When a draw is a win

In the latest podcast episode, I talk about the use of mandatory labor in ICE detention facilities and how current practices mirror forced labor in concentration camp history around the world and in grim U.S. history as well. You can watch it on YouTube or listen on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the links in the written version, you can read Tuesday’s post.

Today, I want to celebrate some good news. The New York Times reported yesterday that Trump’s Department of Homeland Security is planning to sell or allow other agencies to repurpose seven of the eleven warehouses it acquired this year for conversion to detention camps. These camps were intended to house as many as 8,500 people in one site, further echoing the parallels I’ve been making between the current U.S. detention of immigrants and the historical pattern of concentration camp systems and their expansion.

How was this plan halted? It happened largely due to those who publicized the plans to acquire warehouses, those who showed up to protest at sites or in municipal meetings, those who complained to their elected representatives, those who networked to share information and best practices site to site, and the lawyers who filed lawsuits to block the conversions.

This is absolutely good news. Is it an end to the atrocities and the malicious neglect of ICE detention? Will it stop Stephen Miller and Donald Trump’s ethnic cleansing operations cold? No, it won’t. But it has thrown a wrench into their plans for now. Even as we keep an eye on four facilities that DHS is reportedly planning to hold on to, we should celebrate this tremendous accomplishment.

Earlier this week in the World Cup, Cape Verde fought Spain to a 0-0 draw. The tiny island nation (pop. less than a 500,000) beat the global football powerhouse (pop. almost 50 million). Did Cape Verde destroy Spain and boot it from the competition? No, it didn’t. But athletes from the little archipelago did manage to trip a giant and survive to fight another day. I like to think about the ICE warehouses in the same way.

The question of taxpayer dollars is another matter altogether. If DHS were on a limited budget, I might feel better if they had wasted most of a billion dollars on warehouse acquisition for facilities they can’t use, because it would restrict their options about what to do next.

As it is, Congress just allocated $70 billion more to the agency funding it through the end of Trump’s second administration. And that’s on top of the tens of billions that DHS had already received for the current fiscal year. So unfortunately, this domestic Gestapo still has a bottomless pit of money to use to commit atrocities and terrorize the immigrant community as a whole.

This raises other questions about who’s profiting—literally—from all this money being thrown around. Over at the Handbasket, Marisa Kabas interviewed Michael Wriston of Project Salt Box, and they discussed the ways in which mercenary actors and Trump allies might be benefiting financially from the hundreds of millions of dollars in circulation for these purchases.

This repeats some of more complicated and murky issues around past concentration camp systems in the U.S. and elsewhere. One example right here at home is Japanese American wartime detention, in which racism and paranoia were stoked to terrorize a community and remove it from society in ways that financially and politically benefited powerful people. Tragically, it’s a common story where concentration camps are present, from the Armenian genocide to Nazi Germany and beyond.

The good news is that where the present continues to echo the past in grim ways, history still provides a model for effective ways to fight back. As I’ve said many times over the last decade, the two elements in many countries that have helped to halt or undo camp systems in the past were 1) maintaining even partial judicial independence, and 2) protecting and asserting the right to dissent.

The smashing of ICE’s warehouse fantasy is an example in which both these elements played a role. It made a real difference that people showed up in places where the government threatened or even managed to acquire sites, along with demonstrators outside Broadview, outside Delaney Hall, and at the Everglades Camp (which the government calls “Alligator Alcatraz”), who spread awareness of the abuse happening in these locations in real time.

By the time the warehouse acquisition project was well underway, much of the country was already alarmed over and often opposed to ICE tactics. When the threat of warehouse camps became clear, locals put public pressure on elected officials and forced them to act.

Meanwhile, communities also filed lawsuits in courts, keeping the government from speedrunning the opening of new facilities. Demanding environmental review, bringing up issues of infrastructure, and mobilizing people from every community all played a part in limiting the Trump administration’s path to institutionally entrenching more hatred and violence.

But we can’t assume this particular battle is over. In addition to the four of the eleven warehouse projects that the Times reports as on track to be retained, Project Salt Box reported today that the government still has an open call for bids out on a project in Hammond, Louisiana, which has so far managed to stay largely off the radar.

In addition, the government will likely continue its push to expand arrests and detention, working to terrify and intimidate immigrant detainees into giving up any rights they try to assert. But it appears to be doing so in ways that draw less attention and pushback from the general public. This approach is already being made clear by new DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin. Mullin, the Times reports, previously expressed skepticism about the warehouse plan and “has said publicly that he wants the agency to be quieter about how it carries out immigration enforcement.”

It seems clear that while carrying out its purges a little more quietly, the government will simultaneously keep going after those who publicly it. In nearly every past concentration camp system, the government went after dissenters to largely eliminate free speech before moving full fledged on its largest roundups of targeted ethnic or racial groups.

I’ve said before that the U.S. reversing the order of operations to do large-scale roundups and terror sweeps before making dissent impossible may have lethally compromised their attempt to enshrine authoritarianism. But they are catching on to their error, and we will surely see attempts to make future detention more more directly run by DHS and more opaque to outsiders, while charges against protesters expand.

Someone once criticized me for simultaneously saying that a) elected officials shouldn’t settle for small reforms in ICE operations, and b) when it comes to efforts like these warehouse resistance models, every little bit of delay of authoritarianism is an accomplishment. So let me clarify: I would like leaders to lead ambitiously, to make big demands and present the stakes of what’s happening in a way that makes those stakes clear for the public.

When individuals and communities—which have much less power readily at hand to use than federal elected officials—manage to organize and throw a wrench in plans to expand the concentration camps the government is unleashing right now, it is both heroic and has real benefits. I hope those opposed to Trump will continue to grow into their power at every level.

If you’re looking for something to do about all this, I’m doing some speaking on behalf of Project World Cup Spotlight, calling attention to the conditions in the ICE facilities around the country that often sit in close proximity to stadiums where football matches are being played over the next month. You can see the list of planned activities and cosponsors here if you’d like to take a stand against ICE and support the idea that just like top-notch sports teams, the U.S. as a country has more honor and more strength when it embraces and values its connections to the world.

[P.S. - I think I deserve points for living in the metro DC area and not writing about the Reflecting Pool Algaegate, tempting and comedic as it has been this week. But I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have.]

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