Living Under a Concentration Camp Regime — and Fighting Back
“Getting involved locally is critical,” says journalist Andrea Pitzer.
In the latest episode of “Movement Memos,” I talk with journalist Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, about what it means to live under a concentration camp regime — and how people can fight back.
Music by Son Monarcas, Ballpoint, and David Celeste
TRANSCRIPT:
Note: This a rush transcript was originally published in Truthout. It is shared here with permission.
Kelly Hayes: Welcome to “Movement Memos,” a Truthout podcast about organizing, solidarity, and the work of making change. I’m your host, writer and organizer Kelly Hayes. Today, we are talking about the realities of organizing against a concentration camp regime. We will be hearing from Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps and the newsletter Degenerate Art. Andrea has studied how concentration camp regimes are constructed, entrenched, and normalized. At a time when detention infrastructure is rapidly expanding in the United States, her analysis can help us understand what we’re confronting, and what meaningful resistance requires.
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[musical interlude]
KH: Andrea Pitzer, welcome to “Movement Memos.”
Andrea Pitzer: Hi, Kelly. Thanks for having me on.
KH: How are you doing today?
AP: Probably like a lot of people. I am weighted down by the reality all around us. So many people are suffering and that suffering is so deliberately inflicted on them. It’s a hard thing, but I am also buoyed up by all the people who are meeting this moment with grace and joy and beauty and a lot of bravery as well. And so it’s kind of a burden and a relief to have a really specific idea what I need to be doing these days, and so I’m trying to show up for that.
KH: All of that resonates so much. My heart is constantly breaking, and I’m also constantly finding strength in solidarity, and in people who are leading by example in this moment.
For folks who may be unfamiliar with your work, can you tell the audience a bit about what you do?
AP: So I am originally from West Virginia, so I grew up in the U.S., and have lived a lot of my adulthood in the greater … in Washington, D.C. or in the surrounding area. And I am a narrative journalist who mostly writes books about international history. I’ve written about Vladimir Nabokov, the guy who wrote Lolita. My most recent book was a shipwreck book from the time of Shakespeare that also dives into imperialism, climate change, the very idea of a polar hero.
But really, I guess the reason you and I are talking here today is that my second book, One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, and that really runs from the 1890s up to the present. I wanted to tackle the idea of the modern concentration camp, so what happened after barbed wire and automatic weapons showed up. And I went to 18 countries, I think it was, on four continents to report that and also to Guantánamo.
And in addition to that background, and that’s so important for what we’re going to talk about today, I’ll also just add that for most of a decade, I worked in D.C. I have a black belt in martial arts, and I did a lot of self-defense work with rape crisis survivors and refugees, political refugees from various countries that experienced violence. And so before I got into journalism and before I became a book author, I was really working at a community level and looking at violence that way, and I think that still really informs a lot of what I’m doing now.
KH: There is such a constant barrage of injustice, indignity, atrocity, and absurdity under this administration that getting our bearings is really a daily task. I’m grateful for analysis that helps people make sense of what’s happening, and translate that clarity into action. That’s definitely how I experience your writing around the subject of concentration camps.
In your work, you describe how societies move toward mass detention and concentration-camp systems, drawing on global historical examples. Can you walk us through that process, and why you believe the United States is becoming a concentration-camp regime?
AP: So one of the things that I learned researching this history of concentration camps was that looking at all these different places that had had this kind of detention, and by “this kind of detention,” I mean the mass detention of civilians, so not prisoners of war, but the mass detention of civilians without due process or trial on the basis of identity, and that could be political affiliation, ethnicity, religion, race, it can be a number of factors, but it’s something about who the detainees are rather than really specific treatment of individual things that they have done, and the patterns that I found were kind of extraordinary.
And I see the U.S. has its own history with regard to this, and the ways in which it’s changing now are very much in line with the places that became concentration camp regimes. And that all sounds kind of muddy, so just to clarify, concentration camps rise when you’re doing an end run around the law. So in all these different countries over more than a hundred years, they had really different legal systems, they had really different political systems, but these kinds of mass detention of people was always something that happened outside the existing normal body of law. And it was often dependent on how the law had been used before and sort of what you could get away with making quasi-legal or sort of shepherding in. But in each case, there was this sense of what was the existing legal structure and then some need to get around it in order to target particular groups of people.
And in the U.S., we’ve had so many different kinds of detention that touched a little bit on this, and maybe we can talk about those later in the conversation, but what I saw is this weaponization of it that’s happening now is in the way that our long history with immigrant detention is exploding and mushrooming into a vast network of massive detention facilities, mostly for non-”criminals” and for very little regard of whether someone is or isn’t a “criminal,” and criminality is its own whole issue, which I would take issue with. But in terms of how these systems evolve, they tend to draw in a majority of people that have not been labeled criminal in that society before, but which a political actor at the head of a party or at the head of a country in terms of governing, like President Trump and his allies are for us right now, where they want to target particular groups for political benefit to entrench power and to exert control over the country as a whole.
And so some of that has always been happening in the U.S., but the kind of expansion that we saw Congress give funding-wise, the kind of attempts to create this force which existed before — we have Border Patrol, we have ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] — but to be specifically in allegiance to the executive branch, to the president, answerable to his commands, his wishes, and those of his minions. And we are seeing the potential damage, the potential harm that already existed before, but sort of going, as I’ve described it in the book that I wrote, from the A-bomb to the H-bomb.
