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Why Isn't News of Trump Building Vast Concentration Camps Being Treated as a National Emergency?
History shows us that once a nation builds a mass detention apparatus, it never remains limited to its original targets. Wake up, people.
Feb 05, 2026
As people testified before Congress this week about the brutality and violence they’d suffered at the hands of ICE, that massive paramilitary organization was shopping for giant warehouse-style facilities they can retrofit into what they euphemistically call “detention centers.”
Cable news people call them “prison camps” or “Trump prison camps,” but look in any dictionary: prisons are where people convicted of crimes are held. As Merriam-Webster notes, a prison is:
“[A]n institution for confinement of persons convicted of serious crimes.”
Jails are where people accused of crimes but still waiting for their day in court are held, as Merriam-Webster notes:
“[S]uch a place under the jurisdiction of a local government for the confinement of persons awaiting trial or those convicted of minor crimes.”
But what do you call a place where people who’ve committed no criminal offense (immigration violations are civil, not criminal, infractions)? The fine dictionary people at Merriam-Webster note the proper term is “concentration camp”:
“[A] place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard.”
The British originated the term “concentration camp” to describe facilities where “rebel” or “undesirable” civilians were held in South Africa during the Second Anglo‑Boer War (1899–1902) to control and punish a rebellious population.
They were facilities where the “bad elements of society” were “concentrated” into one location so they could be easily controlled and would lose access to society and thus could not spread their messages of resistance against the British Empire.
Future generations of Americans—our children and grandchildren—won’t ask us whether ICE followed civil detention statutes: they’ll want to know why we allowed concentration camps to exist in America at all.
The Germans adopted the term in 1933 when Hitler took power and created his first camp for communists, socialists, union leaders, and, by the end of the year, Hitler’s political opponents. They Germanized the phrase into “Konzentrationslager” and referred to the process of their incarceration as “protective custody.”
The first camp was built at Dachau just weeks after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, and by the end of the year there were around 70 of them operating across the country.
When Louise and I lived in Germany in 1986/87, we visited Dachau with our three children. The crematoriums shocked our kids, but even more so because this was simply a “detention facility” and not one of Hitler’s death camps (which were all located outside Germany to ensure deniability).
The ovens at Dachau were for those who had been worked to death or killed by cholera or other disease, much like the 35+ people who’ve recently died in ICE’s concentration camps.
When American friends would visit us and we’d take them to Dachau (we lived just an hour up the road) they’d invariably be surprised when I told them that by the time of the war there were over 500 substantial camps and an additional few hundred very small ones all over the country.
“How could the people not know what was going on?” they’d ask.
The answer was simple: the people did know. These were where the “undesirables,” the “criminal troublemakers,” and the “aliens” were held, and were broadly supported by the German people. (It wasn’t until 1938, following Kristallnacht, that the Nazis began systematically arresting and imprisoning non-political Jews, first at Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.)
By the end of his first year, Hitler had around 50,000 people held in his roughly 70 concentration camps, facilities that were often improvised in factories, prisons, castles, and other buildings.
By comparison, today ICE is holding over 70,000 people in 225 concentration camps across America, and Trump, Homan, Miller, and Noem hope to more than double both numbers in the coming months.
In Tennessee, The Guardian reports that Miller has been coordinating with Republican leaders to create legislation that would turn every local cop, teacher, social worker, and helper in the state into an official agent of ICE and criminalize efforts by cities to refuse cooperation. It also makes it a felony crime to identify any of ICE’s masked agents or disclose conditions within the concentration camps to the public.
Germans didn’t have the benefit of warnings from a fascist history they could look back on; much of what Hitler did took them by surprise, as I’ve noted in previous articles.
In 2026 America, however, operating with the benefit of historical hindsight, entire communities are rebelling at Trump’s effort to beat Germany’s 1933-1934 prisoner numbers.
In city after city, Americans are organizing to deprive ICE of their coveted spaces, putting pressure on companies not to sell and on cities and counties not to permit any more concentration camps.
Because immigration violations are labeled “civil,” people in ICE concentration camps are stripped of many of the normal constitutional protections that apply to people in criminal incarceration. This has created a legal black hole that ICE and the Trump regime exploit, where indefinite imprisonment, abuse, and medical neglect flourish with little to no oversight or accountability.
