American Concentration Camps: Rounding up people based on their identity rather than their crimes

 Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer writes:

When it comes to the topic of concentration camps, Andrea Pitzer wrote the book — literally. The Washington, D.C.-area writer’s own personal curiosity about the origins and history of this inhumane practice — and her sense that many people view the subject too narrowly through the lens of Nazi Germany or Joseph Stalin’s USSR — sparked her 2017 book, One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.

Although her book traces the long arc of cruel and often disease-ridden detention camps beginning in 1890s’ Cuba on the eve of the Spanish-American War, one question loomed largest, especially when it was published in the first year of Donald Trump’s first term and a crackdown on immigrants at the southern border.

Could it happen here?

Eight years later, Pitzer has no doubt: The push for a network of American concentration camps — rounding up people based on their identity rather than their crimes, holding them indefinitely without due process, in crowded, squalid conditions — isn’t just underway. It’s happening faster than the veteran author could have imagined, especially when compared with the growth of Germany’s camps between when Adolf Hitler took power in 1933 and the start of World War II six years later.

“I’m particularly concerned about where we are now, because we’re well into that five-year period in terms of we’re already doing sweeps, right?” Pitzer said. “We’ve already got masked guys. We’re already disappearing hundreds of people to … foreign countries, or to the Everglades, or now to Fort Bliss” — the El Paso, Texas, military base, which the Trump regime just awarded a $1.2 billion contract for a large new camp.

When I connected with Pitzer this week, she was trying to finish an unrelated project, but kept getting interrupted by pesky journalists like me wanting to talk about One Long Night and the rapid push to erect a U.S. gulag archipelago of camps like the large one hastily thrown up by Florida officials in the fetid swamps of the Everglades.

Anyone clinging to their belief that a democracy like the United States could never go down the trail of large-scale inhumanity blazed by 1930s’ Germany or Russia should have had that faith shattered by the $600 million-a-year, constructed-in-days immigrant detention camp that opened on July 1 in the swampland west of Miami.

Just the quasi-official name bestowed on the new camp by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and others — “Alligator Alcatraz,” reinforced by government tweets of fierce reptiles wearing “ICE” caps and Trump’s jokes about immigrants running from the Everglades’ man-eaters — is the cruelty-is-the-point exclamation mark. Pitzer and other critics of the regime’s mass deportation agenda refuse to call it by the sadistic name, but the alligator branding is hardly the only clue to intentional inhumanity.

“It’s like a dog cage,” a detained Cuban immigrant, Rafael Collado, said by phone to reporters in Miami, describing a wetlands facility that floods frequently, where detainees lack showers, the food is rancid, the overhead light is continuous, and the mosquitoes are voracious.

For Pitzer, the mosquito plague at the Everglades camp is a revelation of its common bond with the worst camps of the last 130 years. “Mosquitoes have likewise long had a starring role in concentration camps around the world, starting with the first reconcentrados in Cuba in the 1890s,” she posted recently on Bluesky. Malaria was endemic at early camps there and with America’s early 20th-century detainees in the Philippines, but later the USSR and China would intentionally torture their prisoners with exposure to the biting and disease-bearing insects.

One of Pitzer’s goals in writing One Long Night and her follow-up works has been to define what exactly a concentration camp is.

She called it “the mass detention of civilians without any real trial. So if there’s a trial, it’s a show trial.” Detainees are held “on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, political affiliation, or some aspect of identity instead of as a consequence of a specific crime that they’ve done and been convicted of. And it was almost always done for political gain. And what I saw all over, but also in the U.S., was the way, particularly after 9/11 in ‘the war on terror,’ that it was used to sort of consolidate political power.”

The most famous case study, in Nazi Germany, is also the source of many current misconceptions, since the “final solution” death camps, such as Auschwitz in Poland, where some of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust died in gas chambers, have often been what people think of. But the first well-known German concentration camp, Dachau, opened less than two months after Hitler took power in early 1933, and was used to detain — not slaughter — the Nazis’ political opponents.