KH: I appreciate that you paused to problematize the category of “criminal.” Part of what we’re seeing right now is an at-will expansion of criminalization as a tool of dehumanization — an effort to justify violence by redefining whole groups of people as inherently criminal. We’ve heard this administration describe those being rounded up as criminals by default, and we’ve also seen escalating rhetoric labeling ICE observers and rapid-response organizers as domestic terrorists or potential assassins.
Criminalization in the United States has long functioned as a way of producing human disposability — a permission structure for cultural forgetting. And it’s particularly frightening to watch that logic intensify in this moment.
You resist simple equivalencies in your work, but you deliberately use the term “concentration camp.” Some critics argue that we shouldn’t invoke comparisons to foreign regimes, especially when so much of this violence is rooted in U.S. history itself. You’ve argued that we need a broader lens — one that draws on global history alongside the legacies of slavery, Native genocide, Japanese internment, Jim Crow, and criminalization. Why is that expansive historical frame necessary?
AP: Yes. I’m so glad you asked this because what happens is this is an international phenomenon. The concentration camp phenomenon, again, as I mentioned before, with the weaponization of barbed wire and automatic weapons, you begin to be able to hold a very large population with a really small guard force. So it’s literally this technical pivot that allowed what we saw happening in the 20th century — with vast, enormous camps holding thousands and thousands of people — to even become possible, really.
And so there is always that international trend that’s worth following, and I would also say that some of the solutions people have found to try to push back or undo those systems from abroad can be really useful to think about in the U.S. context as well. But in any case, every concentration camp system rises out of that particular society’s weakness. So there’s this international trend, but it’s really this domestic culture that allows camps to rise in that place. And so when we look at what allows camps to rise in the U.S., it is these fissure lines that from the beginning we have seen related to Native genocide, related to the history of chattel slavery, related to immigration for a century or more, and actually more than a century at this point. And in each of those cases, that is where you find, that is where the immoral and amoral leadership in a government finds the fissure points in the culture, finds the wedge issues, finds the way to identify the target population that can be scapegoated, and that can then serve as the conduit through which the police state is firmly entrenched and established. And concentration camps are often sort of the pivot point on which that can be first addressed to that vulnerable population and then extended much more broadly.
And so I think that to even consider this question, you have to look at both those international trends and the ways things develop, but also exactly what’s happening locally. You can’t separate the two. And so I deliberately use the term concentration camp because I think people say, “Well, we’ve always been unkind to immigrants,” or, “Well, we have a long history of targeting Black people.” The police do, for instance. These conversations tend to portray these issues as organic and therefore what we are doing can’t be like those other places. And I think it’s a real failure of imagination to not realize the ways in which this can be made worse, and that the international lens and using that term, concentration camp, can be clarifying to understand the possibilities that are set before us now and the ways that U.S. culture may offer some advantages in fighting this and the ways in which we are really starting out at a deficit. And so it can be a lens through which people will see their society in a way that they haven’t been able to think about it before.
KH: I really agree with you about what this language has the potential to clarify for people. I know there’s been some pushback around using the term “concentration camp” in a U.S. context, and I find those critiques ahistorical. This isn’t language that belongs exclusively to one regime or one country — it’s a term with a broader historical meaning. I wish this phenomenon were an isolated historical occurrence. I understand why people might want to imagine it that way. But of course it’s not — and it wasn’t even isolated during the Second World War. I don’t think many people realize that presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman described the internment camps where Japanese Americans were forcibly incarcerated during World War II as “concentration camps” — and only Truman meant it in a bad way.
I also really appreciate your insistence that what we’re facing is both homegrown and globally entangled.
The United States has cultivated and exported enormous harm — sometimes refining tactics abroad before bringing them home. At the same time, contemporary fascists are borrowing from European movements and histories. These currents flow into each other. None of this is contained within a singular nation. We’re in a global struggle against fascism, whether we recognize it or not.
And while reactionaries are sharing strategies across borders, we need an analysis that isn’t siloed. We can’t pretend this is only imported, and we can’t pretend it’s purely domestic. It’s both. These aren’t abstractions — they’re living movements, in motion, adapting and learning from one another.
Listening to you, I’m also thinking about Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s definition of racism as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” That differentiation isn’t new in the United States. But the scale and the methods of exploitation can intensify. The stakes can escalate. And we have to be honest about when that escalation is happening.
Which brings me to a recent report by Pablo Manríquez about the repurposing of a Department of Defense contract to rapidly expand detention and deportation infrastructure — essentially enabling the construction of tent cities and self-contained facilities across the country. What does that move signal to you?
AP: So this is really grim. I am always also aware of things we can be doing to address it, but this is a grim step because on a practical level, this contract, the way that they have been routing this now through the Navy, it expedites everything and it shortens the window by which we can effectively interfere with the plan. It entrenches things more quickly. It makes it more difficult, whether it’s for elected officials or for individuals like you and me, to be able to step in and intervene. Once we have that funding and once it is routed through the WEXMAC contract, I think that it is a way of drawing boundaries around their ability to stand up these facilities quickly. And so we should see it for the escalation that it is. We should see it for the danger that it is. We should be already talking to our representatives about what kinds of actions can be taken, whether it’s now or whether it’s potentially after some shifts with the election later this year to defund, to dismantle. We have to already be looking toward the future routes to doing that because it’s going to be much more difficult with this, the way that they’re implementing this.