Human rights organizations like the ACLU describe pervasive patterns of abuse in ICE detention: hazardous living conditions, chronic medical neglect, sexual assault, retaliation for grievances, and extensive use of solitary confinement.
Detainees who have committed no crime other than being in the United States without documentation report being shackled for long periods, packed into freezing, overcrowded cells under constant fluorescent light, and denied hygiene and timely care. Meanwhile, GOP-aligned private prison companies are making billions off the program.
Inspections and oversight are inconsistent: one recent investigation found that as detentions and deaths surged in 2025, formal inspections of facilities actually dropped by over a third. ICE regularly refuses to allow attorneys, family members, and even members of Congress to access their concentration camps; the issue is now being litigated through federal courts.
History shows us that once a nation builds a mass detention apparatus, it never remains limited to its original targets. Future generations of Americans—our children and grandchildren—won’t ask us whether ICE followed civil detention statutes: they’ll want to know why we allowed concentration camps to exist in America at all.
Germany’s concentration camps didn’t start as instruments of mass murder, and neither have ours; both started as facilities for people the government’s leader said were a problem. And that’s exactly what ICE is building now.
History isn’t whispering its warning: it’s shouting.
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The Actual Gavin Newsom Is Much Worse Than You Think
If you want a more progressive Democratic Party, the California governor ain't it.
Feb 05, 2026
California Governor Gavin Newsom has made headlines this winter by vowing to defeat a proposal for a one-time 5 percent tax on billionaires in the state. Many national polls now rank him as the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2028, but aligning with the ultra-wealthy is not auspicious for wooing the party’s voters. Last year, Reuters/Ipsos pollsters reported that a whopping 86 percent of Democrats said “changing the federal tax code so wealthy Americans and large corporations pay more in taxes should be a priority.”
Newsom has drawn widespread praise for waging an aggressive war of words against President Trump. But few people outside of California know much about the governor’s actual record. Many Democratic voters will be turned off to learn that his fervent opposition to a billionaire tax is part of an overall political approach that has trended more and more corporate-friendly.
A year ago, Newsom sent about 100 leaders of California-based companies a prepaid cell phone “programmed with Newsom’s digits and accompanied by notes from the governor himself,” Politico reported. One note to the CEO of a big tech corporation said, “If you ever need anything, I’m a phone call away.” While pandering to business elites, Newsom has slashed budgets to assist the poor and near-poor with healthcare, housing and food—in a state where 7 million live under the official poverty line and child poverty rates are the highest in the nation.
The latest Newsom budget, released last month, continues his trajectory away from social compassion. “The governor’s 2026-27 spending plan balances the budget by dodging the harsh realities of the Republican megabill, H.R. 1, and maintains state cuts to vital public supports, like Medi-Cal, enacted as part of the current-year budget,” the California Budget & Policy Center pointed out. “Governor Newsom’s reluctance to propose meaningful revenue solutions to help blunt the harm of federal cuts undermines his posture to counter the Trump administration.” The statement said that the proposed budget “will leave many Californians without food assistance and healthcare coverage.”
So far, key facts about Newsom’s policy priorities have scarcely gone beyond California’s borders. “National media have focused on Newsom as a personality and potential White House candidate and have almost completely ignored what he has and has not done as a governor,” said columnist Dan Walters, whose five decades covering California politics included 33 years at The Sacramento Bee. “It's a perpetual failing of national political media to be more interested in image and gamesmanship rather than actual actions, the sizzle rather than the steak, and Newsom is very adept at exploiting that tendency.”
Walters told me that Newsom “has generally avoided direct conflicts with his fellow millionaires, such as discouraging tax increases, and has danced between corporations and labor unions on bread-and-butter issues such as minimum wages. He's also quietly moved away from environmental issues, most notably shifting from condemnation of the oil industry for price gouging and pollution to encouraging the industry to increase production and keep refineries operating.”
Newsom angered climate activists last fall by signing his bill to open up thousands of new oil wells. Noting that “Newsom just championed a plan to dramatically expand oil drilling in California,” the Oil and Gas Action Network said that he “can’t claim climate leadership while giving Big Oil what it wants.” Third Act, founded by Bill McKibben, responded by denouncing “Newsom’s Big Oil backslide” and accused the governor of “backtracking on key climate and community health commitments.”
