#concentrationcamps

I must confess I am discouraged by the alarming countercurrent in US discourse, pushing back on the idea that "Alligator Alcatraz" is an "actual" concentration camp. Some of this is fascist ideological flak, some is "enlightened centrists" whistling past the graveyard, and some of this is even coming from cynical folks on the left who know enough about the American carceral industrial complex to confidently (and to be fair, correctly) state America had "concentration camps" long before Trump. Frankly however I can think of few things less productive than entering into a semantic debate about the wholly accurate term concentration camp; I thought it might be better to just talk about the horrifying observed conditions inside Alligator Alcatraz instead, and let reasonable folks figure it out for themselves. To that end I want to share two stories about the same highly-controlled visit to Alligator Alcatraz by 3 Dem politicians, that each focus on different aspects of why I think the term fits and disputing the characterization borders on apologia. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/14/alligator-alcatraz-lawsuits Hundreds of detainees with no criminal charges sent to Trump’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ "The notorious new “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration jail in the Florida Everglades contains hundreds of detainees with no criminal records or charges, it was disclosed on Sunday, as lawmakers decried “inhumane” conditions inside after touring the facility. Donald Trump has insisted that the remote camp in swamp land populated by pythons and alligators was reserved for immigrants who were “deranged psychopaths” and “some of the most vicious people on the planet” awaiting deportation. But at least one detainee shouted out to politicians during Saturday’s visit that he was a US citizen, the Democratic Florida congressman Maxwell Frost said. And the Miami Herald obtained and published a list of 700 people held in cages showing that at least 250 had committed no offense other than a civil immigration violation." So let's briefly touch on the important revelations in this article. First of all immigration officials are purposely obscuring the numbers and identities of detainees in the camp. Florida politicians are also lying about who runs the camp, which is clearly ICE, to deny opposition (Democrat) oversight of the facility. Please keep in mind that this is in addition to the migrant cages being located in a remote area in the Florida Everglades, far away from the prying eyes of the media and making official oversight all the more difficult. Furthermore, Trump and regime officials who are justifying keeping migrants in appalling conditions that amount to a concentration camp by saying only the worst types of criminals are being held at Alligator Alcatraz, are once again lying; as I stated repeatedly in prior articles hundreds of people in the camp are simply in the US without permission, which as the article notes is a civil violation, not a criminal charge - let alone a violent one. So, can you articulate what perfectly innocent reason a fascist government might have for building a semi-secret migrant cage complex, demonizing all the brown inhabitants as violent criminals even though many of them have committed no crimes, and are actively working to hide what is actually going on inside Alligator Alcatraz from media, regulators, and opposition officials? Yeah, me neither. Now let's take a look at the conditions the 3 Dem politicians were allowed to see despite the regime's efforts to hide occupied cages from them: https://www.commondreams.org/news/alligator-alcatraz-lawmakers-visit 'This Is an Internment Camp': Lawmakers Horrified by Inhumane Conditions in 'Alligator Alcatraz' "Wasserman-Schultz described it as an "internment camp" where detainees are "essentially packed into cages." "Wall-to-wall humans. 32 detainees per cage," she said. This, she noted, is unusual for immigration facilities, like the nearby Krome detention center in Miami-Dade County, where detainees are allowed to roam freely between buildings." Whatever I think of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as a politician, it is inarguable that she's objectively describing a type of concentration camp. With dozens of brown bodies packed into small cages, inadequate access to washroom facilities and water, purposely reduced caloric counts inadequate for the preservation of healthy adults, exposure to elements and insects; what exactly would you call it? It's not an accident Wasserman-Schultz references America's dark history with the term "interment camps" but I think she's still being too generous to the Trump regime here; this is a camp of cages for cruelty concentrating migrants without any concern for their wellbeing at all - a concentration camp if you will. Folks, this is not a question of semantics. This is a concentration camp, for brown people, on US soil and word games aren't going to stop the nightmare we're speeding towards now. #Fascism #Trump #DHS #AlligatorAlcatraz #Noem #EthnicCleansing #Immigration #ConcentrationCamps

