Donald Trump and maga Republicans must not put innocent immigrants in warehouses like Nazi concentration camps

Echo opinion published in the Los Angeles Times by Paul R. Reyes, attorney.

Across the country, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (aka "evil ICE") is acquiring industrial warehouses to be converted into detention facilities for people swept up in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. 

ICE has bought at least seven facilities so far, some of which are projected to hold thousands of people. One warehouse in an Arizona town is the size of seven football fields. The new facilities are slated to be up and running by November.

These plans amount to a lose-lose proposition. Warehouses crammed full of people will not be good for local communities, nor for the detainees housed inside the facilities. Literally warehousing people is a terrible idea❗ (They are modeled after Nazi concentration camps.)

According to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, in February there were about 68,000 people in immigration detention. Three-quarters of these folks have no criminal convictions. Now the administration plans to spend $38 billion to boost detention capacity to 92,000 beds.

ICE will be opening its new detention centers in Socorro, Texas, and Social Circle, Georgia., among other sites. These facilities will likely generate more problems than benefits. 

When the federal government takes over a property, it is removed from the tax rolls, so communities will lose potential tax revenue. Large detention facilities will strain local infrastructure, including water supply, sewage and emergency services. The sites may attract protests, diverting law enforcement resources away from protecting area residents.

It’s no wonder that there has been bipartisan pushback against ICE warehouses, with some sellers backing out of deals in response to public opposition.

ICE’s website states that “detention is non-punitive,” and that it is for holding people while they await court dates or deportation. 

Yet, placing people in vast buildings designed for packages will put men, women and children in danger of disease and abuse. 

Warehouses are often drafty, poorly ventilated structures with hard floors. It’s difficult to see how they can be rapidly retrofitted into safe living spaces for detainees who, the government estimates, could be held for an average of 60 days there.

The scope of ICE’s planned detention network is staggering. The agency has already bought two warehouses with capacity for 8,500 people each; by comparison, the country’s largest federal prison holds roughly 4,000 inmates.

The U.S. has not imprisoned people on such a large scale since World War II, when camps were set up to detain Japanese citizens and Japanese Americans.

Buying so many warehouses poses the risk that such facilities could be kept filled to meet quotas in an attempt to justify the huge waste of taxpayer money — a maneuver that would waste even more money. And the multimillion-dollar prices that the government is paying for these spaces don’t include the costs of equipping the buildings with restrooms, showers, kitchens, medical facilities and recreation areas. Our government is pursuing these expensive plans while many Americans struggle to pay for groceries and healthcare.

ICE is defending its decision to ramp up detention capacity. “These will not be warehouses,” an ICE spokesperson told USA Today. “They will be very well-structured detention facilities meeting our regular detention standards.”

However, ICE has shown that it already struggles to meet its own “regular detention standards.” 

Detention centers are known for overcrowding, physical and sexual abuse, unsanitary conditions, and inadequate medical care. ICE is not taking proper care of the people it currently has in custody, and scaling up detention will only scale up its human costs.

Both of the country’s largest detention facilities, Alligator Alcatraz in Florida and Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas, are plagued with health and safety issues. In February, there were reports of cases of COVID-19, measles and TB (tuberculosis) in immigration detention. Last year 32 people died in ICE custody, making it the agency’s deadliest year in more than two decades.

If the administration’s goal is to remove as many undocumented people from the country as possible, why is it investing in a national gulag of warehouses to house them? The gulag strategy underscores that expanding ICE detention is not about public safety or going after “the worst of the worst.” This is an overreaching government forcing its unpopular agenda on the public and wasting taxpayer money simply because it was allotted a ridiculous $75 billion in last summer’s reckless spending bill. A January Reuters poll found that 58% of Americans say ICE crackdowns have gone too far. Only 39% approve of Trump’s immigration policies.

Concerned citizens must continue to fight the placement of ICE detention warehouses in their backyards. As a political standoff drags on a shutdown of some Homeland Security functions, lawmakers should exert pressure on ICE to redirect taxpayer money away from warehouse projects — and toward more productive efforts, such as improving existing detention conditions or financing immigration courts adequately so that individuals can get their day in court rather than languishing in a warehouse.

ICE’s planned detention expansion will be cruel, costly and harmful. Human beings do not belong in warehouses.

