#dhs

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

Yeah, I did not stutter. While I was away, news emerged that the US government is spending potentially billions of dollars to buy up warehouses all around the country and transform them into concentration camps. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-01-29/us-spends-hundreds-of-millions-on-warehouses-for-ice-detention-centers ICE Begins Buying ‘Mega’ Warehouse Detention Centers Across US "The 23 proposed sites would range in size from 500 to 9,500 beds. If completed as planned, the larger facilities would be some of the biggest detention centers of any kind in the country. For example, the 9,500-bed facility ICE is planning for Hutchins, Texas, could fit the entire average daily jail population of Dallas County with thousands of beds to spare. In recent weeks the federal government has given tours of potential sites in more than 20 cities to contractors and shared with them the designs, including preferred layouts, for at least 15 of the sites, according to people familiar with the confidential process. Contractors — the ones who will turn these warehouses into jails — were required to send in their proposals for the first sites this week, starting with Hagerstown, according to those sources. To reach its goal of deporting 1 million people a year, the Trump administration has said it needs more than 100,000 detention beds. Currently, there are more than 73,000 people in ICE custody, a record. The new sites could give the agency an additional 76,500 beds, according to documents shared with Bloomberg News. To fill all of them, the administration would have to expand immigration arrests beyond what it is already doing, said Emma Winger, deputy legal director at the American Immigration Council. “To reach these kinds of numbers, they’d need to go out into the communities and find people who’ve been living their lives and been here a long time,” Winger said. “They’d have to dramatically increase their presence in communities across the country.” It's unfortunate that I don't have more time to go over this article with you. It's pretty rare that I find myself admiring a piece published in Bloomberg, but this is actually a really in-depth look at the way Trump's mass deportation agenda can't be established without what amounts to a nation-wide network of concentration camps, and those camps are threatening and harmful to both migrants and American citizens, regardless of their political affiliation. Like most mainstream corporate outlets covering the Trump regime's ethnic cleansing program however, they're still far too focused on this merely being a waste of astronomical amounts of taxpayer money. It certainly is, but again, I think the fact that they're building concentration camps out of former online retail distribution warehouses as part of an ethnonationalist project to reshape America according to Stephen Miller and Trump's whims would be a major crisis and a crime against humanity even if they were doing it for free. Maybe that's just me. What Bloomberg does provide the space to stress however, is that you don't build this many concentration camps unless you're planning to lock up a lot more people than the Gestpo is currently detaining; which in turn means that far from backing down in Minneapolis, the Trump regime is clearly headed towards a lot more operations just like it. Where the mainstream corporate media always falls down however, is in forgetting that concentration camps for migrants, can just as easily be concentration camps for anyone the Trump regime wants to dispose of for any reason at all. One simple review of Trump's National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) makes it pretty clear that Trump and his Gestapo have spaces in camps lined up for "terrorists" who oppose his absolute rule over a fascist America. #Fascism #Trump #StephenMiller #ICE #ConcentrationCamps #DHS #Warehouses #NSPM7 #EthnicCleansing #Gestapo #WhiteNationalism

"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

Naturally, if you're going to start sprouting up concentration camps all over the country, while mass arresting more migrants and your political opponents to fill them, you're going to need Gestapo forces and administrators all over the United States of America too; and the buildings to house them. So I guess you won't be shocked to learn that the Trump administration, DHS, and ICE are currently going about acquiring space all over the country to do just that, right? https://www.commondreams.org/news/ice-dhs-expansion-plans Amid Secretive Expansion, Leaked Docs Reveal Locations of New ICE Facilities Nationwide "Overall, Wired reported on Tuesday, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS)—which includes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)—has been aggressively expanding its footprint across the country, with “more than 150 leases and office expansions” that “have or would place new facilities in nearly every state, many of them in or just outside of the country’s largest metropolitan areas.” Quite frankly, I could have put this store in our "DHS is doing ethnic cleansing" thread, because as the article goes on to note, these new ICE facilities are being embedded directly in major metropolitan areas, and next to locations the Gestapo is already targeting - like schools, mosques, and hospitals or childcare facilities. As the author of the original Wired report noted: “The leasing plans give a clear picture of where ICE is going next in the US: Everywhere,” the report concluded." I chose to put it here in the concentration camp thread however, because I think when taken together with ICE's plans to build a nation-wide gulag system for migrants and dissenters they call "terrorists," a very clear picture of how exactly the Trumpenreich fascist dictatorship will be created is emerging. A while back I wrote an article on NIDC predicting that the massive DHS and ICE funding in Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill would facilitate the transformation of those agencies from Trump's Gestapo, into his Schutzstaffel, or SS because the militarization of these forces would allow the Swine Emperor to effectively occupy the United States militarily under a semi-permanent state of martial law. (You can find that article here, if you care: https://www.ninaillingworth.com/2025/07/28/a-schutzstaffel-of-his-own/ ) Taken together, this massive influx of funding to build concentration camps all around the country, combined with ICE's intention to embed itself directly in our urban areas nationwide, sure do look an awful lot like a permanent fascist military occupation of America to me. #ICE #DHS #Gestapo #MartialLaw #Trump #PorkReich #Schutzstaffel #MilitaryOccupation #OccupiedAmerica #GOP #USPol

@TheNovemberMan@bookstodon.com Congressional Republicans are a disgrace. Senate GOP finally propose the same bill they rejected 11 times from Democrats - and the GOP House won’t even vote on it. Instead, they leave for a damn vacation while the federal employees they betrayed are standing in bread lines and moving into their cars. I hope the executive order paying the TSA materializes so our national security employees are not left homeless. But what about the Coast Guard? What about FEMA? Those critical workers will continue to suffer. The GOP owns this pain. All because MAGA wants 0 regulations or legal checks on ICE Gestapo who are literally terrorizing the public and killing Americans in the street. MAGA is a sickness. #GOP #MAGA #TSA #FEMA #DHS #shutdown #NoRepublicansEverAgain #fascism #tyranny #gestapo #politics #workers #ICE

@touaregtweet@mastodon.social #Noem is the most corrupt leader of the #DHS that has ever existed. She is the most cruel, and honestly, she should recieve the same punishment she doles out on others, only worse. I am not a good person for saying this, but she needs a stern lesson in manners and kindness.