Is the U.S. a concentration camp state?

[marmar]

Is the U.S. running a concentration camp system?
According to journalist Andrea Pitzer, the mass incarceration of civilians outside of the law is a clear sign

By Nicholas Liu
Reporter
Published January 26, 2026 6:30AM (EST)


(Salon) The immigration enforcement crackdown orchestrated by President Donald Trump and Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, has drawn parallels to some of the darkest moments in history, including the use of concentration camps. Mass arrests of thousands of immigrants, including nighttime and after-school raids, the use of children as bait, and the shooting of a civilian monitor — all of it leads back to a network of notorious prisons, from “Alligator Alcatraz” to Camp East Montana, a tent facility in the Texan desert where this month a Cuban migrant was allegedly murdered by guards. Things have escalated to such an extent that some people are no longer just debating whether this resembles a concentration camp regime, but which ones it most resembles.

In 2018, author and journalist Andrea Pitzer wrote “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps,” a book detailing the continuous history of concentration camp systems in the last century — systems she defines as designed to incarcerate civilians on the bases of race, political affiliation, ethnicity, religion or some aspect of who they are, rather than what they’ve allegedly done. Much of its workings occur outside whatever is the existing legal system in that country. In the United States, this has manifested in the form of detention without trial, abuse and even killings that have run afoul of the law, and the suppression of documentation and accountability.

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What are some characteristics that distinguish the concentration camp system in the U.S. to those in other historical contexts?

I’ve been all over the world looking at different places that had them across the 20th century, and in each case, there were very different legal systems in place, but the concentration camps are always an end run around to do mass detention without having to go to the trouble of due process or addressing people’s rights. There are people who say, “Well, [ICE] they’re a legitimate agency, and they’ve been funded by Congress.” Those things are true, but the entire way they’re operating at this point, breaking down U.S. citizens’ doors without warrants, shooting people in the streets, basically stalking children outside their schools, using them as bait to try to remove parents, are all outside normal law enforcement practices, and I will say that normal law enforcement practices in the U.S. are already really problematic.

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Can you tell me more about how integrated the concentration camp system is with the “normal,” “non-emergency” parts of the carceral state?

The carceral state is so vast already that when there is not an existing concentration camp network already in place, the natural thing is to take advantage of where you already have the appropriate facilities. And the U.S. has so many [more] facilities than just about any place else on the planet. We have so many people in jail. There’s international ideas that are common between concentration camp systems. And then, of course, they take on the local culture and specifics. The way you get to a more totalitarian style state is once you harden it so that it exists everywhere, all the time, then anybody is susceptible to it. Another thing to know about is when you look at what ICE has available to spend. It is actually more than what the Bureau of Prisons is allocated in the budget. That’s what Congress has given them. And so we have to expect to that we are looking at, if we don’t stop this, something actually larger than the U.S. prison system that we’re going to end up with in fairly short order. ................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/01/26/is-the-u-s-running-a-concentration-camp-system/

[cbabe]

1. Reservations. Red lining. Freeway barriers. It's always been so. One

change is wealthy are abandoning beach front property for higher ground where the poor live. And the poor are gentrified out.

[Johnny2X2X]

2. Mass graves

I'm going to repeat it until it starts getting talked about, but the conditions for mass killings in this country are perfect. You've got a secret police acting without regard to the law who answer only to a dictator. You've got thousands of people being disappeared to prison camps unknown. You've got a wannabe dictator who has spent years telling the people in the secret police that immigrants are animals who are the cause of all of society's problems. And you've got financial incentives that make killing and burying more profitable than deporting. These prisons are being paid based on through put, they kill people to make room for more heads and they make more money.

At this point, it would be a big surprise if there aren't mass graves somewhere right now. The only thing I question is the scope of the killings. Are they killing just a few here or there? Or are they killing a few dozen here or there? A few hundred?

If ICE is brutalizing and terrorizing women and children in public, what are they doing in private?