Jonathan P. Baird

We are in the early stages of a vast expansion and construction of concentration camps in America. The camps are just beginning to be built. ICE is planning to spend $38 billion to convert industrial warehouses into large-scale detention centers. They acquired that gigantic sum of money from Trump’s big unbeautiful bill passed last year.

ICE plans to buy and convert sixteen buildings across the U.S. into regional processing centers which would hold 1000 to 1500 people at a time. Another eight mega-size detention centers would hold 7,000 to 10,000 people and would serve as “the primary location” for deportations. ICE already operates ten existing “turnkey” sites. They are attempting to create 92,000 beds across all facilities.

ICE’s plan is that detainees would spend an average of 3 to 7 days at the processing sites before being transported to the larger prisons where the expectation is that they would be held about 60 days before being deported. Todd Lyons, the acting head of ICE, has said he wanted to see a deportation process “like Amazon Prime but with human beings”.

America has barely begun to realize what is in the works. Before the 2024 election, Donald Trump told Time Magazine he would target 15 to 20 million people for removal from the U.S.. Even if he was exaggerating, there can be little doubt he is aiming for the largest incarceration and deportation scheme in American history.

With three years left in his presidency, the scheme is in high gear. As the leading historian of concentration camps, Andrea Pitzer, has pointed out, in the last year our federal government put more people in detention than the Nazis did in the first seven years of their rule in Germany. Dachau also started as a converted factory. That is the model our federal government is adopting.

The Trump/Stephen Miller scheme is an enormous ethnic cleansing operation. They maintain a demented focus on removing people of color from the U.S., particularly Latinos. It is their response to the so-called “great replacement”. They want to alter the demographics of the U.S. by reducing the number of people of color so they can maintain white supremacy.

There is a history with large-scale concentration camps of this nature. We can look at the Nazi or Soviet models or our own experience with Guantanamo which started as a mass immigration detention facility holding Haitian asylum seekers in the early 1990’s. These camps exist largely outside the realm of law, oversight and accountability. The government does everything it can to hide these facilities and what goes on inside.

As Pitzer has said, each warehouse is a Guantanamo. Horrifying conditions are the norm. Overcrowding, no access to medical care, lousy and inadequate amounts of food, beatings, sexual abuse and people lying in their own feces are common. They are trauma factories.

I don’t think the American public is seeing clearly what the purpose of these concentration camps is. It is not about borders or immigration. The objective is to lock down public life in the U.S. and silence any dissent. Our rulers want to expand and entrench their political power.. This is part of a totalitarian project to limit and destroy our First Amendment rights.

When you look at who has been kidnapped, attacked or killed by ICE, it includes U.S. citizens, people who are here legally and many people who have lived in the U.S. without incident for decades. The project has nothing to do with deporting “the worst of the worst”. It is an effort to create massive levels of fear in the general population and to create constitution-free zones where there is no due process. In cities occupied by ICE, many people are afraid to leave their own homes.

This project is of a piece with efforts to take Jimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert off the air, to arrest reporters, to defund Public Broadcasting and to ignore court orders. As of early 2026, ICE has ignored or violated thousands of court orders. This last week Reuters reported that hundreds of judges around the country have ruled more than 4400 times since last October that the Trump regime is detaining immigrants unlawfully.

It took the Nazis almost 10 years of demonizing the Jews before they turned their factory warehouses into extermination camps. No one knows where the Trump/Miller project will lead but we must not be naive about its evil. Like the Nazis, they dehumanize their opponents. They are aiming for one-party rule where no other party has a chance to win an election.

Pitzer says that the correct response to Dachau was not better training for the guards. There is a failure in our political leadership and in our institutions in not calling out what is going on. All of us who care about saving our democracy need to oppose the construction and creation of a network of concentration camps across America. It is our American gulag archipelago.

In New Hampshire, we have our own gulag coming to Merrimack in the live free or die state. We should not assume its construction and operation is a done deal. We should try to stop it however we can. That is something all democracy-loving people should do in every location a gulag is being created.

Dachau was the name of a town. We should all be asking: do you want your town (where ICE is creating a detention facility) to be a Dachau? We should follow the example of the people of Minneapolis who demonstrated the model for how to defeat fascism.

During the Nazi era, the German people often lamely said they did not know about the concentration camps. We do not have that excuse.