Trump’s Deportation Warehouse System Already Matches a Very Specific Period in History |
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The United States government has begun construction of a multibillion-dollar detention camp system in the newest phase of Stephen Miller’s mass deportation strategy. The Department of Homeland Security has purchased two megawarehouses to be converted into 8,000-to-10,000-bed detention centers, with reported plans to buy and convert more than a dozen other warehouses for “processing” masses of new detainees. On this week’s Amicus podcast, Dahlia Lithwick discussed, with journalist Andrea Pitzer, the clear and chilling picture of what the Trump administration is building. Pitzer is the author of several books, including One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, and her most recent newsletter post is “Building the Camps: The Warehouseification of Detention and Initial Thoughts on Stopping It.” The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Dahlia Lithwick: What is being built? At what speed is it being built? At what cost is it being built? How is it that we’re at the place where the language that you use in your post, concentration camps, actually is not just apt but has become fairly obvious?
Andrea Pitzer: The U.S. already had a pretty extensive immigration deportation system. In the first Trump administration, the White House wanted to prioritize the kinds of optics that signaled that it could go after anybody at any time. That led to a sort of a Keystone Cops approach, and so the numbers of people deported were in fact lower than under Barack Obama. But the optics of things like family separations and the deliberate cruelty were really apparent. The administration learned from that first outing that it needed to do more planning and be more strategic. Now that Donald Trump has returned to office, we’re still seeing a lot of Keystone Cops stuff that the administration probably didn’t intend for people to see, but we’re also seeing a lot of deliberate cruelty on the streets that it does intend for people to see.
Meanwhile, the White House is hoovering up warehouses. Before all these warehouse purchases, there was a turn toward facilities like Camp East Montana, which is this enormous facility that was stood up just last August within Fort Bliss, near El Paso, Texas. They were literally building it out with tents as they were bringing people in. They’ve decided that it doesn’t really meet their needs, and so they are now turning to acquiring these warehouses. There are over 100 the administration in the process of working toward. It’s spent about three-quarters of a billion dollars on buying these so far.
The infrastructure of all that is extraordinary. When you look at some of the biggest concentration camp systems across the world, we are actually approaching or ahead of the........