How to Dismantle a Concentration Camp

Trump’s drive to build a network of detention centers is being met with some robust public resistance.

This time last week, I had accountability on my mind, and the need for liberal leaders in a post-Trump future to transform frustration into lustration by bringing the agents and enablers of Trumpism to heel and forcing them to pay a price for their misdeeds. One thing I could have been more forthright about is what put me in the mood: It’s the old and ongoing story of the abuse being meted out by Trump’s brownshirts. Whatever you’ve been told about these goons standing down or lowering the temperature isn’t the straight story. Every day there are fresh tales of their villainy.

It may seem overwrought or cartoonish to call these people evil. But the story that recently cemented it for me took place last year at a deportation detention center in Dilley, Texas—which you may be familiar with because among the allegedly dangerous “worst of the worst” people they have in custody is a 2-month-old infant. As NBC News reported, last November the child detainees were sent to the gymnasium under the pretense that after months of eating contaminated food, they would be treated to a Thanksgiving dinner. But after being made to stare at tables stacked for a holiday feast, they were told that the food was for their jailers, not them.

So, yes, this is evil—despicable and Dickensian. But what’s particularly hair-raising is that we’ve only learned a fraction of what’s going on behind the closed doors of what are essentially concentration camps; what we don’t know is much more vast. And with the Trump administration splashing billions of taxpayer dollars to develop a network of these warehouse prisons, this evil may metastasize—and get better at keeping us in the dark.

It can already be said that 2026 is off to a grim start. As the American Immigration Council, or AIC, reported earlier this month, there were six deaths in ICE detention centers across the country in January. This includes the death of 55-year-old Geraldo Lunas Campos, which was ruled a homicide after a medical examiner concluded he’d died of “asphyxia due to neck and torso compression.” The AIC noted that while ICE is “legally required to report deaths that occur in its custody, its public disclosures often come late and have little information. Independent investigations frequently contradict these findings later.”

Reporting on what’s going on inside these facilities is notoriously difficult, but sometimes we get a shocking glimpse behind the walls and razor wire. In late January, The New Yorker offered one such look at the kaleidoscopic horror taking place in a detention facility in the Mojave Desert. There, detainees with experience at other detention facilities told reporter Oren Peleg that the California detention center “was unique in its mistreatment of those held in its custody,” with abuses ranging from “extremely delayed appointments with health-care professionals, the denial of medications and treatment, experiences with unsafe and unsanitary living conditions, and a general antagonism by medical staff toward detainees.”

A class action lawsuit filed against ICE and the Department of Homeland Security echoes these accounts. Therein, detainees describe the remote facility as a “torture chamber” and “hell on Earth.” Tess Borden, an attorney at the legal nonprofit Prison Law Office, told The New Yorker that “the conditions at the facility are so terrible that detainees are resigning themselves to self-deportation, instead of pursuing asylum and other immigration cases,” and that others were “also trying to take their own lives.”

If stories of this kind disappear from the news, it won’t be because ICE has reformed itself. Rather, it will probably be the result of a clampdown on information. In mid-February, guards at the Dilley detention center raided the family dormitories to seize and destroy letters and drawings made by the children detained there, after their letters were included in a ProPublica report describing the conditions. And lawmakers seeking to do their own lawful oversight continue to find their access denied. As Senator Alex Padilla mused after recently being denied entry to a detention center in San Diego County, “The big question I come with is, what do they have to hide?”

The other big question is what can be done to thwart the Trump administration’s effort to complete its network of prison camps. While we shouldn’t expect Democrats in the federal government to make headway on this matter anytime soon, we’re seeing a mass movement against these detention centers emerging at the local level. Public protest in Ashburn, Virginia, convinced a Canadian billionaire to scuttle a deal to sell warehouse facilities to ICE. Lawmakers in South Fulton, Georgia, preemptively passed a law banning DHS from acquiring warehouse properties in their jurisdiction.

And ironically enough, local jurisdictions are wielding the tools of proceduralism—the endless array of hoops to jump through that The New Republic contributor J. Dylan Sandifer has indicted as the means by which progress too often gets blocked—to throw a wrench in ICE’s works. State officials in Maryland led by Governor Wes Moore—who, per Sandifer, is a notable skeptic of proceduralism—have filed a lawsuit against ICE and DHS in an attempt to block the agency from transforming warehouses in their state into detention facilities. As The Washington Post reported, the state’s complaint borders on the mundane, but it’s really pulling out all the tricks: “The Trump administration did not conduct an environmental review nor seek public input on the project or provide a reasoned explanation on their decision-making, as required by law.”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently fielded a question from a self-described “ordinary citizen” on social media, who asked, “What can we do to get the concentration camps shut down and restore accountability for those imprisoned against the law?” Her answer: “Local zoning is the way! A lot of these are being stopped or stalled by neighborhood organizing. These warehouses often need to be purchased, permitted, approved for occupancy and specs. Each one of those steps can be interrupted.”