On a conceptual level, it goes back to what I was saying before as well. It is an end run around normal procedure. This is how we know it’s a concentration camp regime. We have lots of ways of building detention facilities in the U.S. We have lots of people that everyone in power has tacitly or implicitly agreed to treat different groups and who can go in those facilities, but this literal physical expansion to the number of beds, expanding those possibilities, but also this end run around normal procedure means that the accountability is lower. It means that it usually foretells a very grim plan that governing bodies have or governing leadership has for the rights of individuals. So it’s a shot across the bow of just how far Stephen Miller and [Pete] Hegseth and Trump are willing to take this.
I think even many elected Republican representatives and senators don’t understand what’s happening right now, even as they’re voting for these things. And that’s not to say some of them wouldn’t approve it if they did know, but I think lacking this greater context, people all across the country don’t realize we are entrenching the kind of concentration camp system — literally the numbers that they were talking about even before the election, 15 million, 20 million. Only 18 million people went through the entire Soviet … In the entire multi-decade existence of the Soviet Gulag, 18 million people went through it, and they’re talking about doing that in the short term and building a system to meet those kinds of numbers.
So when you are doing that, you are talking about something on that scale. There are very few systems — there are some, but there are very few in human history that reach the kind of scale that they’re talking about and the detention beds that they’re talking about and keeping … I’m sure most of your listeners already know, but just to touch on it here, that what we’re talking about is something that will eclipse the U.S. prison system, which is already this unbelievably carceral institution. And I think the U.S., as we’ve been saying, has long had these police state dynamics that applied to some categories of residents and that the society has created a thing where in theory that’s okay with a lot of people, but it’s anathema to the national self-concept that “America” — America in the narrow U.S. sense of the word, it’s anathema to that self-concept that the country has.
And so a lot of the success that past movements have had is pushing back against, finding that gap between the police state dynamics that already existed and the country’s self-image of freedom and democracy. And so activists have successfully pushed back, often at really great cost, in order to highlight that gap and trigger accountability and to trigger change. But what is happening now is a massive broadening of those tactics to apply in settings to people and places that normally would have been considered off-limits for those kinds of police state dynamics, or they wouldn’t be deployed as openly.
And that itself is an assertion of power to say that the communities of exception, the ones that we’ve allowed to be abused in the past as a country, and the state of exception, situations in which people’s rights can be ignored, it’s clear the government is trying to extend that to all groups, to everyone, and to all the time, so that the state of exception becomes a permanent one. When you have that entrenched concentration camp system, when you have enough personnel, which they don’t yet, and you have the beds, which they’re accelerating toward, then you can work to make that happen, and I think that’s what we’re seeing.
KH: We’re also seeing the legitimization of this steady expansion — this creep in who the government claims the authority to disappear into the system. The recent ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit backing ICE’s mass detention policy essentially affirms that anyone in immigration proceedings can be held in custody. By upholding this policy, the court broadens the pool of people who can be jailed and strengthens the legal foundation for large-scale detention.
On the ground, DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] and ICE aren’t just talking about expanding capacity — they’re building it. Federal reports and investigative coverage show multiple purchases of large warehouse properties across states including Maryland, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Georgia, and Texas, each hundreds of thousands of square feet, as part of planned “mega” detention facilities, with Bloomberg reporting plans for roughly two dozen warehouses nationwide. The proposed concentration camp in El Paso would be “the largest jail of any kind in the country.”
At the same time, the Department of Defense and DHS are moving forward with the “soft-sided” tent-based encampments Manríquez wrote about, which he described as “rapid deployment of self-contained cities.” And I think it’s worth noting that these “self-contained” tent cities would house up to 10,000 people each and include biohazard incinerators.
There has been meaningful pushback — people in Mississippi recently blocked the creation of a warehouse facility, and in Kansas City, sustained protests and political pressure led a developer to abandon plans to sell a large warehouse for ICE detention. We know that Native people have waged site fights, including the Miccosukee Nation’s fight against so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” facility in Florida. All of these efforts matter. They slow things down, raise the political cost, and expose what’s being built.
I also think this is a moment where some of our newly mobilized co-strugglers can learn a lot from abolitionist organizers who have waged a lot of site fights to stop jails, prisons, and detention facilities from being built over the years. And we’re clearly going to need that kind of grassroots action. Because nothing that the Democrats are proposing actually has the power to stop the progression we’re describing.
From your perspective, as someone who has studied how these systems are built, normalized, and sustained, what kinds of demands actually meet the scale of the threat? And what outcomes should people be organizing toward if the infrastructure itself is expanding this rapidly?
