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concentration camps
The Dead and the Dying in Trump's American Gulag
A system of concentration camps is being built and it's time the nation reckon with this monstrosity before any more people are killed.
Mar 24, 2026
The March 4, 2026, edition of the Arizona Daily Star put the facts succinctly: “A Haitian asylum seeker held for four months at Florence Correctional Center died Monday at a Scottsdale hospital due to complications from an infected tooth.” It seems the infection spread from his tooth to his lungs, and he developed the pneumonia that killed him.
In other words, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) allowed a prisoner to die of a toothache. His name was Emmanuel Damas. He was 56 years old and the father of two.
And we can only expect medical treatment at ICE centers to deteriorate further. As Judd Legum at Popular Information reported in January 2026:
“ICE… has not paid any third-party providers for medical care for detainees since October 3, 2025. Last week, ICE posted a notice on an obscure government website announcing it will not begin processing such claims until at least April 30, 2026. Until then, medical providers are instructed ‘to hold all claims submissions.’”
Emmanuel Damas’s unnecessary death would be outrageous enough, were it the only one of its kind. In fact, 32 people died in ICE custody during 2025, the most in two decades. Another six died in January 2026 alone, among them Geraldo Lunas Campos, a Cuban father aged 55, at Camp East Montana detention center in El Paso, Texas.
Although ICE initially claimed Lunas Campos had attempted suicide, the American Immigration Council reports that “the El Paso County Medical Examiner ruled his death was a homicide arising from asphyxia due to neck and torso compression.” Of course, it’s pretty hard to strangle yourself to death. Witnesses, however, described his murder this way: “Mr. Lunas Campos was handcuffed, while at least five guards held him down and one guard squeezed his neck until he was unconscious.” At least one other man has died at the Camp East Montana detention center, where tuberculosis and measles are also spreading.
Damas and Lunas Campos were among the roughly 73,000 people whom ICE currently holds in a tangle of detention camps sprawled across the country. And more centers are under construction. Many of them are former warehouses designed to function, as ICE acting director Todd Lyons put it last year, “like Amazon Prime for human beings.” (Like many Trump appointees, Lyons has not received Senate confirmation. His actual title, according to ICE, is “Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”)
What Is a Concentration Camp?
Taken together, this network of prisons or, more accurately, concentration camps, constitutes an American gulag. “Gulag” is not so much a word as a Russian initialism that came to stand for the Soviet Union’s concentration camp program, originally developed under Joseph Stalin. The term stands for “Main Directorate of Correctional Labor Camps” and originally referred to the officials running the camps. Later, “gulag” came to indicate the camps themselves, which were a central instrument of Soviet political repression. Most Americans first learned about those camps through Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1973 internationally bestselling memoir, The Gulag Archipelago.
As Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, has written, such institutions are a relatively recent phenomenon. While human beings have long contrived ways to isolate groups they identify as enemies — for example, in the enclosed Jewish ghettos of medieval Europe — the modern concentration camp evolved thanks to two key inventions: barbed wire and the machine gun. That pair of technological advances made it possible for a small number of guards to control and contain a large number of people in one place.
Concentration camps have a number of defining features:
- Concentration camps exist outside regular legal structures. The people they hold are not prisoners, but detainees. So, we find people of all ages, from infants to ancients, in concentration camps. In most cases, they have not been tried or convicted of any crime. Rather, they are held because of their status, for example, as non-citizens, or in the case of Japanese-American citizens imprisoned during World War II, because of their ethnicity or national origin. This is true for the people held in ICE detention today. Their alleged offenses are against U.S. civil, not criminal law, and their detention exists outside of any court system, including the immigration courts run by the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. Immigration judges, who are really administrative employees, can’t order anyone detained. That’s up to ICE and its umbrella agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
- Concentration camp inmates are civilians, not soldiers, which places them conveniently outside the strictures of the Geneva Conventions. That’s why the U.S. has never recognized the men it has held and, in the case of 15 prisoners, continues to hold as prisoners of war in the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. In the 1990s, almost a decade before the naval station at Guantánamo was first used to house detainees in the “global war on terror,” the U.S. held immigrants there, including as many as 50,000 Haitians and Cubans. Trump’s January 29, 2025, executive order entitled “Expanding Migrant Operations Center At Naval Station Guantánamo Bay To Full Capacity” directed the Defense and Homeland Security departments to prepare to hold as many as 30,000 migrant detainees there. As of July 2025, the camp held detainees from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean.