Raul A. Reyes is an immigration attorney and television commentator in New York City. X: @RaulAReyes; Instagram: @raulareyes1

Donald Trump and maga Republicans enabling right wing evilism and destroying our nation's Constitutional Democracy

What Happens When a Megalomaniac* Fails❓Donald Trump is failing, but as he circles the drain he is creating a political black hole whereby our once Constitutional Democracy can be absorbed by right wing evilism.

The historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat on Donald Trump and “autocratic backfire.” With Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos

*A person who is obsessed with their own power.

An echo opinion published in the Salt Lake Tribune, Utah, (originally in The New York Times):  A year into Donald Trump’s second term, friends who live outside of the United States continue to express shock at the news that comes from this country, often mixed with concern for my safety. 

Nevertheless, I shrug. Even those of us in the United States who oppose this administration’s illegal actions have a way of (unfortunately) normalizing them. Recently, I saw a news release in my inbox: a new filing in the legal case against the construction of the giant immigrant detention facility in Florida. I — like many other Americans, it seems — had almost forgotten about Alligator Alcatraz.

In Europe, attention has been unwavering. Journalists are writing articles and making documentaries about America building a concentration camp. On these shores, we have simply become a country that builds concentration camps. It’s only one of the changes we have absorbed in the last year.

We have become a country where people are disappeared by a paramilitary force that hunts them down in their apartments, on city streets and country roads, and even in the courts. Less than a year ago, videos of Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests would go viral and social media posts about ICE sightings would send chills down our spines. Now even the most high-profile detentions have faded from view: Who has been released❓ Who has been deported❓ Who is still missing❓ Who can keep track❓

We are now a country where a person can be summarily executed in public for protesting that paramilitary force. After an ICE agent killed Ms. Renee Good by shooting her three times at point-blank range in Minneapolis on January 7, Trump, Vice President JD Vance (who is a Roman Catholic convert) and other federal officials said the shooting was justified 🤥as an act of self-defense (the videos show otherwise) and pointed to Good’s ostensible affiliation with left-wing groups — apparently affirming that protest is now punishable by death in America.

We have become a country whose federal government deploys military and paramilitary forces in the streets of its major cities, terrorizing the residents in the guise of protecting them. A foreign observer taking stock of the United States could describe us as a nation on the brink of civil war. But we can barely keep current the list of cities where troops have been or still are in the streets: Washington, D.C.; Los Angeles; Chicago; Portland, Oregon; Memphis, Tennessee; New Orleans. The number of armed federal agents deployed to Minneapolis may now be five times the size of the city’s police force.

We are a country whose government is attacking its universities, defunding research, reversing scientific advances, assaulting museums and hollowing out cultural institutions. Few of those attacks — carried out in broad daylight, announced in executive orders, extolled in speeches and put on display in giant metal letters — meet meaningful resistance. We are making ourselves stupider.

Now, under Donald Trump's evilism, we are a nation that demonstratively tramples on international laws. 

Our military bombs a different nation every few weeks, commits murder on the high seas and removes foreign political leaders by force. Our government threatens the world, including our allies, with its imperial ambitions.💢❗

We are a country ruled by a megalomaniac whose views are openly hateful and proudly ignorant, whose avarice knows no bounds and whose claim to power is absolute, according to our Supreme Court. Foreign leaders try to appease him with flattery and curry his favor with gifts. It rarely works to temper his appetite or even catch his attention, but it’s seemingly all they can do.

To be sure, some elements of our current condition predate Trump. This country has long maintained the world’s largest carceral system, and one of the least humane in the Western world; it formed the foundation for the concentration camps. Police executions of Black people have long been a pattern. The origins of ICE and its parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, conceived as a secret police force, go back to 9/11. The culture wars date to at least the 1980s. And disregarding international law, playing the world’s heavily armed police officer, has been a long-standing bipartisan tradition — as have increasingly hostile, restrictive immigration policies. The presidency itself has been growing less transparent and more powerful for at least a couple of decades.

I am not arguing that what we have become this year is just more of the same. Few people would make that argument anymore. But, the truth is, even though we are taught to think about history as a series of definitive turning points with specific dates — wars, revolutions, assassinations, declarations of independence and decrees announcing martial law — no transformation is instant or total. 

Horrific❗This Trumpzi administration moved at breakneck speed. And still, it hasn’t broken everything, at least, not yet.