I don't think this horrifying January 20th article on Popular Information broke into the mainstream media much at the time, but given the news that the Trump regime is turbocharging its efforts to build concentration camps out of warehouses and military bases all around the country, it probably should have. In the simplest possible terms, ICE is now denying medical coverage to thousands of detainees, and regardless of the reasons why that is happening (more below) this depraved indifference to human life inside what we have already established are concentration camps, is eerily reminiscent of the process that lead the actual Nazi Reich in Germany to conduct the Holocaust. https://popular.info/p/ice-has-stopped-paying-for-detainee ICE has stopped paying for detainee medical treatment "Under the law, ICE is required to provide necessary medical care for this population. While ICE employs some of its own medical staff, it often uses third-party providers. ICE’s Buffalo Federal Detention Facility, for example, houses over 500 detainees and has no doctor or dentist on staff. ICE, however, 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.” ICE’s failure to pay its bills for months has caused some medical providers to deny services to ICE detainees, an administration source, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press, told Popular Information. In other cases, detainees have allegedly been denied essential medical care by ICE." If you read the entire story, you'll discover that this situation likely arose out of another manufactured outrage promoted by fascists both inside and outside the GOP; specifically the idea that having Veteran Affairs process medical services claims for ICE (which ICE paid them for in full) amounted to "robbing veterans to pay off" migrants. That is however not exculpatory for either ICE or the larger Trump administration, because deciding to stuff people into concentration camps and then refusing to provide them necessary, in some cases even life-saving medical care, because of a manufactured political scandal, is still deciding to lock people in concentration camps and let them fucking die. To paraphrase Toni Morrison, the reason the Nazis called what we now know as the Holocaust, the "final solution" is because they tried a bunch of other things before that to solve the "problem" of Jewish people existing inside Nazi-controlled territory. One of those "solutions" was absolutely purposely making life in the concentration and labor camps impossible to sustain - in other words, murdering Jewish people and other folks inside the camps through intentional neglect. I'm pretty sure it's not any sort of accident at all, that Trump, Miller, Noem and other assorted literal fucking white supremacist nazis in this administration and the larger Homeland Security aparatus, are copying from Hitler and Himmler's most evil playbook. #Fascism #ConcentrationCamps #ICE #Murder #Trump #GOP #KristiNoem #StephenMiller #FinalSolution #MurderByNeglect

"But wait," I hear you saying. "Even with 23 new concentration camps, and 150,000 beds, that's still not enough capacity to do either Trump's ethnic cleansing operation, or the regime's plan to start locking up its political opponents." That may be so, but would if surprise you to learn that the Trump administration is also working with the Navy to create at least six more tent city style concentration camps, and the capacity to literally sprout new ones anywhere they like? https://www.commondreams.org/news/military-contract-concentration-camps US Military Helping Trump to Build Massive Network of ‘Concentration Camps,’ Navy Contract Reveals “This $45 billion increase, published just weeks ago, converts the US into a ‘geographic region’ for expeditionary military-style detention,” he wrote. “It signals a massive, long-term escalation in the government’s capacity to pay for detention and deportation logistics. In the world of federal contracting, it is the difference between a temporary surge and a permanent infrastructure.” He says the use of the military funding mechanism is meant to disburse funds quickly, without the typical bidding war among contractors, which would typically create a period of public scrutiny. Using the Navy contract means that new projects can be created with “task orders,” which can be turned around almost immediately, when “specific dates and locations are identified” by DHS. “It means the infrastructure is currently a ‘ghost’ network that can be materialized anywhere in the US the moment a site is picked,” Manríquez wrote. Amid its push to deport 1 million people each year, the White House has said it needs to dramatically increase the scale of its detention apparatus to add more beds for those who are arrested. But Manríquez said documents suggest “this isn’t just about bed space; it’s about the rapid deployment of self-contained cities.” So much of the good dirt in this article stems from the reporting of Pablo Manríquez from Migrant Insider, who in turn is working from actual government contract information; so this is definitely real. As the report notes, the Navy currently has about 55B dollars set aside to fund this nightmare, so in addition to the six 10K person-sized, tent city concertation camps expected to be built in Louisiana, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Utah, and Kansas, they're also creating the infrastructure and capacity to build many more such camps anywhere the federal government wants to, provided they own the land. If you want to know what a Trump regime program to create a gulag complex for migrants, trans people, and anyone left of Otto von Bismarck, might look like - this is pretty much what it would look like. #Fascism #ConcentrationCamps #ICE #DHS #USNavy #Trump #EthnicCleansing #Gestapo #WhiteNationalism #Gulags