- Concentration camps are associated with authoritarian regimes. They function both as a direct form of repression and, no less importantly, as a warning to the rest of the population about what could happen to those who resist the regime. In this sense, concentration camps are very much like another tool of repression, institutionalized state torture, about which I wrote in my book Mainstreaming Torture. Like state torture, concentration camps perform a kind of national security theater, made all the more entrancing by its quasi-secret nature. In the case of ICE detention camps, the DHS has made a show of not permitting local officials or members of Congress to enter those facilities. But such detention centers can’t fulfill their full repressive function if people don’t know anything about what goes on in them. So, we have the spectacle of a hearing in which a congresswoman asked then-DHS secretary Kristi Noem about a double amputee who “has to crawl through mold and feces and bodily fluids just to take a shower.” Knowing that this is happening to people who have almost no recourse is intended to have a chilling effect on political action.
- Concentration camps are not death camps, but people do die there. Many Americans tend to think that all German concentration camps were sites of direct extermination. In fact, the Nazis constructed six camps specifically designed for the industrialized murder of their inhabitants. But for a decade before the first death camp was even opened, prisoners had already been concentrated in thousands of “labor” camps. In fact, they were not there to be killed directly, but to be removed from society. As the National World War II Museum in New Orleans explains, “Initially, the population of these concentration camps were not usually Jews, but Communists, socialists, Roma and Sinti, Jehovah’s witnesses, gay men, and ‘asocial’ elements (alcoholics, criminals, people with mental disabilities, the poor).” Notably, like undocumented people in the U.S. today, these were groups who then received little sympathy from the larger German population. The conditions they encountered — lack of food and medical care, crowding, and unsanitary conditions — sickened and killed as many as a third of those who passed through them.
A Brief History of U.S. Concentration Camps
The Soviet gulag was not the world’s first concentration camp, although such institutions are, in fact, a relatively recent phenomenon. Human beings have long contrived to isolate groups they identify as enemies, as Americans at times did with enslaved Africans and the native peoples of this continent. Indeed, when the Cherokee nation was evicted from its lands under the 1830 Indian Removal Act and forced to travel the “Trail of Tears,” many of them were kept for some time in “emigration depots” in Alabama and Tennessee.
Almost everyone in this country has heard of Nazi Germany’s camps, but the history of the modern concentration camp really began at the end of the nineteenth century. As Andrea Pitzer recounted in a recent interview, Americans first became aware of such camps in the 1890s, when Spain instituted a policy of reconcentración in its efforts to put down a rebellion in Cuba. As has happened in ICE detention camps today, malnourished men, women, and children were shoved into holding camps there, where crowded conditions and poor sanitation led many to sicken and die. News of the horrifying conditions in Cuba led Americans to organize material aid for those being held.
The United States then dispatched the battleship Maine to accompany the ships carrying relief supplies to Cuba. When the Maine sank in Havana harbor under murky circumstances, the U.S. government had the pretext it needed to mount a military campaign against the remnants of Spanish colonial control in the Americas and the Pacific. That relatively short war ended with the U.S. in possession of most of Spain’s remaining colonies, including the island of Puerto Rico, and what would eventually become the nation of the Philippines. Almost immediately, the new American colonizers reproduced in the Philippines the kind of reconcentración camps they had supposedly gone to war to eradicate in Cuba. In another parallel with the twenty-first century, it was during the occupation of the Philippines that U.S. forces invented the form of torture we have come to call “waterboarding.”