“It was used in a kind of social engineering way,” Pitzer said of Hitler’s early camps. “There were a lot of homeless people, there were a lot of career criminals that they put in the camps to kind of dilute the percentage of political prisoners. So it would be more of a PR thing. People would support it more. You saw detention, particularly, of gay men.”

For Pitzer, the controversial but ultimately unpunished methods America used on Muslim detainees after the 2001 terror attack, including torture tactics such as waterboarding detainees at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba or CIA “black sites” around the world, established a baseline of depravity the Trump regime is now building on.

It’s clear the unsanitary Florida detention camp isn’t a one-off, but rather a model for what the 47th president and his immigration guru, Stephen Miller, hope to accomplish over the next three-and-a-half years.

Right now, the surge in raids on unauthorized immigrants by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has already created an all-time high number of detainees at more than 56,000, which is far more than the federal government can handle. That’s led to horrendous makeshift situations like an ICE office in Manhattan, where leaked videos show detainees held in what’s supposed to be an office, as a man shouts that “they’re treating us like dogs in here.”

The Florida concentration camp model will expand, now that Congress has approved a massive $45 billion appropriation for new immigration detention sites, with another $29 billion to hire more masked agents to arrest people and fill them.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has unveiled a plan for a new network of sites in military bases across the country, including one at New Jersey’s Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst that a critic has already dubbed “the Garden State Gulag.” A 5,000-bed camp planned for Fort Bliss, near the border with Mexico, has already raised red flags after the contract went to an inexperienced firm, but Pitzer noted this isn’t the only problem with using military sites.

“It’s not like it’s a secret prison, but it is a closed space,” she said. “And it’s going to be harder to know what’s happening and to keep track of it.” The author shares my concern that as the concentration camps gain momentum, the purpose of them will shift — maybe to incarcerate protesters or political prisoners, or Americans stripped of their citizenship.

Pitzer said her research has shown these camps “almost always transcend whatever were the original goals of even the very bad actors that imposed the camps in the first place. And so what we are looking at potentially happening here is not just sort of Stephen Miller’s visions being fulfilled. We could be looking at something much worse over time that we aren’t even imagining yet.”

With Pitzer, I share a fascination with the history of concentration camps and a sense of horror watching this story unfold on U.S. soil, in my own lifetime. We do need to be honest about American history: This has happened before, not just overseas, but here during World War II, when approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans were moved into camps. Still, the growing prevalence of Holocaust education with its rallying cry of “Never Again,” and a U.S. apology over that Japanese internment made me hope — even believe — that I’d never have to write a column like this.

I was wrong.

Pitzer told me that while she is worried about the speed with which concentration camps are being implemented, and about the weakness of institutions like Congress or the media that could play a role in stopping this, she also feels some hope in sinking public support for Trump’s immigration agenda and the protests that have occurred.

“What they don’t have in place yet is that there’s actually still a tremendous amount of personal liberty and ability to dissent among most of the American population,” she said. Yet, if we don’t raise our voices immediately, that ability could disappear quickly. The moment to scream “Never Again” is right now, not during your grandchild’s history class.

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An American concentration camp--Alligator Alcatraz and the decline of democracy

What were you doing the day the president attended the opening of an American concentration camp in the Everglades? Dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” by Republican officials because of the predators living in the surrounding swampland, it has been built to cage thousands of people rounded up by ICE and allied law enforcement agencies as part of President Trump’s mass deportations. “‘Alligator Alcatraz’ is a concentration camp,” Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night, a history of concentration camps, told The New Republic.

That morning, Trump attended the camp’s opening in Ochopee, Florida, along with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. “We’d like to see them in many states,” Trump said at a press conference there. “And at some point, they might morph into a system where you’re going to keep it for a long time.” He complained about the cost of building jails and prisons, then complimented his team, who “did this in less than a week.”