One of the people who heartily approved of AOC’s advice was M. Nolan Gray, the author of Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It. “As the guy who wrote the book on zoning abolition,” he wrote, “I’d like to go on record as saying: If you can use zoning to stop the concentration camps, fucking go for it.” It’s great to see everyone on the same page.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

There’s Only One Way to Eradicate Trumpism for Good

If accountability isn’t a central pillar of a post-Trump future, we will doom ourselves.

One of the weirder journalistic spectacles of the Trump era has been watching mainstream news organizations parachute into the hinterlands to try to understand the voters who ushered in, and continue to support, this age of cruelty in America. A recent classic was The New York Times’ herculean effort to find one Minnesota diner whose patrons were willing to talk shit about the ICE resistance in Minneapolis. There has not, however, been an equivalent effort to reveal the everyday people who saw the dangers of Trumpism coming. But this week, TNR contributor Toby Buckle returned to these pages to do just that.

I’m petty enough to enjoy a good round of “I told you so.” One of the better value propositions of your TNR subscription is that you’ll more frequently find yourself in the company of writers who recognized the dangers of Trumpism from several miles off and unflinchingly told the truth about it. That’s why Buckle’s warning that a mere election victory won’t be sufficient to right this ship has stuck in my mind: “We must undertake an ambitious program of accountability and reform in order to create liberal democracy in America again.” So here’s something else I’m going to be right about in advance: The failure to hold the malefactors of Trumpist fascism to account will only ensure its return.

This isn’t some loose theory. Perhaps the best proof of this fundamental fact can be found in recent history, as both Trump’s rise and his return were preceded by Democratic administrations that showed little regard for civic accountability. The Obama administration made the conscious decision to make “looking forward, not backward” the order of the day, to the great relief of Wall Street crooks and war-on-terror torturers. Obama extended grace to those who capsized the economy, and kept showing extreme deference to them throughout his administration.

As The American Prospect’s David Dayen reported this week, an email from recently disgraced Goldman Sachs lawyer Kathy Ruemmler to pedo-oligarch Jeffrey Epstein—in which she seeks advice on how to defend Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Mary Jo White from Senator Elizabeth Warren, who’d been stoking outrage about White’s constant granting of deferred prosecution agreements to corporate criminals—is perhaps the perfect encapsulation of the Obama administration’s laxity. This vacuum of accountability was filled by Trump’s right-wing faux-populism and anti-immigrant sentiment. Much of this could have been headed off.

And while there were some significant areas in which Joe Biden seemed to learn from his former boss’s mistakes, the need for a more robust campaign of accountability was not one of them. Despite the ample reasons to launch investigations and obtain redress for past corruption, Attorney General Merrick Garland did little more than attempt to radiate an ambient virtue, perpetually endeavoring to shield his agency and the Biden administration from the perception that they were seeking purely political prosecutions. Not that this ever stopped Trump from crying foul about witch hunts! Garland’s first major investigation into Trump’s misconduct wasn’t launched until three days after Trump announced his reelection campaign—the very thing that the Biden administration should have been trying in earnest to prevent after the Senate failed in its duty to impeach him. Once Trump entered the safe harbor of a presidential candidacy, efforts to hold him responsible fizzled—and the Supreme Court all but crowned him king.

As I’ve argued before, these “look the other way and cross your fingers” ways of the past aren’t going to cut it anymore. There shouldn’t be Democrats running for election anywhere who aren’t fully committed to using their regained power to take Trumpism down. That means large-scale investigations and hearings. That means pursuing criminal charges and jail sentences. Yes, that means everyone currently employed by ICE gets a pink slip. And that means doling out punishments to the corporate scofflaws and institutional enablers that allowed Trumpian misrule to flourish.

Axios reported this week that corporate America is being warned that the “subpoenas are coming.” I want that to be true; if we end up with political leaders on the left who are too timid to do what needs to be done, we will fall short. The Beltway-brained are perennially concerned with “political capital,” the allegedly short supply of which creates the perpetual demand for scaling back Democratic ambitions. Future party leaders need to shed these phantasmal fears. And they need to be ready for the political press to lobby hard against these efforts. After all, the sight of so many people being held accountable will raise serious questions of how much went wrong on their watch.

All that said, I continue to be buoyed by the sense that Democratic voters are bent on elevating real fighters—and cheered by the sight of those whom they’ve been elevating repaying that faith. There is already ample material to fuel the ambitions of would-be warriors. A recent Economist/YouGov poll found that massive swaths of Americans are using brutal terminology to describe the Trump administration: 47 percent of respondents say they would describe Trump as “racist,” 49 percent would characterize him as “corrupt,” and 46 percent would describe him as “cruel.”

