Is the U.S. running a concentration camp system?

The immigration enforcement crackdown orchestrated by President Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, has drawn parallels to some of the darkest moments in history, including the use of concentration camps. Mass arrests of thousands of immigrants, including nighttime and after-school raids, the use of children as bait, and the shooting of a civilian monitor — all of it leads back to a network of notorious prisons, from “Alligator Alcatraz” to Camp East Montana, a tent facility in the Texan desert where this month a Cuban migrant was allegedly murdered by guards. Things have escalated to such an extent that some people are no longer just debating whether this resembles a concentration camp regime, but which ones it most resembles.

In 2018, author and journalist Andrea Pitzer wrote “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps,” a book detailing the continuous history of concentration camp systems in the last century — systems she defines as designed to incarcerate civilians on the bases of race, political affiliation, ethnicity, religion or some aspect of who they are, rather than what they’ve allegedly done. Much of its workings occur outside whatever is the existing legal system in that country. In the United States, this has manifested in the form of detention without trial, abuse and even killings that have run afoul of the law, and the suppression of documentation and accountability.

Pitzer spoke to Salon about how the Trump administration’s campaign against immigrants fit into that category, and how Americans are understanding the political moment as one that reflects American history but not necessarily as it has been presented.

This interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

What are some characteristics that distinguish the concentration camp system in the U.S. to those in other historical contexts?

I’ve been all over the world looking at different places that had them across the 20th century, and in each case, there were very different legal systems in place, but the concentration camps are always an end run around to do mass detention without having to go to the trouble of due process or addressing people’s rights. There are people who say, “Well, [ICE] they’re a legitimate agency, and they’ve been funded by Congress.” Those things are true, but the entire way they’re operating at this point, breaking down U.S. citizens’ doors without warrants, shooting people in the streets, basically stalking children outside their schools, using them as bait to try to remove parents, are all outside normal law enforcement practices, and I will say that normal law enforcement practices in the U.S. are already really problematic.

We have serious issues there that have set us up for what ICE is doing now. But ICE is clearly outside even that framework in terms of the way that they’re operating. And so that is one key area. I would also say this is a mass extension of the system, if you will, that Stephen Miller has prioritized: the building of facilities on such an enormous level to house 10,000 people at a time, this discussion of deporting millions and millions, even before the election. The numbers that they were putting out there were larger than all of the people that went through the Russian gulags during the Soviet era. Across decades, the numbers they were talking before the election were already going to pass what the Russian gulags had been across its whole extent of decades. And they’re talking about doing that in one administration.

With the tactics used by ICE and law enforcement having become even more egregious and performative over the last year, would you draw a distinction between selfish kinds of cruelty that serve what they believe is a legitimate policy objective, versus wanton kinds of cruelties that wouldn’t actually help them move towards that goal at all and only seem to be the result of an irrational power trip?

I think it’s really critical to understand that ICE is a relatively recent phenomenon. We have already done bad things in the past, but ICE itself and what it is doing as a formal agency today is the product of criminalizing border crossings. Of course, this was [originally] not a crime at all, and then it was a misdemeanor. And you were still allowed to apply for asylum post-World War II, so that people in danger in their countries could find safe harbor. But since ICE has come into existence, and even in the years just before that, we really undid all those measures, and both political parties have treated immigrants like something dangerous, something shameful, instead of being a bedrock of our economy and how our country can grow.

The upshot of that is that immigrants have been demonized, so that you will even see many politicians in the Democratic Party who will not stand up against really serious physical and civil rights abuses of civilian human beings, of women of children. These are not terrorists, as we’re being told they are. And so it’s pretty clear that for some time, the Republican Party has actively pushed, and for some time, the Democratic Party has not adequately resisted.

I would say this definition of immigrants as a threat and as monsters closely resembles the language of Nazi Germany, and that’s part of where these comparisons come from. They literally repeat the same kind of things, treating people as sub-human and animals and saying they’re a “threat to the country.” The stuff that’s coming out of DHS [Department of Homeland Security] in terms of social media is literally using Nazi materials and images, and so it’s pretty clear that there is, unlike the first time, those sorts of ideas working their way through the political world. Except that then, they didn’t know where they were going, right? They didn’t know exactly where they were going to take it. It took a long time for everything to evolve. Even the concentration camp system took more than a decade to evolve to its worst state.

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However, Stephen Miller and DHS and the Trump administration today understand very clearly what history they’re winking at, where they’re driving to, and we see them actively employing these models. So we see the propaganda methods that are repeated. And you’re asking, what image or what impression are they trying to send out? It’s terror. This is literally trying to create a police state by terrorizing the most vulnerable parts of the population. When you look at different concentration camp regimes around the world, that’s usually a first step. It is a way to entrench power. It is a way to seal a kind of control over the entire population.