Most Americans know about President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1942 executive order creating 10 concentration camps to hold people of Japanese descent, about two-thirds of whom were U.S. citizens mostly living in the western United States. Over 120,000 men, women, and children were interned for the duration of World War II. Many lost their homes, farms, businesses, and other property (often seized by their non-Japanese neighbors). A much smaller number of Italian and German nationals were also interned, as Germans had also been during World War I.
The Japanese camps were constructed by the Works Progress Administration (WPA), the same federal agency that provided mass employment for millions during the Great Depression under Roosevelt’s New Deal program. Few Americans know that, in addition to building roads, schools, dams, and the occasional zoo, the WPA also built the barracks and strung the barbed wire that enclosed World War II internees.
ICE’s predecessor agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), ran about 20 of those camps, primarily ones imprisoning Japanese, German, and Italian non-citizens. Three of them were built in Texas to hold people from those countries who had been deported from Latin America. (Most of them were Japanese from Peru.) Those camps were guarded by the Border Patrol, rather than the military police. In other words, ICE and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have a long history of running the U.S. version of concentration camps. They’re used to it.
American Gulag
It’s no exaggeration to say that ICE detention camps now threaten to become a central instrument of repression under the Trump administration. As many as 40 people have died in the camps since Trump returned to office in January 2025. And those are only the deaths that have been publicly acknowledged.
If Camp East Montana is the biggest ICE camp in the country, the most notorious may well be the Florida site in the Everglades that has come to be known as “Alligator Alcatraz.” Constructed hastily over just a week, according to Amnesty International, it “houses” people in horrific conditions:
“Inside, people are crammed into overcrowded cages around bunk beds with little room to move. Food is spoiled and maggot-infested. Mosquitoes swarm constantly, showers are scarce, and extreme heat and humidity make the center unbearable. There appear to be almost no reliable or confidential means for detainees to communicate with their attorneys or family members.”
That description is echoed in the testimony of people held in ICE detention camps nationwide. A complete report on the conditions at all of those camps would run to hundreds of thousands of words. Indeed, it’s hard to get a handle on the full scope of ICE’s concentration camp program, since reports on the number and size of such camps change quickly as new ones are proposed or come online. The organization Freedom for Immigrants maintains an interactive immigration detention map which identifies at least 200 separate locations where immigrants (and the occasional U.S. citizen) are detained. And the Trump administration is not done. According to the Guardian, DHS plans to spend $3.8 billion “upgrading” 24 existing warehouses to implement ICE Acting Director Todd Lyons’s dream of treating immigrants like human widgets.
And that brings us back to the point of all this. Concentration camps exist to support and expand the power of an authoritarian regime. They make everyone afraid of being treated like the current targets of the regime. Like state torture programs, concentration camps accelerate the process of dehumanizing groups of people in the public imagination. Such a process often begins by describing the target group as non-human, as “vermin” or “garbage” (as Trump has, of course, done). Ironically, the very act of placing people in inhumane conditions can amplify the public’s perception of their inhumanity. After all, would genuine human beings submit to such treatment? Would our good nation treat genuine human beings that way?
One other significant aspect of all this: the enrichment of a few corporations. President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” gave ICE upwards of $45 billion to spend on those camps, which meant that there was a lot of money to be made. Today most of them are run by two private prison companies, CoreCivic and the GEO Group. The president’s Big Beautiful Bill also allows the Department of Homeland Security to expedite that money-making by using the U.S. Navy’s Supply Systems Command program, which serves as an end-run around the usual bidding process for federal contracts.
This morning, I asked my partner whether she thought that the Trump administration could make the transition from concentration camps, where people die as a “side effect” of their internment, to actual death camps. “I think it’s possible,” she responded — and so, horribly — do I.
