Locked Down. Rounded Up. Warehoused. The Rise of America’s Concentration Camps – OpEd |
In 2021, amid a global pandemic, warnings that the federal government might repurpose warehouses into detention facilities on American soil were dismissed as speculative, alarmist, even conspiratorial.
Five years later, what was speculation is a blueprint for locking up whomever the government chooses to target.
According to investigative reports, the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement are actively purchasing warehouses, factories and industrial buildings across the country for use as detention centers—often with little public notice, minimal oversight, and virtually no accountability.
This is no longer a warning.
It is a five-alarm fire.
With the Trump administration moving forward with plans to rapidly acquire warehouses for what could become a nationwide mass detention network, it’s no longer a question of whether the government will expand mass detention to lock up Americans for defying its mandates but when.
This is how it begins.
The government already has the means, the muscle and the motivation. It has spent decades building a vast archipelago of prisons, detention centers, and emergency facilities capable of imprisoning large numbers of people.
Almost 70,000 people are currently being held by ICE. With $45 billion burning a hole in its budget, the Department of Homeland Security is spending big on its concentration camps in order to hold more people, for longer periods, with fewer constraints.
While the Trump administration insists that it is only targeting the “worst of the worst”—murderers, rapists, gang members, pedophiles and terrorists—most of those being rounded up have no criminal record. Being undocumented is a civil violation, not a crime.
This is where we have to tread cautiously, because authoritarian regimes love to play Orwellian word games, and the current administration is no exception.
Case in point: DHS Secretary Kristi Noem claims that every single individual arrested or detained has committed a crime, but being charged with or even suspected of a crime is very different from being convicted of a crime.
When the Secretary of Homeland Security equates an arrest with a crime, she isn’t just playing word games—she is effectively nullifying the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments’ guarantee of due process and the presumption of innocence.
If the bar for being arrested is merely committing a crime, we’d all be locked up.
It may come to that eventually.
Given the over-criminalization of the American legal code, which contains over 5,000 federal criminal statutes and hundreds of thousands of regulations—translation: every single American unknowingly commits at least three crimes a day—every American can be rendered a “criminal” at the government’s whim.
When you have a government in the business of rounding people up in order to fill warehouses and play to the optics of being tough on crime, it won’t just be undocumented immigrants getting rounded up.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, political theorist Hannah Arendt warned that concentration camps were not built primarily for criminals. They were built to imprison the innocent—people rendered “criminal” by the state simply for who they were or what they believed.
These camps functioned as laboratories for total domination, where guilt was irrelevant and innocence........