These numbers indicate a very favorable environment for Democrats to attack Trump on these fronts—to explicitly say that Trump is a cruel and corrupt racist who’s enriched himself in office at the expense of the American people while egging on a secret police force that is increasingly evil in the purest sense of the word. It will take effort and commitment to provide real accountability, but the prize at the end of the quest is a democracy with restored resilience and a repellent right-wing movement beaten back into irrelevance. If it’s done correctly, the next time anyone goes looking for the point of view of Trump voters, they won’t be able to find anyone willing to admit they ever supported him.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Bad Bunny’s Neighborliness Is the Antidote to Ring’s Dystopian Vision

More and more Americans are turning against the surveillance state—and embracing each other.

Sunday’s Super Bowl was mostly an exercise in foregone conclusions: Bad Bunny’s halftime show would show off his talent and creativity, the Seahawks would grimly dominate the pitiable Patriots, and I would shout “Get fucked!” at the television when the inevitable commercial for ICE aired. But there was one surprise discussion that sprang to life the morning after the big game—involving lost dogs, the all-encompassing surveillance state into which we’ve gotten locked, and what it means to be a neighbor.

The proximate cause of all this agita was the commercial for Ring, whose doorbell cameras are among the most popular in the country. In their Super Bowl spot, Ring touted a feature called Search Party, a new(ish) AI-enabled “familiar faces” tool that the Amazon-owned company has billed as a way for lost pets to be easily recovered: Just upload a picture of the missing pet into Ring’s database, and it will deploy all the Ring cameras in the area as a dragnet to search for the wayward animal. As Mashable’s Chance Townsend reported in July 2025, these AI tools were the brainchild of recently returned founder Jamie Siminoff—who, perhaps not coincidentally, reversed the company’s previous decision to back away from working hand in glove with law enforcement.

Against that backdrop, it was perhaps inevitable that Ring’s commercial went over so badly with viewers. In fact, one of the few nice things I can say about the ad was that it was the first thing in a long while to invite unified criticism from voices all across the political spectrum. That included Matt Nelson, of WeRateDogs fame, who published a blistering video critique of the ad: “Neither Ring’s products nor its business model are built around finding lost pets,” and even if they were, it’s a job that Ring does very badly: “Ring claims that the ‘Search Party’ feature finds one dog a day,” Nelson said. “This would equate to roughly .03 percent of the over one million lost or found pet reports posted to the Ring app annually.” If this is something Ring is touting as a core competency, it could be that they’re pulling the wool over your eyes.

What Ring is, Nelson observed, is “a lucrative mass surveillance network” that turns “private homes into surveillance outposts and well-meaning neighbors into informants.” Jason Koebler of 404 Media concurs:

With Ring’s recent partnership with Flock, which will further facilitate the sharing of video footage with police, and its new Search Party feature, the message is clear: Ring is still, again, and always will be in the business of leveraging its network of luxury surveillance consumers as a law enforcement tool. After years of saying it wasn’t doing facial recognition and that it was focused more on “object recognition,” it has now explicitly launched “friendly” versions of facial recognition and facial recognition-adjacent technologies.

CNBC reported on Thursday that Ring canceled its partnership with Flock because of the public backlash over this Super Bowl advertisement. The report noted further friction building at other tech companies, with Salesforce employees pressuring company CEO Marc Benioff to “cancel ICE opportunities,” and employees at Google making similar demands that the firm “divest itself from ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection.”

The transformation of “friendly” tech into tools for the police state has been something of a trend lately. Flock security cameras deployed at schools across the country, ostensibly for the purpose of keeping kids safe, have been used to “assist Donald Trump’s mass immigration enforcement campaign,” according to a recent report from The Guardian. And while firms like Ring and TikTok go to extravagant lengths to say that they do not directly feed your data to law enforcement agencies, the fact is that data originating from these firms can frequently find its way into the hands of partners, data brokers, and other third parties who’ve made no such commitment. From there, as TNR contributor Logan McMillen pointed out this week, the government can simply purchase that data, circumventing your constitutional rights. It’s always best to assume that any technology firm not explicitly against the surveillance state will eventually become a tool of it.

With more and more of us reading stories about ICE’s predations—or experiencing them firsthand—it’s not a surprise that Ring’s happy puppy commercial landed the way it did. As I’ve said before, ICE and Customs and Border Protection aren’t actually doing immigration enforcement. They are a tentacle of the war on terror that’s been turned against the American people, armed with cutting-edge technology. People are slowly waking up to the dystopian nature of these........

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