were women and children.

I’ve mentioned in previous episodes the ways in which various governments coordinated with one another in the Americas under right-wing dictatorships in 1970s and 1980s in a project named Operation Condor. This kind of collaboration allowed for outsourcing of detention and torture, and these countries carried out their abuses with broad support and sometimes training from the U.S. The synergy that is created when countries collaborate adds to the overall potential for harm.

War on Terror tactics

Closer to the present day and after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. bullied and cajoled other countries into violating international law and norms in a variety of ways. Many of our key European allies aided in illegal renditions; others were even more complicit. As laws and ethical restrictions were subverted or ignored during the War on Terror, the United States set up black sites around the globe.

Lithuania and Romana hosted such such sites, which the U.S. used for detention and interrogations that resorted to torture. In May 2018, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that the governments of both countries were complicit and aware of the illegalities of the program, but had never imposed accountability on those involved.

Thailand was also home to another U.S. black site more than two decades ago. Not only were 10 detainees held and tortured there before being moved to places like Guantanamo, but a witness testified that Gina Haspel, an undercover CIA officer, personally oversaw the waterboarding of at least one detainee there, as well as expressing support for destroying videotapes of interrogations that had been recorded.

The Thai black site reveals clearly the brutal legacy of this kind of detention, both on the ground and in the halls of power. During Trump’s first term in office, Haspel was named director of the CIA. And back in Thailand, the waterboarding that the CIA had introduced there in 2002 became part of a practice of torture and interrogations that local authorities adopted for use on Muslims they arrested.

U.S. support for Operation Condor, as well as its creation of the War-on-Terror black sites, took place even as the U.S. still—publicly at least—embraced human rights and democracy at home and abroad. Now we have a regime in place that no longer even pretends to care about these issues. And that regime is pressing countries to violate humane and legal considerations, and pervert their own domestic detention systems.

As Trump leads the country further into committing war crimes, and other illegal acts become commonplace, the shifting role of international relations in both immigrant concentration camps and military operations represents a twin danger.

This is all still in the early stages. But due to lack of reporting or oversight—not to mention oppressive measures by governments against those trying to find out more—in many of the countries to which the U.S. has effectively rendered immigrant detainees overseas, we don’t yet know even the true outlines let alone the worst abuses of the system Trump is bringing into existence.

But it’s clear the government is trying to set up a system to let it administer a kind of extralegal indirect rough justice without accountability. Looking at one well-known case, Kilmar Abrego Garcia was the subject of a court hearing today over the government’s attempt to deport him to Liberia. Prosecutors argue that they’re not deporting him to Africa instead of South America to punish him. Instead, as Todd Lyons wrote in a brief filed last month, Abrego Garcia must be sent to Liberia precisely because the U.S. has gone to so much trouble to negotiate a third-country agreement there.

This is an insane rationale. Liberia is a country with overcrowded prisons providing inadequate rations and only intermittent electricity and running water. And Trump’s lawyers are arguing that they’ve gone to so much trouble to create a path to send him there that their effort to do so somehow becomes the justification for making him go.

For now, I think we should realize that conditions in many of these official and unofficial camps likely match or exceed the worst treatment we’ve seen immigrants receive in the U.S. so far in places like the Everglades camp in Florida, or at Camp East Montana in Texas, where multiple detainees have died. The U.S. has a lot of expertise in brutal detention and is now partnered with a number of regimes that have their own substantial experience and a willingness to collaborate.

Ways to help

People worried about America pushing concentration camp–style detention overseas might feel particularly helpless, not knowing how to take action. And it’s true that, on the whole, foreign detention is more opaque and less available to the kind of community oversight and NIMBY opposition tactics Americans are currently making use of at home. But there are still things that can be done.

As I’ve mentioned before, if there’s a point at which it seems impossible or too late to intervene, work your way backward in the chain of bad events. Try to address the harm at earlier stages. So one way to keep those detained from being deported to a third country—and perhaps deported at all—is to make sure they have legal representation. Few things are as critical as this. Groups like the National Immigrant Justice Center, which works in the Midwest, exist all over the country, and help to make sure that detainees get lawyers.

And lawyers pushing back on third-country deportations have already notched some important victories. Last May, for example, lawyers got word that their clients were on a bus about to be put on a military aircraft in Texas that would carry them to Libya. The attorneys were able to file an emergency motion and get a court injunction preventing the government from sending any immigrant detainees to Libya (where people are routinely trafficked and tortured).

But it can be hard to know what to do if we don’t know what’s actually happening. So support journalism that does reporting about detention and deportation of immigrants. ProPublica has been doing an extraordinary job of late, and independent journalists like Gillian Brockell have newsletters tracking different aspects of ICE movement and operations.

In the end, all this won’t stop until we undo the conditions that made these heinous acts possible. We’ll have to use community networks, elections, and protests to get rid of corrupt leaders who have made ethnic cleansing and camps their mission. And we’ll have to demand change and real democracy on a variety of fronts, to keep from returning to where we are now. So be active on these broader issues, too, remembering the enormous downstream effects changes can have.

In the meantime, consider making overseas concentration camps at least a small part of the story you tell. Organizers, candidates for office, protesters, and people talking to their neighbors can mention stories of not just those held in domestic camps but also individuals facing the threat of third-country deportation and those already held in inaccessible or dangerous places overseas. What the government is doing is part of a deliberate strategy meant not only to harm specific detainees, but to terrorize all immigrants.

Visit the Third Country Deportation Watch website, and follow the stories uncovered so far. Tie these faraway places to the warehouse conversions happening here at home, and declare that the U.S. should not be in the business of running or creating concentration camps anywhere on the planet.

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