AP: So there’s a lot. I’ll try to touch on a few things. I think that in my newsletter, since the beginning, I have been trying to encourage people to be networking and be active on a local level, and here’s a good example where that can be a really beneficial thing to have those networks already in place or to make them quickly. If you live in a place where ICE is not currently slated to have a facility, work with your local representatives to create a situation that it will be more difficult for them to do that. Now, the federal government has a lot of power, but if you can get your community involved preemptively, you can make yourself much less attractive. And I would say that’s critical for people that live in red areas as well. We are seeing, in some cases, we are seeing Republican senators stepping in in order to sort of NIMBY this and say, “Not in my backyard.” And I mean, it’s terrible if they get pushed to blue areas instead, but any time this can be slowed, any time it can be stopped, it’s a good thing.
So getting involved locally is critical: demonstrating, showing up at city council meetings, finding out who has those properties, getting them to commit not to sell in the first place. I mean, these are all ways that people can be acting preemptively if this hasn’t yet come to your backyard. If it is already in your backyard, it will depend very much on what that contract is and how it’s working, but there are always contractors. And so targeting those contractors, targeting any employees that work in that facility, denying them the ability to work in municipal jobs or in teaching anywhere in your community, perhaps anywhere in the state, if you can get your state legislators behind it. So those are things that you can do locally and on a state level.
I think on a national level, we need to be pressing our elected representatives. We need to be pushing through organizations of change to educate the community and to educate, frankly, our politicians about some of what you and I are discussing today, because while I’m very much in favor of the kind of hemming in that Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are talking about with ICE, that you cannot just ask the mask question and not look at what is happening, look at the underlying mechanics of what we’re faced with. And I understand that when you’re in the minority party, your hands are tied, but this is a moment, if ever there was a moment, where a vocal opposition is absolutely critical because some of these people can most quickly, more quickly than most of us are able to, actually tell the American people what is coming, make Republicans take a stand on it, put it in those terms.
I was gratified to see — I think it was LaMonica McIver who was asking some pretty hard questions of acting ICE Director Todd Lyons, and pushing to discuss the enormous immorality of what is unfolding before our eyes and what Congress is actively abetting in this moment. And I have seen it myself, the camp at Guantánamo, and I went to Gitmo twice. It started out as an expeditionary camp, and it’s a slightly different contract than what we saw with WEXMAC, but it is, in fact, a similar thing. I slept in these kinds of tents that they’re talking about. Press there, that’s where we slept. The courtroom is an expeditionary courtroom, and they’re talking about building expeditionary courtrooms. And expeditionary means, literally, it’s movable. You can go in, you can set it up very quickly, you can throw it in, and that was how the tribunal setup at Guantánamo was built.
And my point in bringing that up again here is once more to say that what has happened in the past sets the stage for the future. Immigrants’ detention on a mass level was how detention started at Gitmo before it became “war on terror” detention. And so if we look at these camps being established around the U.S. using the same expeditionary means, but instead of doing it somewhere outside the normal borders (what are generally observed as the borders of the U.S.), now it’s being turned inward, and that is also part of concentration camp history, that what was done initially at the turn of the 20th century in colonial settings was brought then into the heart of empire. And I think that is part of what we’re seeing in the U.S. right now, an importation of those very tactics that we’ve put out on the world.
And so the way that you resist them is to draw attention to them, is to organize against them, is to protest at the sites where they will be happening. But I think that there is a lot that can be done, still, at the political level, whether it’s local or national, because if you name this for what it is and show what it is, the vast majority of Americans will not support it. There are hardcore groups of racists, there is another group that doesn’t care if it happens as long as it happens out of sight, and then there are the people that don’t want it to happen. And if you combine the second and third group, you have a majority of people in the U.S. and they will not want this. But once it’s built, just as we see with Guantánamo today, it is very difficult to make it go away.
KH: I want to say a bit more about the chasm between reforms that the Democrats are offering and the popular demand to abolish ICE. There’s so much complexity to address here that we aren’t going to piece our way through today, but I am personally very frustrated by the focus on reforms like body cameras, because we’ve been here before. People really believed that body cameras would reduce police violence, and we’ve seen what a momentous failure that effort has been. We’ve actually seen an increase in the number of people killed by police since body cameras went into widespread use. So, in addition to having a major uptick in mass surveillance, where cops can generate footage to criminalize people just by walking around, we’ve also found that footage of police killing people, filmed from their perspective, doesn’t disincentivize killing, and doesn’t lead to greater accountability. There was a recent piece by Matt Novak in Gizmodo that explained that there was actually a brief stint of police getting busted for planting evidence more often around 2017, when they were still learning how body cameras worked, and didn’t understand when they were and weren’t filming, but that didn’t last, and the obvious explanation is that they adapted. So, I really want people to internalize that making connections between the struggle against police violence and the violence of incarceration is crucial here, both in terms of having an analysis of what doesn’t work, and also what can.
I’m also thinking about something you wrote in your recent piece, “Into the abyss.” You said: “Nobody sane now thinks the answer to abuses at Dachau was to give the guards more training.” Can you talk about the need to disempower the people who are perpetrating these harms and the apparatuses that enact that violence?
AP: So obviously we need to use our votes, but we also need to understand the power we have in society. And so that can be through shaming, that can be through institutions that are already in place for moral accountability in the U.S. I think there’s tremendous possibility, which we’ve already seen, and we saw it with [faith leaders challenging Rep.] Rosa DeLauro, and we’ve seen it on the front lines in a number of cities where we have clergy from different faiths that are coming together and asserting that moral situation.