We are still a nation with a robust civil society. Lawyers fought the administration in court. People rallied against Trump’s usurpation of power and organized to protect their neighbors from ICE. But, Trump’s attacks on universities, his assault on the judiciary, and his threats against nonprofits and philanthropies have already altered the way civil society functions. The universities and the foundations aren’t what they were a year ago, and neither is the judiciary, where so much civil society work is concentrated. And, the execution of Ms. Renee Good has surely affected every potential protester’s mental calculus.

We still (sort of) have an independent media. But taking stock of how much the media landscape has changed is sobering. Even before the 2024, election, the owners of The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times curtailed the independence of their editorial pages. 

Soon after the election, ABC News and then the parent company of CBS News paid millions of dollars to settle what certainly appeared to be frivolous lawsuits filed by Trump. (He filed several more, including one against The New York Times, and another against 20 individual members of the Pulitzer Prize Board, which includes Times journalists.) Now, under new ownership, CBS is rapidly transforming itself into a Trump-friendly network.

Autocrats destroy the free press in at least two ways: by cracking down, as Trump has done through lawsuits and regulatory pressure, and by reapportioning access to information. In October, the Trump administration effectively kicked legacy media outlets out of the Pentagon, replacing them with loyal journalists and influencers. The media, like civil society, is much diminished compared with what it was a year ago.

We still have elections. But, how free and fair will the 2026, elections be❓ Trump doesn’t carry a grudge just against the election authorities of many states; he made that grudge a centerpiece of his 2024, campaign. Since he returned to office, his administration has taken a series of executive actions and filed a series of lawsuits aimed at restricting access to the polls, purging voter rolls, limiting the independence of local election authorities and generally laying the groundwork for the systematic intimidation of both voters and election officials.

States have joined this effort. Florida is cracking down on voter registration drives. Ohio and other states introduced restrictive voter ID laws. Georgia limited poll hours and banned providing food or water to people standing in line to vote. Texas gerrymandered a map that threatens to disenfranchise Black, and Latino voters and may wipe five Democratic congressional seats out of existence. Plus, the Supreme Court allowed this controversial new map to be used in the 2026, midterms. Add to this Trump’s threat to deploy the military to deal with the “enemy from within” during the elections on the one hand, and his promise to send Americans what amounts to a bribe — $2,000 checks “toward the end of the year” — and you have the prospect of elections that are far less free and a lot less fair than the last ones.

As for the next presidential election, Trump made his intentions clear: He is not planning to leave his throne. He may look for a pretext to cancel the vote. (When Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy told him that Ukraine can’t have an election during the war, Trump visibly lit up: “So you mean if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections? Oh, that’s good.”)

Trump may find a way to invalidate the vote after the election — he is laying the groundwork for such an illegal move since his first term. Even if he doesn’t, it is foolish to think that this iteration of our national nightmare will end in three years.

One term for regimes that maintain the trappings of democracy, such as legislatures, courts and elections, but use them primarily as decoration is “electoral authoritarianism.” This is what we are becoming.

It matters what we call things — what we call ourselves. It matters for wonky reasons like reading the polls: Public opinion functions differently in democratic and nondemocratic societies. But it matters more for how we think about the future. We can’t count on change being brought about by elections when we can’t count on elections. We can’t count on the freedoms and resources we enjoy today to still be available to us tomorrow.

Ask anyone who has lived in a country that became an autocracy, and they will tell you some version of a story about walls closing in on them, about space getting smaller and smaller. The space they are talking about is freedom. In Russia, mass protest used to be possible. (The first time people got prison terms for peaceful protest, in 2012, I wrote a whole book about it.) Then, mass protest became impossible, and the only option was what we called the one-person picket: a person standing alone with a sign. Then people started getting arrested for standing alone with a blank piece of paper, then for “liking” something on social media.

Russian journalists used to know that they could write freely as long as they stuck to culture and avoided politics; now a person can get arrested for performing a tune by a banned songwriter.

Of course, the United States is not Russia — or (not yet) Hungary, or Venezuela, or Israel, or any of the many other democracies that have turned or are turning themselves into autocracies. 

But, now is the time to focus on the similarities and try to learn from the ways other countries have cracked down on protest, eviscerated their electoral systems, limited their media freedom and built concentration camps. The only way to keep the space from imploding is to fill it, to prop up the walls: to claim all the room there still is for speaking, writing, publishing, protesting, voting. It’s what the people of Minnesota appear to be doing, and it’s something each of us needs to do — right now, while we still can.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.