Great efforts to curb the ubiquitous toxic impacts of PFAS “forever chemicals” hit a wall in October when Newsom vetoed legislation to ban them in such consumer items as cookware, dental floss, and cleaning products. “This bill had huge support from both within the state and beyond, and yet, apparently, the governor was interested only in the one sector opposing it—the cookware industry,” said Clean Water Action policy director Andria Ventura. The organization put the veto in context, observing that “the governor seems determined to move away from his pro-environment past.”
As with the environment, so with workers’ rights. In 2023, Newsom vetoed a bill to provide unemployment compensation to workers on strike. In 2024, he vetoed a bill to help protect farmworkers from violations of heat safety regulations, while temperatures in California’s agricultural fields spike above 110 degrees.
The latest Gallup polling of the party’s rank-and-file indicates a wide ideological gap between Newsom and the party’s base. Fifty-nine percent of Democrats described themselves as “liberal” or “very liberal,” while 32 percent said “moderate,” and 8 percent “conservative” or “very conservative.” And the trendline is striking: Democrats’ self-identification as liberal or very liberal has doubled in the last two decades.
It might be tempting to believe that Newsom’s services to corporatism and the rich are less important than the possibility that he would be an adept Democratic nominee to defeat the GOP ticket in 2028. But pursuit of such “moderate” politics was harmful to Democratic turnout in 2016 and 2024. Newsom’s current political attitude is similar to the timeworn approach that undermined the candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.
Newsom says he’s eager to pitch a big tent for the Democratic Party, declaring that he welcomes the likes of former US senator Joe Manchin as well as New York’s socialist mayor Zohran Mamdani in the fold. “I want it to be the Manchin to Mamdani party,” Newsom said in November. “I want it to be inclusive.” He did not mention that during the Biden presidency, while in the Senate, Manchin wrecked prospects for transformational Build Back Better legislation and other measures that would have benefited tens of millions of Americans.
It’s telling that Newsom and former president Bill Clinton, a longtime backer, have voiced profuse mutual admiration. Interviewed after he came off the stage with the former president in a joint appearance at a Clinton Global Initiative event a few months ago, Newsom praised “the ability to reach across the aisle.” That formula is a throwback to what propelled Clinton into the presidency with a pledge to find common ground, only to toss the working class overboard from the Oval Office. The disastrous results—made possible by Clinton’s reaching “across the aisle”—included passage of the NAFTA trade pact, the “welfare reform” law that harshly undermined poor women with children, the mass-incarceration-boosting crime bill and the media monopoly-enabling Telecommunications Act.
Launching his podcast “This Is Gavin Newsom” a year ago, the host began warmly showcasing extremist bigots by featuring Charlie Kirk as his first guest. When Kirk was assassinated in September, Newsom lavished praise on him, tweeting: “The best way to honor Charlie’s memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse.” From the governor’s office, Newsom issued a statement that explained: “I knew Charlie, and I admired his passion and commitment to debate.”
The praise raises the question: how far right would someone need to be before no longer meriting Newsom’s admiration for “passion”? Clearly, Kirk wasn’t far right enough to be disqualified. He only said things like asserting that “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America,” proclaiming “we made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s” and castigating Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee and others as affirmative-action hires: “You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”
Newsom’s show has continued to give a friendly platform to such extreme right-wingers as Steve Bannon and Ben Shapiro. In effect, Newsom is engaged in a podcast form of triangulation—by turns validating and disputing his guests’ attacks on progressivism.
On no issue is Newsom more out of step with the Democratic electorate than US support for Israel. Last summer, a Quinnipiac survey found that 77 percent of Democrats believed Israel was guilty of genocide in Gaza—but last month Newsom said the opposite, declaring “I don’t agree with that notion.” Like most Democratic officeholders who combine their denial of genocide with support for the nonstop weapons flow to Israel, Newsom lays blame narrowly on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, saying that he is “crystal clear about my love for Israel and condemnation of Bibi.” The same Quinnipiac poll found that fully three-quarters of Democrats were opposed to sending further military aid to Israel, a position that Newsom refuses to take at the same time that he dodges questions about the right-leaning Israel lobby group AIPAC.
Newsom can expect a direct challenge from another California Democrat likely to be on debate stages when the party’s presidential campaigns get underway next year. Congressman Ro Khanna said of Newsom in January: “He doesn’t want to offend the AIPAC donors. He doesn’t want to offend the donor class. And that explains his position on going to give Netanyahu a blank check right after October 7, on not being willing to ever call out the funding we were giving, and not willing to call out that clearly it was a genocide, and then not willing to challenge the billionaire class on tax policy.”
