In the first year of the current federal regime, I spoke widely about What Japanese American Wartime Incarceration Tells Us About Mass Deportation Today. The favored means then of deportation by Homeland Security was the outsourcing and offshoring of American concentration camps, away from the public eye.
Now in its second year, this regime’s tactics have evolved. Here are highlights of the grim outlook I gathered from several sources and shared at Densho’s recent workshop on “Teaching Difficult Histories;” at a panel at the Association for Asian American Studies conference just concluded; and last week at the Seattle Public Library’s “One Book, One Coast” program.
Homeland Security initially ramped up for mass deportation by flying those it had seized in the dead of night to places the U.S. already owns, like Guantanamo in Cuba. Then the process evolved to flying them to industrialized prisons in places they’ve never lived before, like El Salvador. This poster artwork was for a talk at Wellesley College that nailed the mood at the time – a 21st century jetliner on the tarmac, ready to forcibly remove these Japanese Americans from 1942 from my graphic novel, clutching their suitcases and duffel bags holding only what they could carry.
But we’re not hearing much about international flights these days. That’s because in the Big Budget Bill of last summer, Congress gave DHS 38-Billion dollars to rapidly scale up its capacity for mass detention by leasing or buying up vacant industrial warehouses to bring the camps closer to cities and indoors, where no one can see what’s going on inside.
Above is an actual White House photo of an early example, showing the president in a red cap inspecting the facility in Dade County, Florida built by Ron deSantis. I refuse to use the popular nickname that refers to crocodiles and confinement. These are caged bunkhouses built inside huge industrial warehouses. This is the floor plan for just one floor.
We’ve heard the acting director of ICE famously quoted as saying he wants a deportation system that works as efficiently as Amazon Prime, but for human beings.
Each black dot in this floor plan is a person.
As Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night, A Global History of Concentration Camps, said in our recent mass call for The 50501 Network, concentration camps are a relatively modern development of the 1890s, with the invention of barbed wire and the machine gun, two features that enable the control of a large population with a small force.
She also says that if these warehouse centers are allowed to remain entrenched for three to five years, they will become permanent fixtures in the American culture and landscape and inevitably lead to death camps. Maybe not through an overt policy of extermination, but she says the system itself will do a lot of that. To date, we know of 72 such deaths in DHS detention, and counting.
Death through disease, deprivation, or indifference.
This is a map published in March by the Courier news network showing places where DHS is trying to buy or lease existing vacant warehouses across America.
- The blue dots are proposed sites.
- The black dots are where deals are pending or complete.
- The red dots are where citizens have rallied city councils to deny use of a location.
The largest facilities, described by the government as “mega-centers,” could house up to 10,000 people apiece. That’s the size of a Manzanar, or Tule Lake. Of course, that map looks very much like this one – the wartime Sites of Shame mapped by Densho.org.
The big orange dots are the ten WRA camps. That dot in Utah is for the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah, where ICE has just bought an 800-thousand-square-foot warehouse in Western Salt Lake City. The irony was not lost on editorial cartoonist Pat Bagley, who published this in the March 20th Salt Lake Tribune:
The cartoon appeared atop a blistering editorial board statement denouncing ICE as “a murderously rogue federal agency” and calling for “Utah’s historic resistance to federal overreach to come out of its Trump-era slumber and make it clear that a giant ICE prison is not something we want built in our community or operated in our name.”
This is a developing story with a frightening urgency to it.
As our friend Satsuki Ina has said, we know a concentration camp when we see one. What began with high-tech prisons overseas is evolving today to a network of 21st century American concentration camps.
By looking at what’s happened before, we can be guided by it and get an idea how we can respond today.