It’s possible, but not yet inevitable. To date, local actions have provided the most effective means of resisting the creation of the American gulag our federal government is constructing. These have included organizing to oppose siting camps in specific communities, efforts to leverage local zoning laws to stop them, and attempts to generate state-level political opposition to them. (The Washington Post had an excellent roundup of recent efforts in one county in Maryland to block such a camp.)
We know what’s at stake. We know we can dismantle the American gulag, because some of us are already doing it. It’s time for the rest of us to get to work.
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A Brief History of US Concentration Camps
There is no doubt that concentration camps are in operation on US soil once again
Jun 21, 2019
Concentration camp (noun): "a place in which large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or to await mass execution." -Oxford English Dictionary
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) has ignited a firestorm of criticism, from both the left and the right as well as the mainstream media, for calling US immigrant detention centers "concentration camps." To her credit, Ocasio-Cortez has refused to back down, citing academic experts and blasting the Trump administration for forcibly holding undocumented migrants "where they are brutalized with dehumanizing conditions and dying." She also cited history. "The US ran concentration camps before, when we rounded up Japanese people during World War II," she tweeted. "It is such a shameful history that we largely ignore it. These camps occur throughout history." Indeed they do. What follows is an overview of US civilian concentration camps through the centuries. Prisoner-of-war camps, as horrific as they have been, have been excluded due to their legal status under the Geneva Conventions, and for brevity's sake.
Trail of Tears
Half a century before President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act into law in 1830, a young Virginia governor named Thomas Jefferson embraced genocide and ethnic cleansing as solutions to what would later be called the "Indian problem." In 1780 Jefferson wrote that "if we are to wage a campaign against these Indians, the end proposed should be their extermination, or their removal beyond the lakes of the Illinois River." However, it wasn't until Jackson that "emigration depots" were introduced as an integral part of official US Indian removal policy. Tens of thousands of Cherokee, Muscogee, Seminole, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Ponca, Winnebago and other indigenous peoples were forced from their homes at gunpoint and marched to prison camps in Alabama and Tennessee. Overcrowding and a lack of sanitation led to outbreaks of measles, cholera, whooping cough, dysentery and typhus, while insufficient food and water, along with exposure to the elements, caused tremendous death and suffering.
Thousands of men, women and children died of cold, hunger and illness in camps and during death marches, including the infamous Trail of Tears, of hundreds and sometimes even a thousand miles (1,600 km). This genocidal relocation was pursued, Jackson explained, as the "benevolent policy" of the US government, and because Native Americans "have neither the intelligence, the industry, the moral habits nor the desire of improvement" required to live in peace and freedom. "Established in the midst of a... superior race, and without appreciating the causes of their inferiority... they must necessarily yield to the force of circumstances and long disappear," the man who Donald Trump has called his favorite president said in his 1833 State of the Union address.
The Long Walk
Decades later, when the Sioux and other indigenous people resisted white invasion and theft of their lands, Minnesota governor Alexander Ramsey responded with yet another call for genocide and ethnic cleansing. "The Sioux Indians of Minnesota must be exterminated or driven forever beyond the borders of the state," he declared in 1862, offering a bounty of $200 -- over $5,000 in today's money -- for the scalp of each fleeing or resisting Indian. Around 1,700 Dakota women, children and elderly were force-marched into a concentration camp built on a sacred spiritual site. Many didn't make it there. According to Mendota Dakota Tribal Chair Jim Anderson, "during that march a lot of our relatives died. They were killed by settlers; when they went through the small towns, babies were taken out of mothers arms and killed and women... were shot or bayoneted." Those who survived faced winter storms, diseases and hunger. Many did not make it through the winter.
