The New United States: The Return of Concentration Camps
Both the U.S. and Canada have built them before. It was awful. And now they're coming back...
Back in the 1830s, the United States government was conducting an ambitious, horrible project. They were displacing thousands of Indigenous Americans from their ancestral homes and forcing them to relocate to designated regions, well out of the way of settlers who were coming to take over their lands.
Moving people around en masse like that is no easy thing, requiring massive manpower, money, and complex logistical planning.
Getting them from point A to point B wasn’t as simple a matter as getting them to walk in a straight line. Transporting and tracking detainees over long distances is no mean feat.
To help with this task and ensure that all prisoners would be sorted and marched out in good time, the government set up what were called ‘emigration depots.’
These were facilities where the displaced Indigenous peoples would be collected into rigidly controlled camps, under guard, where they could be held until they were moved along to the next camp on the trail.
Trapped in close-knit quarters in poor conditions, many of them became quite ill, and many more perished as a result of their ill treatment and lack of proper nutrition.
These so-called emigration depots were, in effect, the first Concentration Camps built on U.S. soil. Unfortunately, they would not be the last.
During World War II, in the 1940s, the U.S. and Canada constructed multiple internment camps where Japanese, German, and Italian immigrants and their children could be taken into custody and held for the duration of the war.
This was supposedly to maintain security and prevent spying from dissident immigrants from countries the U.S. and Canada were at war with.
It also allowed the government to confiscate all of their belongings and assets, including any lands, money, and businesses they owned. Like with the emigration depots, illness spread easily in the camps, where people lived in tight quarters under guard.
Many committed suicide. Others were shot by the armed guards as they attempted to escape. Lest you think this was a very long time ago, actor, writer and activist George Takei spent part of his childhood in one of these camps.
He went on to write about his experiences, both here on Substack and in his book, They Called Us Enemy.
Both the emigration depots and the Japanese Internment Camps represent what we call Concentration Camps, though few people ever talk about them today. When you mention Concentration Camps, people instead picture the Holocaust in Germany and dismiss any such comparison.
To most people, the term Concentration Camp evokes systematic mass murder. To them, anything less than systematic mass murder means that detention facilities cannot be compared to Concentration Camps.
But in fact, that simply isn’t true.
We had Concentration Camps in the past. And unfortunately, to our deep and abiding shame, we’re now seeing them being constructed once again.
The definition of a Concentration Camp is simple: a location such as a makeshift prison where targeted demographics, political prisoners or dissidents are incarcerated for an extended period of time, usually without proper legal justification or warrant.
A facility where people who are hated by the State are held under guard, for punishment and to exploit them as essentially slave labour. There’s a reason the famous gate above Auschwitz says, “Arbeit Macht Frei.”
“Work makes you free.”
You can find examples of Concentration Camps in the form of the Japanese Internment Camps, and also in China where the government incarcerates the Uyghur people and other Muslim minorities as enemies of the state.
The dictator Augusto Pinochet constructed Concentration Camps in Chile for his political enemies, North Korea boasts many prison labour camps where political dissidents are imprisoned, forced to work and heavily abused.
You can even argue that Canada’s Residential School system could be considered a network of Concentration Camps. They were an instrument of cultural genocide, for certain, and match up with the definition.
And there are many, many other examples to dig through.
We associate Concentration Camps mainly with the horrors of the Holocaust because it’s a very visceral memory for most of us. We therefore assume that all Concentration Camps have to do with the murderous part of a genocide — but not necessarily.
While the Nazis built around a thousand camps, 23 large-scale detention centers and many hundreds of smaller outpost camps, they only built 6 purpose-built extermination camps.
These were Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka.
Extermination camps are for systematic mass murder. They were the places in Nazi-occupied Germany where humans were sent to die.
Don’t misunderstand me; people die in all kinds of Concentration Camps. Neglect, lack of medical care, food or clean water, abuse, disease, all kinds of things can kill you in a camp.
Extermination camps are different beasts. They are the places where you walk into the gas chamber and don’t come back out. It’s where people are sent to be destroyed, rendered to ash and dispersed. It’s where you send entire minority groups to be erased.
When I say that the Nazis ‘only’ built 6 of them, I don’t mean to make it sound less horrific. Quite the contrary.
I say that to explain that the regular Concentration Camps made up the bulk of the Nazi ethnic cleansing measures. Slave labour was an intrinsic and integral part of the regime, and their camps served as dumping grounds for every kind of person they hated.
Political enemies, ethnic and religious minorities, disabled people, queer people of all stripes… they all went into the camps. They were all chattel. Less than human. Allowed to starve and live in squalor, being beaten and refused medical care and even the barest hint of compassion.
There don’t need to be gas chambers to make Concentration Camps into crimes against humanity.
A crime that the United States is now actively carrying out once again.
Lately, ICE has been working on expanding their detention capacity dramatically.
I’ve seen reports of over 20 warehouses under consideration for new detainment centers since January. Enough space to hold hundreds of thousands of people.
Contrary to what the Trump administration likes to say, there aren’t that many criminal immigrants in the U.S. Not nearly enough as to need all of that space — certainly not with the detention centers that already exist.
But we know that they aren’t just after criminals, don’t we? They’re after anyone they dislike.
There’s even been talk from RFK Jr. about building ‘wellness camps’ for disabled, mentally ill people or those who suffer from addiction. Places where they can be put to work growing food for the healthy, as ‘treatment.’
The Trump regime already has Concentration Camps. They’ve been building them for a while now, and they’ve even been supplying detainees to foreign camps built by dictators around the world.
Remember CECOT in El Salvador? That’s about as clear-cut as an example can get.
And while this is now being widely reported, it’s not getting as much traction as it should. There are still people who, like we talked about earlier, dismiss any notion that these are ‘Concentration Camps’ because they don’t have gas chambers.
Yet.
It’s important to note that the extermination camps didn’t pop up until fairly late in the war, and by then the Concentration Camps had existed for years.
The Nazis turned to extermination after mass deportation had been attempted and failed.
Remember, when we compare Trump’s regime to the Nazis, we’re not comparing them to the end of the Holocaust with 6 million dead.
We’re comparing them to the Nazi rise to power. To the early years, before it got to that point.
Hopefully, if you play your cards right, you can heed the lessons of history and stop it before it gets there.
Solidarity wins.
I'm afraid we're already too late. All we can do now is stand up against all of this anyway we can and pray for those inside. Once the weather warms up, there will be more stories of detainees dying from diseases and malnutrition, or worse, beatings.