For the event, Trump wore one of his signature red ball caps, this one reading “Gulf of America,” his jingoistic name for the nearby Gulf of Mexico; Noem wore a white “Make America Great Again” ball cap with gold stitching. The flimsy camp offered them some shelter from the punishing humidity, which would later give way to a downpour. A C-Span camera followed them into one of the massive tents, where rows of chain-link cages contained numerous bunk beds—for the moment, empty. Photographers raced ahead of Trump and Noem to get shots of them entering, taking in the cells, pausing to ask inaudible questions. DeSantis stood as if he did not know where to put his hands. “They’re going to sweep this six times to make sure there’s nothing that could be used as contraband, as weapons,” DeSantis told Trump a bit too brightly, “before the detainees come in.” He smiled as he told reporters about how soon their prisoners would “check in.”

The American concentration camp on view Tuesday was erected within the Big Cypress National Preserve, traditional Miccosukee land. The tribe was not consulted, said Betty Osceola, a member and activist who lives a few miles from the camp’s entrance. She was one of hundreds of people protesting on the road outside the camp over the last several days as massive trucks streamed into the site. “People should be concerned about the secrecy of this,” Osceola told the Fort Myers News-Press. “It’s a big deal. Our ancestors were laid to rest in this area, and they talk about it like it’s a vast wasteland. It’s not.”

The site of the camp is also public-owned land, most recently occupied by the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, “a remote facility for promising pilots to practice their touch-and-goes amid disinterested herons and alligators,” according to The Palm Beach Post. An executive order issued by DeSantis cited a nonexistent “emergency” to get around the legal process for building on the site.

Two environmental groups working in the area, Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity, filed a lawsuit Friday “to halt the unlawful construction of a mass federal detention facility for up to 5,000 noncitizen detainees.” Friends of the Everglades noted that their group was founded in part to stop construction of a major jetport on the same site. Members of the Miccosukee and Seminole tribes fought against the jetport too—generations ago. The state of Florida contended in court on Monday that the “risks” of not locking up immigrants on the site (on this expedited pseudo-emergency basis) “overwhelm any incidental environmental harm.” They also claimed the site was “temporary.”

There is no reason to believe any of the claims from the Florida and federal governments. The same day the concentration camp opened, ABC News reported that despite Trump’s campaign refrain that his mass deportations would target “criminals,” “new data shows a recent shift toward also arresting those who have not been accused of crimes.” This was foretold by Tom Homan, Trump’s “immigration czar,” who was the face of the mass deportation plan long before Trump returned to the White House. “No one’s off the table,” Homan said at the Republican National Convention last summer. “The bottom line is: Every illegal alien is a criminal. They enter the country in violation of federal law. It’s a crime to enter this country illegally.” Every immigrant—every person the Trump administration said was an immigrant—was a target from the beginning.

On Monday, a reporter asked Homan about an ailing 75-year-old Cuban man who died in ICE custody recently. His response: “People die in ICE custody.” He complained, “The questions should be, how many lives has ICE saved?” He challenged reporters to look into ICE’s detention standards. Last week, Wired reported on a chilling pattern of apparent neglect inside immigrant detention centers, based on nearly 400 calls made to 911 from the 10 largest ICE facilities. Incidents included seizures, self-harm, and sexual abuse. Some calls were made by the people caged inside, desperate for help.

At his press conference at the concentration camp, Trump learned that his massive budget bill had passed the Senate. The funding in the bill will make ICE the largest jailer in the world, with $200 billion at its disposal. As Felipe De La Hoz wrote last month for TNR, the bill “would take everything we’ve seen so far”—the targeting of activists for their speech, masked agents grabbing people off the street, sudden flights to Guantánamo or out of the country, ramping up detentions—and crank it to 11.”

A storm blew through the concentration camp during the press tour. Florida reporter Jason Delgado captured videos showing a layer of rainwater blowing across the floor of the cells, while the soft roof of one tent rippled in the wind. Water pooled at the base of the American and Florida state flags and around extension cords for lights. “The state says the sites here are rated to withstand a category two hurricane,” he posted on X. Two stronger hurricanes that made landfall last year —Helene and Milton—brought flooding and tornadoes to the area. People in jails and prisons in Florida were not evacuated.

Outside the concentration camp, when the storm hit, the protesters were still there. Some had been there for days. No one can say, years from now, that nobody knew about the camp, or that no one pushed back.

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