As people testified before Congress yesterday about
the brutality and violence they’d suffered at the hands of ICE, that massive
paramilitary organization was shopping for giant warehouse-style facilities
they can retrofit into what they euphemistically call “detention centers.”
Cable news people call them “prison camps” or “Trump
prison camps,” but look in any dictionary: prisons are where people convicted
of crimes are held. As Merriam-Webster notes, a prison is: “[A]n institution for
confinement of persons convicted of serious crimes.”
Jails are where people accused of crimes
but still waiting for their day in court are held, as
Merriam-Webster notes: “[S]uch a place under the jurisdiction of a local
government for the confinement of persons awaiting trial or those convicted of
minor crimes.”
But what do you call a place where people who’ve
committed no criminal offense (immigration violations are civil, not criminal,
infractions)? The fine dictionary people at Merriam-Webster note the proper term is “concentration camp”: “[A] place where large numbers of people (such as
prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or
religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard.”
The British originated the term “concentration camp” to
describe facilities where “rebel” or “undesirable” civilians were held in South
Africa during the Second Anglo‑Boer War (1899–1902) to control and punish a
rebellious population.
They were facilities where the “bad elements of society”
were “concentrated” into one location so they could be easily controlled and
would lose access to society and thus could not spread their messages of
resistance against the British Empire.
The Germans adopted the term in 1933 when Hitler took
power and created his first camp for communists, socialists, union leaders,
and, by the end of the year, Hitler’s political opponents. They Germanized the
phrase into “Konzentrationslager” and referred to the process of
their incarceration as “protective custody.”
The first camp was built at Dachau just weeks after
Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, and by the end of the year there were around
70 of them operating across the country.
When Louise and I lived in Germany in 1986/87, we
visited Dachau with our three children. The crematoriums
shocked our kids, but even more so because this was simply a “detention
facility” and not one of Hitler’s death camps (which were all located outside
Germany to ensure deniability).
The ovens at Dachau were for those who had been worked to
death or killed by cholera or other disease, much like the 35+ people who’ve recently died in ICE’s concentration
camps.
When American friends would visit us and we’d take them
to Dachau (we lived just an hour up the road) they’d invariably be surprised
when I told them that by the time of the war there were over 500 substantial
camps and an additional few hundred very small ones all over the country.
“How could the people not know what was going on?” they’d
ask. The answer was simple: the people did know. These were where the “undesirables,” the
“criminal troublemakers,” and the “aliens” were held, and were broadly
supported by the German people. (It wasn’t until 1938, following Kristallnacht,
that the Nazis began systematically arresting and imprisoning non-political
Jews, first at Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.)
By the end of his first year, Hitler had around 50,000
people held in his roughly 70 concentration camps, facilities that were often
improvised in factories, prisons, castles, and other buildings.
By comparison, today ICE is holding over 70,000 people in 225 concentration camps across
America, and Trump, Homan, Miller, and Noem hope to more than double both
numbers in the coming months.
In Tennessee, The Guardian reports that Miller has been
coordinating with Republican leaders to create legislation that would turn every local cop, teacher,
social worker, and helper in the state into an official agent of ICE and
criminalize efforts by cities to refuse cooperation. It also makes it a felony
crime to identify any of ICE’s masked agents or disclose conditions within the
concentration camps to the public.
Germans didn’t have the benefit of warnings from a
fascist history they could look back on; much of what Hitler did took them by
surprise, as I’ve noted in previous articles.
In 2026 America, however, operating with the benefit of
historical hindsight, entire communities are rebelling at Trump’s effort to
beat Germany’s 1933-1934 prisoner numbers.
In city after city, Americans are organizing to deprive
ICE of their coveted spaces, putting pressure on companies not to sell and on
cities and counties not to permit any more concentration camps.
Because immigration violations are labeled “civil,”
people in ICE concentration camps are stripped of many of the normal
constitutional protections that apply to people in criminal incarceration. This
has created a legal black hole that ICE and the Trump regime exploit, where
indefinite imprisonment, abuse, and medical neglect flourish with little to no
oversight or accountability.
Human rights organizations like the ACLU describe pervasive patterns of abuse in ICE
detention: hazardous living conditions, chronic medical neglect, sexual
assault, retaliation for grievances, and extensive use of solitary confinement.
Detainees who have committed no crime other than being in
the United States without documentation report being shackled for long periods, packed into
freezing, overcrowded cells under constant fluorescent light, and denied
hygiene and timely care. Meanwhile, GOP-aligned private prison companies are
making billions off the program.
Inspections and oversight are inconsistent: one recent
investigation found that as detentions and deaths surged in 2025,
formal inspections of facilities actually dropped by over a third. ICE
regularly refuses to allow attorneys, family members, and even members of
Congress to access their concentration camps; the issue is now being litigated
through federal courts.
History shows us that once a nation builds a mass
detention apparatus, it never remains limited to its original targets. Future
generations of Americans — our children and grandchildren — won’t ask us
whether ICE followed civil detention statutes: they’ll want to know why we
allowed concentration camps to exist in America at all.
Germany’s concentration camps didn’t start as instruments
of mass murder, and neither have ours; both started as facilities for people
the government’s leader said were a problem. And that’s exactly what ICE is
building now. History isn’t whispering its warning: it’s shouting.
If you believe democracy needs defending, subscribe to
The Hartmann Report. Free or paid, your support matters. Share this
post to help wake more people up.
Trump Is a Threat to Democracy.
Consider his autocratic abuse of presidential power, his constitutional ignorance, his lawless demagoguery, his sociopathic bullying, his pathological narcissism, his grandiose delusions, his anti-social personality disorder, his malignant arrogance, his felonious behavior, his moral relativism, his white nationalism, his perfidious nationalism, his hateful racism, his infectious nihilism, his outrageous iconoclasm, his ruthless competition, his puerile dereliction, his embarrassing stupidity, his provocative transgressions, his mocking disrespect, his impetuous vulgarity, his sexual predation; his belligerent intimidation, his incessant lying, his conspiratorial gaslighting, his obsessive vindictiveness, his hypocritical cowardice, his compulsive xenophobia, his callous misogyny, his insufferable bigotry, his disgusting buffoonery, his histrionic rallying, his seditious actions, his obstruction of justice and concealment, his army of thugs, his detention of children, and his dangerous authoritarianism... .
-Glen Brown
