You can’t reform a concentration camp regime. You have to dismantle it and replace it. We have a thousand ways to do it. And most U.S. citizens—particularly white ones—have the freedom to act, for now, with far less risk than the many people currently targeted.

without a complete dismantling of the targeting and detention systems we’ve created, we’re bound to return to this again and again. If it isn’t stopped, it can and will get much worse. p span[style*="font-size"] { line-height: 1.6; } Still, just as the U.S. has a heritage of oppression, it also has a vast inheritance from those who believed and worked for the best that the country could become

if you happen to be thinking, “Well, Japanese American detention camps were stopped. America refused all that,” I would answer that in that case, the camps were stopped within that critical three-to-five year period I’ve been discussing today. (And that camp system was never quite dismantled even then, but for decades continued to remain a closer call than you might imagine.)

People often think the Nazi system was a single static thing. But it evolved over time, just as our system of detention is evolving right now. It was in November 1938, just over five years into Nazi rule and Dachau’s existence, that the Nazis first swept tens of thousands of Jews en masse into camps in Germany and its territories during Kristallnacht.

The way camps work is that they come into being in a police state and help the police state to become more of a police state. Camps ratchet up the speed and the efficiency of harm the state does, particularly killing.

Congress has already allocated funding that will create a camp system that could, on its own, surpass our existing (massive) prison system. The state is already trying to use modern surveillance methods to control communities both outside and inside the camps. Concentration camp systems take the worst abuses of the existing system then expand and weaponize them.

Slave patrols combined a quasi-official role with citizen vigilantism. At the far end of the spectrum, the U.S. government has had an overt and vicious history of harming civilians from its founding, with Native genocide and chattel slavery.

both the international history of camps and domestic U.S. history are critical to understanding what’s going on and where we are in the current process.

Again, we need to do more than stop the construction of additional facilities, more than just get ICE agents to behave more politely. We need to dismantle the current system and remove the possibility for it to exist again. In my opinion, that is what “Abolish ICE” should mean.

we’re on the verge of entrenching a massive system, which is a very bad place to be. It’s my opinion that we have a limited window in which to act. What happens this year will be critical for significantly dismantling the existence of and any future capacity for building the extrajudicial camp network the government is constructing today.

We may already be living in a concentration-camp regime, but it hasn’t yet hardened into the kind of vast system that becomes the controlling factor in the country’s political future.

But Trump has since returned to office. And if we count the Biden administration as simply a pause on the Trump agenda in several ways, the U.S. is currently approaching the end of that three-to-five year window.

More often, as in the early years of Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, the struggle over concentration camps took place between competing powers within the solidifying police state. Under Hitler, nearly three years into Nazi rule, the pro-camps faction of that struggle won, leading to an expanded camp system, which eventually blanketed the country then the continent.

In other cases, the external pressure applied is different. Three years into mass detentions in Chile in the 1970s, the situation was volatile enough that the U.S.—the major state supporting Pinochet’s dictatorship there—pressed for changes to DINA, the Chilean secret police. The organization was eliminated and replaced. That subsequent force was still abhorrent and continued to practice arbitrary detention. But one byproduct of the shift was that any expansion of mass detention into a broader, permanent camp system was halte

Sometimes the power struggle that determines the future of a camp system is external—for instance, defeat in war. Four years into the Khmer Rouge’s complete destabilization of Cambodia, Vietnam invaded.

In most cases, there’s a three-to-five-year window after a ruling party or leader or revolutionary brigade comes to power and asserts the right to arbitrarily detain and punish civilians. At some point toward the end of that window, a struggle typically begins over whether to massively expand the quasi-legal sites of detention into a more permanent system.

In the U.S., we currently have the existing brutality of the carceral system, cultural acceptance of disparate treatment for people of color, forced Native American exile to reservations, the long echoes Japanese American internment during World War II, the continuing operation of places like Guantanamo, and the willingness of both major political parties to use a detention-based punitive approach to immigration. These are the domestic weaknesses that helped to make the country susceptible to becoming a concentration camp regime.

Concentration camps involve the mass detention of civilians without due process on the basis of political, racial, ethnic, or religious identity. And that is where we’re at right now.

I’ll make clear that not all concentration camps are death camps

And also keep in mind that the U.S. is currently holding three times as many people as were detained in the Nazi concentration camp system in spring 1939—six years into the Third Reich and just before the start of World War II. In addition, the Department of Homeland Security, in its language and images in press releases and on social media, is directly aping Nazi propaganda.

A recent report from the American Immigration Council counts some 66,000 people in immigration detention at the end of 2025. That’s an increase of almost 75% since Trump returned to office. But it falls far short of the goal the government had hoped to reach, having planned to expand capacity to more than 100,000 beds and fill them.

As far as we know at present, seven people have died in immigration detention this year. Two died by suicide (despite facility responsibility to prevent self-harm). Two died of heart issues. One is said to have died from fentanyl withdrawal, and one was reportedly choked to death by guards. One more was found unconscious and unresponsive, with details of his death yet to come.

Today I’ll write about how a society comes to concentration camps, the process we’re already deep into, why the ways we’re talking about events in the U.S. may be unhelpful, and how we can undo it this mess.

What I’m saying is that the camps have already taken root and are on a fast-track to get exponentially worse. We’re already deep inside the process.

It’s critical to recognize that each of the societies that has had camps underwent a lengthy process. This process is often easier to see happening in your own country if you first look at an example in another one.

we need massive reform to the way in which ICE and DHS are currently conducting themselves.” Note that the “massive reform” mentioned is to the way that the agencies conduct themselves, not to the bad-faith mission of these agencies.