So I'm up late, watching the news on YouTube when I stumble across this short (14m) Majority Report Segment, about an anonymized ICE employee, testifying to a local news station about the horrifying and inhumane conditions inside a concentration camp located in the Baltimore George H. Fallon federal building. This "detention center" recently made national news when a whistleblower leaked video showing dozens of migrants crammed inside a single cell like sardines in conditions that well, resembled a concentration camp more than even a jail. Look, I'm not going to lie to you; some of the testimony provided is hard to hear, but this is another story that I think probably has more impact when you hear a real, actual person who was in position to know, talk about the dehumanizing and dangerous conditions inside ICE concentration camps - which as we're learning, appear to be both intentional and systemic in nature, and not the result of one or two bad facilities. As an aside, shoutout to the WUSA 9 news guys here for going super old school on this high-quality journalism. They reported that the ex-ICE employee couldn't be identified because they'd signed an NDA (uh, should we be making people who work for the migrant carceral complex sign NDAs? Is there any innocent reason for that practice?) but confirmed that they did work at the Baltimore facility in question through employment records, so this is about as credible as an anonymous whistleblower interview can possibly be. If only every news organization still cared this much about doing the job right. ICE Worker Leaks Concentration Camp Ghoulish Conditions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8fWTFnmH0w As I mentioned above, the leaker's account of the conditions inside the Baltimore concentration camp are difficult to hear, especially considering the fact that he's clearly still an extremely reactionary immigration hardliner himself. This isn't exactly a person sympathetic to the migrants he was paid to help confine. In very broad strokes the former ICE employee describes habitual and horrific overcrowding, people forced to lay in feces and urine, women forced to wear diapers due to lack of sanitary supplies, as well as physical and psychological abuse of detainees. Furthermore, much of this testimony was supported by headcount sheets, and screenshots from group chats with co-workers. This nightmare is real. I think perhaps the most important part of the leakers testimony however, is their articulation of the way running the concentration camps saw the ICE employees themselves to begin to see the confined migrants as less than human, even literal animals. As any historian worth her salt will tell you, this dehumanization is both an ever-present byproduct of locking people up en masse in concentration camps for the crime of their birth, and a necessary precondition for pogroms, genocides, and other mass extermination programs under reactionary fascist governments. After the segment featuring the ICE concentration camp whistleblower, the video then opens into a broader discussion between Sam Seder and Emma Vigeland about the growing evidence that all of this torture and mistreatment is intentional, to force kidnapped migrants to give up their legal attempts to stay in the country "voluntarily." And finally our hosts close by noting that the secrecy behind all of this dehumanization, torture, and abuse is rooted in the way DHS and ICE function as part of the specially empowered national security state that grew out of US political class reaction to 9/11 and the War on Terror. The chickens of racialized American imperial adventurism have indeed, come home to roost. #ICE #Fascism #TMR #DHS #ConcentrationCamps #Baltimore #FallonBuilding #EthnicCleansing #PoliceState #WhiteSupremacy

@AnarchoNinaAnalyzes@social.treehouse.systems Your fire the words. “There is no reforming this system.” #concentrationcamps, #iceout, #whipple

@markwyner@mas.to Let the people free. #concentrationcamps, #whipple, #iceout

@MaryAustinBooks@mstdn.social Sunday. February 1, 2026. It is good. It is another data point that people can get out of the concentration camps. Here a member of the judicial branch made the difference. Imagine everyone getting out. All of them are innocent. #iceout, #concentrationcamps

@violetmadder@kolektiva.social @inthehands@hachyderm.io Well said. “More people are starting to notice the signs and recognize concentration camps for what they are.” #concentrationcamps, #iceout