But in terms of disempowering, we have to actually … This “abolish ICE” idea, it’s not an ephemeral idea. And I used the Dachau example to be not exactly provocative, but to be concrete because that’s what we’re talking about. That’s what we’re fighting. When Dachau came into existence, it was not that different than what we are already doing. And so this willingness that we’ve had to create a state, a nation in which millions are imprisoned way out of line with other developed countries, with countries with similar backgrounds, with countries with similar diversity quotients, I would say when you add that on to what our immigration system has become, you see the nexus of how our current situation is formed.
And so this abolish ICE idea is going to mean that we need to get rid of these camps. We need to deprive the contractors of jobs. We need to put our bodies on the line to call attention to what’s happening inside them. We need to call for access to them. In the end, what we need to do is to create an immigration system that does not have punitive detention — or even really detention at the heart of it, or we will, because of our histories, we will always be setting this up. And I would also argue that we need to do that with the carceral state in general, but the place that we can start with is undoing it.
And I actually had … I’ve had senators call me privately to discuss this at various points in the last decade. And in each case, they were not really unwilling, but they were unable to imagine an immigration system that didn’t have detention at the heart of it, even though so much of what we’re seeing now has really come into being in the last 20 to 30 years. And so I think one huge thing for that dismantling is the imagining of pathways: bureaucratically and structurally, what would that border look like? What would that be?
And I don’t want to minimize the hard work that is involved in all of this. You start the work and you don’t know when it will be finished. But one thing I will say is that … that concentration camp system being dismantled is a huge first step in terms of protecting life and envisioning a way out of that police state. And so I think that it should be the heart of what we are dealing with now.
I think particularly the facilities, even though with these expeditionary contracts in place and with many of these facilities bought, if you want to compare it to a video game, the skill level at which we have to play has jumped exponentially, but literally educating people about what is happening and what the stakes are is a really vital part.
KH: I really appreciate this call to action, and I also appreciate something you’ve named in our conversations, which is that as massive as these efforts are, and as bleak as things may seem, so many of the concentration camp apparatuses that have been created globally have been dismantled. We know this can be done, because it has been done, and it will be done again. Will we do it, and what are we willing to do to make it happen? Those are the real questions.
Something else that’s coming up for me, particularly as a prison abolitionist, is that part of this work of making the atrocity visible is staying in touch with people on the inside, and refusing to let them be wholly disappeared or forgotten. That’s a tradition as old as imprisonment and slavery, and it’s very much alive in the culture of abolitionist organizing and immigration justice work. It’s also another reason that independent media and movement media are so important right now. Because the corporate media and the legacy media are key actors in the work of social and cultural forgetting. So, we need to support people who are capturing the truth of what’s happening, and we need to amplify that work — whether they’re doing it in a publication or in their own grassroots activism. Because, as my friends who’ve been attacked by ICE in the streets are constantly saying, if they would do this to me out in the open, what do you think they’re doing in the camps and detention centers? And I would add that: If they can so easily distract people from what they are doing in broad daylight, we need to take seriously the work of exposing what’s happening behind the walls and barbed-wired fences of detention. That has to be our work, because the people we’d like to believe would do it are not doing it.
And on that note, I really want to praise L.A. Taco’s coverage of the ongoing vigils at the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego, and the community members gathering there. People in that facility have been throwing bottles of lotion with messages wrapped around them over fences and walls to communicate with the people holding vigil outside. Those communications have allowed people to provide material support to some of the people inside. In some cases, they’re getting the A-numbers of imprisoned people, which allows supporters to deposit commissary funds and funds for phone calls. Some of these detainees haven’t been able to speak to their loved ones in a very long time, so that’s crucial support. And while this support is happening, these communications are also allowing detainees to spread the word about conditions inside. One of the notes someone threw over the wall said, “We are all constantly sick.”
We know that 32 people died in immigration detention last year. We know that when children at ICE’s Dilley detention center get sick, they’re told to drink water, when detainees say it’s the water that’s making them sick. We know an 18 month-old baby nearly died at Dilley, after being hospitalized for respiratory failure, and then denied the medication that doctors prescribed. It’s clear that all of this will escalate as the concentration camp system expands. So, I think we really need to ground ourselves, our politics, and our sense of what’s necessary in that understanding.
I also want to circle back to something else that you said before. You said that what we’re seeing now is similar to what was going on at Dachau in the beginning. Could you say more about that?
AP: Sure. So there’s this idea, I think … Well, and one thing to be clear about is that people imagine, when they think, “Nazi concentration camp,” they think, “death camp.” And so just if there’s any listeners that … There’s a reason I’m picking Dachau, I would say, instead of Auschwitz here. And Auschwitz is where factory-style mass executions were happening. It was literally, “How quickly can we kill this community of people that we’ve designated for death,” which is a different phenomenon than we see in the non-death camps that existed across Nazi Germany for almost a decade before the death camp system arose.
And yet those other camps, those concentration camps, the pre-death camps, were also lethal. And like most of the systems around the world, the lethality was more often due to other kinds of harm than mass-factory-style executions. There would occasionally be firing squads, but more often disease, malnutrition in some of the very early colonial-style camps. And I think since these are expeditionary camps, we’re going to see and we are already seeing this kind of thing in Camp East Montana, for instance. We see deaths from guards choking someone. We see deaths, we see illness — massive illness from tuberculosis, from measles.