Two years later, Civil War general and notorious Indian killer James Henry Carleton forced 10,000 Navajo people to march 300 miles (480 km) in the dead of winter from their homeland in the Four Corners region to a concentration camp at Fort Sumner, New Mexico. This followed a scorched earth campaign in which famed frontiersman Kit Carson tried to starve the life out of the Navajo, hundreds of whom died or were enslaved by white settlers and rival tribes during what became known as The Long Walk. Those who survived the death march to Fort Sumner faced starvation, lack of wood for heating and cooking during the bitterly cold winters and ravaging diseases. Daily depredations included a ban on prayers, spiritual ceremonies and songs. It is estimated that some 1,500 people died while interned at Fort Sumner, many of them infants and children.
Contraband
At about the same time, the Union Army was re-capturing freed slaves throughout the South and pressing them into hard labor in disease-ridden "contraband camps," as escaped and freed slaves were considered captured enemy property. "There is much sickness, suffering and destitution," wrote James E. Yeatman of the Western Sanitary Commission after visiting one such camp near Natchez, Mississippi in 1863. "There was not one house that I visited where death had not entered... Seventy-five had died in a single day... some had returned to their masters on account of their suffering." At one camp in Young's Point, Louisiana, Yeatman reported "frightful sickness and death," with 30-50 people dying each day from disease and starvation. One camp near Natchez, Mississippi held as many as 4,000 black refugees in the summer of 1863; by fall 2,000 had already perished, most of them children infected with smallpox and measles.
'Benevolent Assimilation' in the 'Suburbs of Hell'
With indigenous peoples no longer standing in the way of its "manifest destiny," the US set its sights on becoming a first-rate imperial power through overseas conquest and expansion. After overthrowing Hawaii's monarchy and annexing its islands, war was waged against Spain, resulting in the capture of the first US colonies in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines. When Filipinos resisted, US commanders responded with tremendous cruelty. Echoing Andrew Jackson, President William McKinley called this the "benevolent assimilation" of the Philippines into the burgeoning US empire.
As General "Hell-Roaring" Jake Smith ordered his troops to "kill everyone over 10" in Samar, future president William Howard Taft, the US colonial administrator of the archipelago, instituted a "pacification" campaign that combined the counterinsurgency tactics of torture and summary execution with deportation and imprisonment in concentration camps, or reconcentrados, that one commandant referred to as the "suburbs of hell." General J. Franklin Bell, looking forward to his new post as warden of the notorious Batangas reconcentrado, declared that "all consideration and regard for the inhabitants of this place cease from the day I become commander."
He meant it. In December 1901 Bell gave the people of Batangas two weeks to leave their homes and report to the camp; everything they left behind -- their homes, farms, livestock, food stores and tools -- was stolen or destroyed by US troops. People who refused to report to the camp were shot, as were random prisoners whenever insurgents killed an American. Conditions were beyond horrific in many reconcentrados. Hunger, disease and torture, which included waterboarding, were rampant. In some camps, as many as 20 percent of internees died. In order to save food, 1,300 Batangas prisoners were forced to dig mass graves before being gunned down 20 at a time and buried in them. "To keep them prisoners would necessitate the placing of [US] soldiers on short rations," one soldier explained. "There was nothing to do but kill them."
Concentration Camps for US Citizens
During both world wars, thousands of German nationals, German-Americans and Germans from Latin American nations were imprisoned in concentration camps across the United States. However, their race and relatively high level of assimilation saved most German-Americans from internment, and conditions were much better than they had been in previous US camps. Japanese-Americans weren't so lucky. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, under which all people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast were rounded up and imprisoned in dozens of civilian assembly centers (where they were often forced to sleep in crowded, manure-covered horse stables), relocation centers, military bases, and "citizen isolation centers" -- harsh desert prison camps where "problem inmates," including those who refused to pledge allegiance to the United States, were jailed. Conditions varied by camp, but overcrowding, lack of indoor plumbing, fuel shortages and food rationing were common. Many of the camps were located in remote, scorpion- and snake-infested deserts.