Can you tell me more about how integrated the concentration camp system is with the “normal,” “non-emergency” parts of the carceral state?

The carceral state is so vast already that when there is not an existing concentration camp network already in place, the natural thing is to take advantage of where you already have the appropriate facilities. And the U.S. has so many [more] facilities than just about any place else on the planet. We have so many people in jail. There’s international ideas that are common between concentration camp systems. And then, of course, they take on the local culture and specifics. The way you get to a more totalitarian style state is once you harden it so that it exists everywhere, all the time, then anybody is susceptible to it. Another thing to know about is when you look at what ICE has available to spend. It is actually more than what the Bureau of Prisons is allocated in the budget. That’s what Congress has given them. And so we have to expect to that we are looking at, if we don’t stop this, something actually larger than the U.S. prison system that we’re going to end up with in fairly short order.

When it comes to the people who are actually running the prisons, how would you describe the process in which they became either completely okay or even gleeful about their role in mass incarceration. To what degree have some of them just been into this kind of thing from the start?

So in any given population, you’re going to have a certain percentage that really embrace sadistic authoritarianism. That is not the bulk of the people that you know are being hired into this in these kinds of systems, but they definitely exist. And I would say that they are actively recruiting for that, it’s the policy of a leadership that embraces cruelty and abuse and violence.

But even so, for many, many people, they may be growing up in communities where you can’t get a job, and got the kind of signing bonuses that they’re giving out for ICE recruits. It can seem very appealing if you exist entirely inside the world of Trumpist media. You may very well believe that you are doing something patriotic, because it’s been sold so much that way. You have to have sort of continuous and deep propaganda to get people to be willing to do this. They start to shift their mentality. And they start saying, well, there are some dangerous immigrants to whom civil and human rights don’t apply.

But what I will say is that, literally, across more than 100 years, every time there has been a camp system, people would convince themselves that their country’s detention camps aren’t like those other concentration camps, because they as a people are not like that, and these people in the camps are actually bad. And if you get a society that’s bent enough to that mentality, then you will find not just those hardcore, sort of sadistic guards that we hear about, but allow people who didn’t necessarily sign up for that to be sadistic, who are going to be willing to go along with it and normalize it i their heads or don’t know how to get out of it. And so one of the big things we can do as a society, I think, is making ICE a shameful thing to be associated with, a shameful thing to be a part of.

If someone is accustomed to seeing terrible cruelty, that becomes their new baseline, right? And so policing conduct that they saw maybe 10 years ago, and would have found reprehensible then, could actually seem to be okay now with the bar so low. On the other hand, there are other people who see the current state of things as being more eye opening, where they actually start to question things that they previously normalized.

I think that the danger of the flaws we had in our preexisting system, which were deep ones, is that they get used to the way that they are, and that they normalize this worsening until it’s too late for us to do anything about it. That’s the risk, and aside from it just being wrong, that’s why we shouldn’t have those kinds of abuses. The second time that Trump has come into office now, I think his people have a sense that they have to get it now. They have to get it done now, or they’re not going to be able to pull it off right. And so they’re out over their skis. I would say far too often, it’s still shocking what they’ve been able to accomplish. But I think that the American public, as it gets a whiff of this absolute embrace of horror and cruelty that we are seeing is a little bit of a mask-off moment for a lot of the American public. I do believe that a majority of Americans, if they understood exactly what was happening, would be opposed to it.

And what we’re already seeing reflected in the polls is that people are taking about these issues. But the biggest difficulty for that is people have siloed in the information that they get in the news they see and hear, so now that there are a bunch of Americans who don’t actually have any idea this is going on. The Trump administration is taking it so far so quickly, and not giving the public time to acclimate to each new step. Renee Good being shot, or the little boy in the blue hat being put in front of a door to try to bait relatives out — that is shocking to people, and will be shocking even to a number of Republicans, if they ever see it.

Many people are already shocked. The bigger question is, how do we make sure other people see that? And a really key way to have that happen is exactly what Minneapolis is doing, which is to make it impossible to miss. Have the whole community come out and back this. Have these Episcopal priests putting their wills in order, in order to put their bodies on the line if they need to. And I think that it’s very much a page out of the civil rights era that these people are putting their bodies out there on the line, knowing that some number are going to be hurt, but trying to have as many people as possible to make it visible to an America that doesn’t want to see it.

Back then, the obstacle they had to overcome was that a lot of white Americans just did not see Black Americans as fully human. The obstacle we have to overcome is that I think we are so deep in this Trump delusion that there will be a certain number of people who will say that the immigrants being taken must be bad people.

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