For anyone who wants a truly progressive Democratic Party, Gavin Newsom is bad news.
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Body Cameras for Federal Agents Is Not the Solution You May Think It Is
Research suggests that the public should lower their expectations of body cameras, including assumptions that equipping federal officers with the devices will somehow effect change.
Feb 05, 2026
The US federal government has announced that it will “immediately” equip all its Homeland Security officers in Minneapolis with body-worn cameras, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, with plans to outfit all federal officers nationwide.
The announcement follows criticisms in response to ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers who killed two protesters last month in Minneapolis. The initiative to require federal law enforcement officers to wear body cameras has bipartisan support and is popular among the public.
But will body cameras effect change?
Research on the efficacy of body cameras is inconsistent. In 2018, a Bureau of Justice Statistics report outlined the primary reasons cited for law enforcement use of body cameras. These included increasing the quality of evidence, decreasing civilian complaints, reducing agency liability, and enhancing officer safety. However, according to a January 2022 National Institute of Justice report, the “research does not necessarily support the effectiveness of body-worn cameras in achieving those desired outcomes. A comprehensive review of 70 studies of body-worn cameras showed no consistent or no statistically significant effects.” Nevertheless, in May 2022 then-President Joe Biden signed an executive order expanding body cameras to federal law enforcement officers.
Will federal body camera footage be manipulated by AI for release? We can no longer be certain.
Why would President Biden sign an order to expand an otherwise inconsistent technology to law enforcement when acknowledged as such by his own government agency? The answer is because the promise of body cameras is based mostly on popular beliefs and assumptions even when the evidence does not support that the devices would deliver the results the public desired.
In our new book Police Body-Worn Cameras: Media and the New Discourse of Police Reform, we trace the broader shift in the rationale for body camera adoption to concerns over transparency and accountability. Indeed, “transparency” was cited as the primary reason in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announcement to equip its officers with body cameras.
Transparency is characterized by visibility. However, the release of body camera footage or agreement over what footage necessarily shows can never be assumed.
In October 2025, a judge in Chicago ordered all ICE agents in the city to wear body cameras after reviewing clips of submitted footage from officers who had already been equipped with the devices. In December, in response to a records request of immigration operations in Chicago, ICE reported that it had no body camera footage despite that it had earlier submitted footage. It remains uncertain if the footage will ever be released.
DHS has indicated it has body camera footage of CBP shooting and killing Alex Pretti last month in Minneapolis. There are widespread calls to release the footage including by politicians like the mayor of Kansas City who said, “Video is only great if we can see it.”
If seeing were only that simple.
Video footage, whether from body cameras or another source, is never some sort of objective arbiter of truth as it is routinely asserted. Instead, narratives are presented that explain footage to viewers, whether it be to the public or in a courtroom to a jury. Research has shown that narratives presented as textual descriptions have had an influence in how audiences judge what is depicted in video recordings, including body camera footage.
The 1991 bystander recording of police beating Black motorist Rodney King in Los Angeles is a standout example of narrative influence. At the time, the recording was considered the most extraordinary recording of police brutality to be shown on television. The footage, which many people believed very clearly showed police beating an unarmed man on the ground, was used as key evidence at the trial that resulted in the acquittal of four officers because of the ability of the defense to offer a counternarrative of the police beating.
The recent use of artificial intelligence has only further complicated such matters.
Last month, the White House released a digitally manipulated image of an ICE arrest. The image was different from other released AI materials in its presumably intended realism, which casts doubt on visual evidence released from the government moving forward. Will federal body camera footage be manipulated by AI for release? We can no longer be certain.
As if all of this wasn’t already enough, research examining online user assessments of video as possible evidence of a crime has found that people mostly interpret what they see as it best corresponds to their worldview. And alternative views are unlikely to sway them. The use of AI has only exacerbated this process, as online users across the political spectrum have manipulated images of bystander recordings of Alex Pretti’s killing to correspond to contradictory politically inspired narratives about his death. How then might body camera footage of Pretti’s killing fit into the discordant political discourse, assuming the video is released?
What this all suggests is that the public should lower their expectations of body cameras, including assumptions that equipping federal officers with the devices will somehow effect change. Moving forward clear policies governing the use of body cameras, like when cameras should be activated and a timeline for release, are important next steps. Policies prohibiting the official manipulation of any evidence including body camera footage should also be enacted.