And some of those early colonial camps, where the camps were sited and the conditions in them, we think of what I call the Everglades Camp, which a lot of people call “Alligator Alcatraz,” deliberately sited to do harm to those detainees. A lot of the early Northern German camps when the Nazis first came to power were work camps and labor camps. And then they would slowly devolve into these worse settings, into these more institutionalized, more hard infrastructure, poured concrete or designed by an architect for better surveillance. You see this shift that takes about six or seven years.
But in those early days at Dachau, one of the most amazing things that happened was there was a man named Hans Beimler who actually managed to escape, and there is still some open question of how exactly he did it because those stories — there were rumors about Dachau and there were horrific gossip reports that were making their way out. And even The New York Times was letting some people into camps briefly to look at them, of course under really controlled circumstances, but what made a huge difference was when this man — Hans Beimler, who was a communist deputy in the Reichstag in Germany — who was arrested and he was held there and he was tortured. And one of his colleagues was tortured to death and they were trying to get him to commit suicide himself. They were trying to drive him to despair.
And I think that’s a little what we’re seeing already happening in some of these U.S. situations, but he managed to escape and he was able to get out of the country and he wrote a story. He wrote the account of what had happened in there. And it was one of the first accounts that people had of when people were arrested, and how they’d get taken from these different places, and how the guards actively left some people alone and actively tortured others. But of course, it created this hell for everybody because once you see someone tortured, once you experience it once yourself … And this was something that a woman that I interviewed who had been tortured in Argentina under dictatorship told me, is that you only need these things to happen once. You only need to see them happen once to understand that these people can do what they want to you whenever they want.
And so part of what’s happening that was happening at Dachau as well is we’re witnessing an assertion of power. And right now it’s these several millions that are currently targeted, and the people that are pushing back — so the Renee Goods, the Alex Prettis, and the many people showing up in Chicago and L.A. and D.C. at facilities or when they see someone grabbed on the street. For right now, these are the only people that can be targeted, but the entire operation, as was the first months and years of Nazi Germany, is an attempt to install the omnipotence to just change the category of who you wanted to do it to.
And the big concerning thing is that the resources have already been set aside for this, but they have gone, I think, in my opinion, and this is what gives me some hope, they have gone too quickly, and that the population has not been, as a whole, sufficiently propagandized enough the way that the Nazi Germany population was. They have not had control. They are getting it. We see the billionaires buying these things and then kowtowing. We see Trump exerting influence. We certainly had Rush Limbaugh for decades. We had Fox News for decades. But as a whole, the U.S. population has not experienced the hardcore propaganda year after year that would allow them, allow the government to assert this power and simply lock up anybody they want.
And people are horrified. We see this in the massive changes in public polling about immigration. And that’s one of the reasons I think it’s critical to stop this now while we have the literal physical ability to stop some of these facilities from coming online, but also it’s critical to act now while immigration opinion is volatile because there are things that could happen that would swing it back the other way. So we have this, I think, ideal moment in which we can be acting, which is right now.
And just to make sure this is said, and I should probably say it 20 times every time I speak to anybody, but one of the good things — the U.S. has its own deficits, but one of the good things about it is that right now, most Americans, certainly not all, but most Americans actually have more freedom to act and to stand up against the government than almost any system that I’ve looked at around the world in the research that I’ve done. Most Americans can still exert those rights. We are seeing that it has real risks, that we have some people that have died doing that, but most Americans will not face those kinds of penalties. And if enough of us stand up, we will be able to stop this.
[musical interlude]
We have to be physically present in front of the people that have power to do things. We have to be physically present at the places and sites where this is happening. But I know for some people, that either because of disability or because of their responsibilities for elders or for young children, I mean, not everybody can psychologically or physically be out on front lines as I see every time I see a new photo of you from somewhere. But I am in awe of the people that have come up with extraordinary ways to make really valuable contributions when they can’t be present in that way that I think we do have to be present, but there’s lots of room for other things.
And I think of Megan Piontkowski, who was an illustrator who basically took it on herself to help create these ICE zines for all over the country. And people can just download them with their local info, and if you need to make a call in, what to report. I mean, stuff that most Americans, I would say, who are not active, don’t even know how to begin to start. Dan Sinker, who is working with lots of other people, producing hundreds of thousands of whistles. And these alone are not sufficient, of course, in and of themselves, but by building ourselves into whatever part of a network, we, I think, realize our strengths, we realize how many of us there are, and also it infiltrates the community itself and you really can change the nature of a community and what it does.
I’m forgetting the name of the person who said it, but there was the thing of when fugitive slave laws were being reinforced in the North, it suddenly made abolitionists out of all of these people that before, as we had talked about, this group of people that was kind of willing to let things happen if they didn’t have to know about them — there are a lot of people that will wind up contributing mightily if you can show them what is actually happening. They aren’t necessarily intentionally averting their eyes, although there are people that do that. There are some that — it is made so convenient in U.S. society to not see what is happening for many people, whether it’s on the basis of how they live or where they work or who their circles are. And so I think that there’s tremendous power in all that.
