Working for the enemy

In the latest podcast episode, I talk about how resistance to corruption and despotism in India and Albania offer a model for people hoping to protect democracy in the U.S. These movements are still emerging, but their early power shows how smaller issues can become symbols for larger movements. 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’ll write about an encounter that happened almost seven years ago, well into the public outcry over family separation during the first Trump administration. My history of concentration camps had been out two years at that point. But millions of people in the U.S. who were worried about the president’s xenophobia still hadn’t come to terms with exactly what “immigration enforcement” had already meant for some time, and just how much worse the crisis could get.

A university in Chicago had invited me to speak on the history of concentration camps. To the administrators’ credit, they did not try to get me to agree in advance to avoid the border crisis, or to promise not to call U.S. immigration detention “concentration camps.”

Some Uighur students had shown up for the talk, and were willing to share details of what it meant that their parents were detained in Xinjiang, and how that detention had affected their families. I briefly mentioned the Chinese treatment of Uighurs in my lecture, and the attendees’ accounts were a powerful reminder to everyone present that concentration camps weren’t just some abstract historical concept.

But the exchange I want to focus on now is from another conversation that happened during and after the same event. I made reference to it in the same thread on Twitter. Two people in attendance said that they were working within the U.S. border detention system, and were aware of what was happening. They were trying to think through how people in the past weighed maintaining humanity inside an increasingly cruel system versus just walking away altogether.

I tried to acknowledge the choice isn’t always a simple one. The decision to walk away from a job isn’t the same for everyone—sometimes it comes with a very high cost. And there are cases in which people who stayed on the inside in regimes that had turned to concentration camps were able to do a lot of good—typically by secretly sabotaging the goals of the ruling party or taking on illegal roles to save people, often in an administrative capacity. Some survivors owe their lives to such people.

Yet far more people wound up compromised or complicit, inadvertently supporting a harmful or even evil system—often in ways they’d never imagined. Governments that operate camps are malleable and aggressive. They innovate new ways to harm, sometimes in surprising ways.

I mentioned some writing by M. Gessen, who had publicly explored weighing choices while working as a journalist and editor in Vladimir Putin’s Moscow years ago. And I pointed out pivotal moments in history that had clarified matters for everyday people in other countries faced with similar dilemmas.

After the lecture, they came up to me to talk more, and were accompanied by some coworkers. No longer speaking in front of the whole room, they confided that several of them worked for the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). In their official roles, at least some of them helped children who had been separated from their families by the administration reunite with parents or relatives.

They were disturbed by the tactics of that first Trump administration. But they worked for the Administration for Children and Families, part of Health and Human Services, not ICE or Border Patrol. How could staying in their jobs make them complicit in any way or cause harm, they wondered, if all they did was to help these children who were suffering so terribly? Wasn’t that critical work?

Rather than hectoring anyone over a tough decision, I tried to quietly go through the typical ways in which harm can happen, even when a person’s motives for staying are good—even when they may still be doing work that helps people in danger.

First, good people help to legitimize a dangerous system of detention by staying. Supporters of the ruling party can point to those who stay to argue that the system has not changed so much that long-term employees or holdovers from the last administration are leaving. Vulnerable people who recognize the good in employees who remain willing to help others may expose themselves to greater risk, thinking that the danger is not significant, and that there’s no possibility that anyone will come to serious harm.

Second, by helping one legitimate part of an illegitimate system to function, you free up personnel and resources to handle the vile tasks. Walking away can help reveal the existing system’s incompetence and malice.

Third, not only is it possible that you won’t be able protect the people you think you can by staying, but your own work may be used to harm them.

After everyone cleared out of the room that evening back in 2019, I knew that the ORR staff were still undecided. I heard later from one of them that he’d decided to stay in his current position.

I was hoping to talk further with him. But at the time, my mother was suffering from both paranoia and Alzheimer’s, and my stepfather dying of lung cancer. Preparing to bring her to live with me to protect my stepfather from her, I dropped nearly every plate I was spinning. Three months later, Covid struck.

***

Reading a news story this week, I thought of those staffers again. Since Trump’s return to office in January 2025, Reuters reports, “ORR has shared more than 460,000 ‘leads’ with ICE about unaccompanied children, their sponsors—usually parents or other relatives—and additional ​household members, leaving them vulnerable to detention and deportation.”

There have now been “more than 12,000 people arrested ‌by U.S. immigration authorities following tips from the Office of Refugee Resettlement during President Donald Trump’s second term, according to internal government data reviewed exclusively by Reuters.”

Trump stains the reputation of everyone who thought they would outsmart him, or that they could control him. And a concentration camp society, in the end, warps every official act toward detention of vulnerable groups.

I’ll reach out in the coming days to see if I can find out what had happened with those ORR workers: what decisions they made, where they are now, and what thoughts they have about their choices. If they have anything they want to say, I’ll share their insights.

All this is worth keeping this in mind at a time when many people may feel tempted to lie low and not push back against the heinous acts of our government. And certainly, there are those who are at significant risk merely by virtue of their existence. But for the rest of us, nearly seven years after I made the same argument in that Chicago lecture hall, I would still say that walking away from any work that braces the regime is one of the most dramatic and effective ways to reduce its power, helping to save the country or even a single person’s humanity.

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