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Senators Demand Answers on Equifax Plan to 'Profiteer' Off GOP's Medicaid Work Requirements
"Corporate consultants and vendors are getting to make a killing off of Medicaid work requirements' administration machinery while our patients will lose healthcare and suffer," said one advocate.
Feb 05, 2026
Three of the US Senate's top critics of corporate greed and anticompetitive behavior are investigating a scheme by credit report firm Equifax that they say will allow the company to profit from Republican policies that are set to rip away healthcare coverage and food assistance from millions of Americans.
Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) wrote to Equifax CEO Mark Begor on Tuesday with several questions about the company's anticipated profits from provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA) that imposed work requirements on recipients of Medicaid and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.
Begor told investors last summer that the policy presented a "massive" business opportunity for Equifax, as a product owned by the company called the Work Number is used by many states to instantly verify the wages and work hours of Medicaid applicants.
At least 99 million workers across the country are covered by Equifax's database, which the company has filled with data through exclusive contracts with employers and payroll firms. Equifax has frequently imposed steep price hikes on the product and has been accused of having a monopoly on providing income data to state agencies.
North Carolina's Medicaid program was hit with a 24% price increase in 2022 and a 36% hike in 2024.
"We have very little leverage and recourse to back out," state Medicaid director Jay Ludlam told the New York Times in November.
Luke Farrell, a former employee of the US Digital Service under the Biden administration, told the Times that Equifax owns "a product that has become a core piece of the safety net. I’ve never seen another vendor do such price hikes across public benefits.”
With the new work requirements set to go into effect in January 2027, states will be required to check the database more frequently.
The OBBBA's $1 trillion in cuts to SNAP and Medicaid are projected to cause "over 5 million people to lose their health insurance and over 3 million people to pay higher grocery prices within the next few years," wrote the senators this week.
"But for Equifax, these new threats to Americans’ food assistance and health insurance coverage 'represent the chance to become a lot richer,'" they wrote, quoting the Times' article from November about Equifax's plan to price-gouge states.
The senators continued:
Because Equifax is already dominant in this market, the law’s new red tape requirements allow the company to consolidate power even further, using extractive contracts to price-gouge states, squeeze competitors, and drive up profits. In fact, Equifax is laying the groundwork to cash in by proactively building out a platform called “TotalVerify,” which is specifically marketed as a tool to help “Prepare Your Agency For H.R.1.” Equifax also pitched the platform as a “single-source” for states and government agencies to be able to verify employment, income, incarceration status, consumer address, and phone number history and claims to “help state and government agencies manage the complexities of SNAP and Medicaid programs.” Given that Equifax’s tight grip on this business has “border[ed] on a monopoly,” Equifax stands to gain even more as OBBBA’s red-tape requirements take effect nationwide.
The lawmakers noted that judging from history, the work requirements are unlikely to "be effective at anything but increasing red tape," as the vast majority of Medicaid and SNAP recipients who are eligible to work already do and states have already run "failed" experiments with Medicaid work requirements.
In 2018, Arkansas' program resulted in 18,000 low-income people losing coverage in under a year, with people who had no home internet access and those who qualified for an exemption from the work requirement most likely to lose their benefits.
"Now, President Trump and Republicans in Congress have expanded this policy in a move that will ensure more Americans get tangled up in red tape and lose essential healthcare coverage and food assistance as a result," wrote Warren, Wyden, and Sanders. "That these requirements could allow Equifax to profiteer off of this ‘solution’ [makes] them even more egregious."
Adam Gaffney, former president of Physicians for a National Health Program, summarized the senators' objections to Equifax's price-gouging practices: "Corporate consultants and vendors are getting to make a killing off of Medicaid work requirements' administration machinery while our patients will lose healthcare and suffer. Meanwhile taxpayers will fund the bureaucratic lard."
The senators demanded to know Equifax's per-query costs for each state contract for the Work Number, the number of OBBBA-related contracts it expects to bid for in 2026 and 2027, the company's lobbying expenditures over the past five years for federal, state, and local governments, and whether Equifax plans to retain a clause in its contracts that allows it the “categorical right” to change prices with 30 days’ notice.
"Equifax’s long history of anti-competitive behavior," said the senators, "raises serious concerns about the company’s potential moves to price gouge states and taxpayers."
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