Incredibly, thousands of Japanese-Americans volunteered to fight for the country that was imprisoning them for nothing more than their ethnicity. These were some of the most highly-decorated US troops in the war. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court sided with the government in three cases brought by Japanese-Americans challenging the constitutionality of their detention, and an American public caught in the grip of racist "yellow peril" hysteria acquiesced to the blatantly unconstitutional mass imprisonment. Internment would last the duration of the war, sometimes longer, with many detainees discovering their homes, businesses and property were stolen or destroyed when they were finally released. President Ronald Reagan would formally apologize and sign off on $20,000 reparation payments to former internees in 1988.
In addition to Japanese and some Germans, a smaller number of Italians and Italian-Americans were also imprisoned during World War II. So were the indigenous Aleuts of Alaska, who were forcibly evacuated before their villages were burned to the ground to prevent any invading Japanese forces from using them. Nearly 900 Aleuts were imprisoned in abandoned factories and other derelict facilities without plumbing, electricity or toilets; decent food, potable water and warm winter clothing were in short supply. Nearly 10 percent of the detainees died in the camps. Others were enslaved and forced to hunt fur seals.
During the early years of the Cold War, Congress passed the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950 over President Harry Truman's veto, which led to the construction of six concentration camps that were meant to hold communists, peace activists, civil rights leaders and others deemed a threat in the event the government declared a state of emergency. The act was upheld by the Supreme Court during the McCarthy/Red Scare years but in the 1960s the high court ruled that provisions requiring communists to register with the government and banning them from obtaining passports or government employment were unconstitutional. The camps, which were never used, were closed by the end of the decade.
From Japan to Vietnam
In a little-known atrocity, at least 3,000 Okinawans died from malaria and other diseases in camps set up by US troops after they conquered the Japanese islands during fierce fighting in 1945. During and after the war, Okinawans' land and homes were seized at gunpoint and their houses and farms were bulldozed or burned to the ground to make way for dozens of US military bases. Some 300,000 civilians were forced into these camps; survivor Kenichiro Miyazato later recalled how "too many people died, so the bodies had to be buried in a single mass grave."
For sheer scale, no US concentration camp regime could match the Strategic Hamlet Program. In 1961 President John F. Kennedy approved the forcible relocation, often at gunpoint, of 8.5 million South Vietnamese peasants into over 7,000 fortified camps surrounded by barbed wire, minefields and armed guards. This was done to starve the growing Viet Cong insurgency of food, shelter and new recruits. However, few hearts and minds were won and many were indeed lost as US and South Vietnamese troops burned people's homes before their very eyes before marching them away from their land, and with it their deepest spiritual bonds with their revered ancestors.
War on Terrorists and Migrants
Although prisoner of war camps are not included in this survey of US concentration camps, the open-ended global war against terrorism started by the George W. Bush administration after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States has seen a blurring of lines between combatant and civilian detention. According to Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff for Bush-era secretary of state Colin Powell, most of the men and boys held at the Guantanamo Bay military prison were innocent but held for political reasons or in an attempt to glean a "mosaic" of intelligence. Innocent civilians were also held in military prisons, some of them secret, in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Many detainees were tortured and died in US custody. Some of these men have been held without charge or trial for as many as 17 years, while some deemed too innocent to charge remain imprisoned at GITMO despite being cleared for release for many years.
Now it's the migrants' turn. And despite the howling protestations of those who commit or justify the crime of tearing infants and children from their parents' arms and imprisoning them in freezing cages that Trump officials have euphemistically compared to "summer camp," there is no doubt that concentration camps are in operation on US soil once again. The Trump administration's attempt to portray child imprisonment as something much happier instantly recalls World War II propaganda films showing content Japanese-Americans benefiting from life behind barbed wire. Actor George Takei, who was interned with his family for the duration of the war, was anything but content. "I know what concentration camps are," he tweeted amid the current controversy. "I was inside two of them. In America. And yes, we are operating such camps again."
Takei noted one big difference between then and now: "At least during the internment of Japanese-Americans, I and other children were not stripped from our parents," he wrote, adding that "'at least during the internment' are words I thought I'd never utter."
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