And I know people want the magic answer of, “Oh, if you do this one weird trick that I can tell you they did in Chile in 1978, it’s going to undo the whole system.” There’s nothing, there’s no one magic trick here, right? This is going to be hard work. Even if the elections were to go radically against Trump and his supporters, we are looking at generational damage here. This is going to be years to undo. And I think that we ourselves, individuals and the communities that we form, the networks that we form in our communities, are the biggest answer to this. We are the ones that are going to solve this.
KH: In your recent piece, you noted that, “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.” Can you say more about that?
AP: Sure. So what I found was that in most systems, so in all the ones you’ve heard of and some that you wouldn’t have, there seems to be this period between the third year and the fifth year after coming to power in which they have already been asserting this ability to do a kind of, again, end run around the existing system, a kind of bonus concentration camp-style mass detention of civilians that wasn’t done on that scale before, in some cases wasn’t done at all before, and there usually comes a conflict point. And it was strange that it was so consistently in this three-to-five-year window because it would be for different reasons.
Sometimes it would be, as the U.S. did in Chile, after the car bomb assassination of [former minister under Chilean President Salvador Allende] Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C., the US government, which had been very supportive of [Gen. Augusto] Pinochet and the other generals, said, “Whoa,” and I’m paraphrasing here but, “this is getting a little out of hand.” And they put pressure on the Chilean secret police, the DINA, and the DINA was, in response to that and some other things, dismantled. And so this move toward mass detention that had been existing in Chile for a time got scaled back to more typical secret police activities and on a smaller scale. And so in that case, you had foreign pressure and intervention.
I think also of how the Khmer Rouge existed for a certain number of years, and in that three-to-five-year window then you had external pressure, you had external invasion that shifted it. But more often, it’s something like what happened in the Nazi era, which is you have a battle between existing power factions. And in this case, it would be those who wanted to use the legal system and who had power — Nazis, to be clear. Nazis who had power under the legal system, the law, the traditional system, were fighting with the Nazis who had this sort of end-run concentration camp-style power. And there was actually, there was a window in which they started to dial the camps way down. Numbers were tiny. Dilley holds more people now than were in most of the detention facilities in that moment. And so, I mean, total. In all, they equaled something more on the scale of Dilley. And then the concentration camp faction won out.
And U.S. history now is very strange in this field because we had that intervention because unlike most of these places, we still had the capability for elections, and we had an election and we brought [Joe] Biden in and it hit a pause button. So that’s year four. You did see this shift, and it did hit a pause button on some things. The deliberate expansion and overreach and entrenchment that we’re seeing now didn’t happen under Biden, but what also didn’t happen under Biden was you didn’t actually have a fundamental shift in how immigration detention was happening. You didn’t have a fundamental rollback of the tools that Trump used when he came in in his first administration to do things like the Muslim ban, to do things like family separations, to become visually/optically aggressive about the way that immigrants were being detained and to begin to create this propaganda arm within the government to be pushing that on people.
So some of those things got paused, but not undone. And as a result, with Trump coming back a second time … And meanwhile, you had Biden’s actions and university actions with protesters around the Gaza issue, which completely dismantled, in many ways, the ability for university students to take on a traditional role in protests that we would be seeing much more now if that hadn’t happened under Biden. So in some cases, Biden actually made the situation worse for where we are now, but in some cases it was paused.
So I’ve been trying to figure out: Where are we in that three-to-five-year time frame now, because I think we were already on the back end of it when the country said, “Hey, let’s bring in other people,” but then enough change wasn’t made. And so I think, in some ways, we’ve picked up almost where we left off and a year has gone by. So my assessment of the situation, again, this was never a totally hard and fast thing, but as a sort of a general rule, but we are already on the back end of that five years now.
And so my sense is that this year is the last one that we have to try to stop this before we already have a fully entrenched concentration camp state, and the actions with the budget allocations that were done last year with these moves to the WEXMAC contract now and the kind of staffing we’re seeing, the push and the huge bonuses to try to recruit ICE and Border Patrol folks, it’s all coming together and it’s not there yet, but one could easily see how by the end of the year we would have … I think that they’re going to far exceed the 100,000 beds that they initially set as their goal.
And by the time you have that size of a camp system, as a country, our ability to push back becomes much more difficult. In a lot of these facilities — and I’ll say particularly the ones that are affiliated with military bases — the visibility level, the cutting off from society is much, much more severe and it’s harder to track.
And yet I will say, because I’ve seen it all over the world, people do manage to smuggle out things. The lotion bottles go over the fence. Things get scribbled. There was one person who actually managed to send a postcard from detention that had an actual, the real thing … They managed to slip out basically between someone else’s postcards a postcard that said what was happening in the camp, and it stayed fastened together long enough to make it out of the country. And on that basis, [President Dwight D.] Eisenhower ended up pulling somebody out of a Soviet Gulag camp and he was released. And so the ways in which people still find to get around those boundaries are astounding, but here we are on the back of that three-to-five-year [time frame]. I guess we’re on the five-plus model right now, and that is a really dangerous place to be.
And one other thing I should say is that it is so much … Not only do I think we have the capacity to stop this, but it is so dependent on us to do it because a lot of concentration camp systems in the past, when activists tried to call attention to them and get the stories out, one of the things they were doing was to try to appeal to countries that at least nominally espoused democracy. And so Europe and the U.S. would often be the target of some of these actions. And in fact, it did have effects on public sympathies, sometimes government pressure, but right now the U.S. has abdicated that role entirely. Europe is … Politically, many countries in Europe are in some of the same dangers that we see in the U.S.
And so I think that unfortunately the burden is going to fall even more heavily on us to convince our own fellow people living in the U.S. of what’s happening, and that they in fact are going to have to be the ones that help take a stand against this, because we are not going to see it from the billionaires like Peter Thiel, who is already looking for a post-democratic society, to the people like Stephen Miller, who don’t want it and never believed in it — I think that the people with the levers of power right now, in many cases, highlighting the gap between the ideal of democracy and what’s happening, that is not going to move them.
KH: What concrete moments or battles do you think will determine whether we slide further into entrenched systems or manage to roll them back?
AP: I think there are a few things. I am very much heartened by Minneapolis’s response, by L.A.’s response. When there have been people that have been killed, the … I don’t want to say “fearlessness” because people, of course, they are afraid. The bravery, the courage with which people have responded to that. I think we’ve already sort of passed one big hurdle, which is that there was clearly the hope from the government that people could just be intimidated and they would just shut up, that some of this harm would come. And they set up situations, not necessarily that Renee Good was targeted weeks in advance or anything like that. You don’t need that to happen. If you create these dynamics, the violence will come. They will have an opportunity. Government agents will have a chance to do this violence. It will happen. And people have responded to that with just greater strength and showing up more for each other.
And I don’t want to forget that Chicago is still in the midst of it, that Minneapolis is still taking it in the teeth. It isn’t as if getting over those hurdles means that you can kind of sit quietly and be like, “Oh good, that’s done.” It’s not done. It’s still going on. But showing up with that kind of bravery and courage, I think, is something that was a huge test that so far as a country, we are passing and we’re going to have to pass it more and more at harder and harder levels, but that’s one thing we’ve already done.
In terms of what’s coming up, I think this DHS funding fight is huge. I think we should be pressing on it. I think we should not be letting anyone get away with anything. And I was heartened by Bernie Sanders with the amendment to claw back the $75 billion that had been done and it failed by one vote. Again, I know those are strategic and performative votes in many cases. People know how it’s going to play out and they just get a chance to do the vote that will make the least of their constituents angry. But that it was so close, I think, is important. That they had to perform for their constituents does still matter. And that we are seeing [Republican Mississippi] Sen. [Roger] Wicker, for instance, making that call to Kristi Noem and saying, “Hey, we don’t want this here.” It’s because people laid the groundwork for that and created the pressure for that. And we can do that in more places and it’s going to require, in the end, a federal response as well as the local response.
But I think this DHS funding right now is critical. I think that the first facility that we can decommission will be a huge victory. And I think people should be looking strategically about, what is the most vulnerable one, what is the most one where there is visibility and where we can have those stories coming out? There is nothing that beats actually communicating these lives. And I know that people like Pretti and Good, that there’s the whole risk of the white savior model and that they get attention that other people don’t. But my thought is, “Thank God, at least they still get attention,” and now we need to do the work.
And by we, I mean as middle-aged white woman, I need to be doing the work so that it is extended, this kind of grace and this kind of sorrow and understanding of the loss is communicated about not just people like Renee Good and Alex Pretti and not just to children like Liam Conejo Ramos, but also to people like Keith Porter Jr. in L.A. We need to be actively humanizing our neighbors. We need to be actively making these stories count in addition to getting them out. And it just — it is in our power to not let people look away.
It is slow, hard work, but I don’t think we get out of this without doing that work. Retaking our communities at the community level — that’s going to help create this pressure for the change that’s going to have to come at the federal level. And it will come through elections, of course, but it has to come from the grassroots in this case because right now, the government — and this is classically how it happens with concentration camp systems — the executive overpowers and controls the legislative and then tries to eat away at the judiciary.
And so the things we can do to support what’s left of Congress in terms of its ability to act and especially the groups that are bringing these cases and arguing them and making some important wins, but out on the streets is the main way, is in community, helping the people and coming into community to come up with the ideas that are going to solve this.
KH: Well, Andrea, I could talk to you all day, but I know we’re out of time. I’m so grateful for your insights and for the rigor you bring to this work. These are hard topics, and I really hope the analysis we’ve shared here today helps our listeners orient themselves a bit amid everything we’re up against. I know I found it helpful, and I’m just so glad you could be here.
AP: I admire your work so much, Kelly, so I’m really delighted to be here. I wish we didn’t have to do this work, but it’s wonderful that you’re out there doing what you’re doing. So thanks for having me on.
KH: I also want to thank our listeners for joining us today, and remember, our best defense against cynicism is to do good, and to remember that the good we do matters. Until next time, I’ll see you in the streets.
Show Notes
- Need an organizing resource? Check out Block It! Don’t Build It. Don’t Fill It. Don’t Fuel It. A Mini Toolkit to Take Action to Disrupt the ICE Kidnapping, Detention, and Deportation Machine.
- Don’t forget to check out Andrea’s book One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.
- Want to learn more about Japanese internment? This 2013 piece from Mariame Kaba is worth checking out — it’s also where I learned that two U.S. presidents referred to these camps as “concentration camps.”
