For many Americans, the word “concentration camp” evokes another country, a time long ago and a facility operating in the dark of night, away from the prying eyes of an outraged public. But a new concentration camp opened in Florida’s Everglades this week, and it’s the opposite of a secret.
President Donald Trump toured the facility with reporters in tow. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and other officials posed with him, laughing in front of cages meant for human beings. The Florida Republican Party launched merchandise and gave the camp a nickname, “Alligator Alcatraz,” that the state made official.
Hitler’s camps aren’t the lone precedent for the Everglades project. But even the extreme case of Germany offers disturbing parallels.
But it’s not just a new prison, Alcatraz or otherwise. I visited four continents to write a global history of concentration camps. This facility’s purpose fits the classic model: mass civilian detention without real trials targeting vulnerable groups for political gain based on ethnicity, race, religion or political affiliation rather than for crimes committed. And its existence points to serious dangers ahead for the country.
This camp stands apart from other immigration detention facilities for a few reasons. First, its projected capacity of 5,000 beds is several times the average detention center (though Immigration and Customs Enforcement is looking at even larger facilities). Its improvised tents and chain-link cages put detainees on display reminiscent of El Salvador’s CECOT prison. And it is billed as a “temporary” camp, with the theory being that the administration can seamlessly process massive numbers of detainees with rapid-fire judicial hearings by National Guard members-turned-immigration judges. In practice, this is unlikely to go smoothly.
While concentration camps have historical roots in earlier forms of mass detention, they themselves are modern. The patenting and mass production of barbed wire and automatic weapons over a century ago made it possible to detain large groups with a small guard force for the first time.
At the turn of the twentieth century, imperial powers such as Spain and Britain set up concentration camps in colonial regions. The camps had staggering death tolls that made early systems unpopular. But World War I led to a revival of the concept, with nearly a million people detained globally. The wartime camps paved the way for similar systems after the conflict ended, such asthe Soviet Gulag and the detention of homeless people in multiple countries.
Those were all in place before the Nazis came to power, so Hitler’s camps aren’t the lone precedent for the Everglades project. But even the extreme case of Germany offers disturbing parallels — and not just because the Nazis also allowed reporters to tour their camps.
On Tuesday, Noem noted that the Everglades camp was meant to frighten immigrants into self-deporting.
Some defenders of current immigration policy say that arbitrary detention or abuse of foreigners isn’t like what Hitler did to citizens. Years before he came to power, however, Hitler wrote about his goal of stripping German Jews of legal protections so that they would have no more rights than aliens and could be put into camps.
In 1935, at Hitler’s behest, the German Reichstag passed the Nuremberg Laws, a focus of which was to identify German Jews and revoke their citizenship, with countless other regulations restricting them. Dreaming of a pure Aryan nation, the Nazis initially imagined their targets would self-deport. Once the myth of self-deportation collapsed, they turned to more punitive measures.
On Tuesday, Noem similarly noted that the Everglades camp was meant to frighten immigrants into self-deporting. “If you don’t,” she said, “you may end up here.”
What will happen in the U.S. if the pressure to self-deport fails, as it did nearly a century ago? We’re already seeing aggressive moves against people living in the U.S. legally. The administration is still trying to strip legal status from half a million Haitians who were allowed in before Trump’s return. The DOJ is prioritizing cases involving the possible revocation of citizenship, working to undo birthright citizenship itself and targeting the citizenship of political enemies. The administration wants to define who can be an American in ways that appear profoundly racist, and it seems immigrants are the most politically advantageous large population to target.
And there are parallels in U.S. history for these camps as well. Centuries of Indian removal and genocide set the stage for abuse of those not counted as citizens. Lawmakers and courts wielded the weight of law or executive authority to prop up slavery, allowing cross-border trafficking and detention of humans denied rights. Concentration camps holding Japanese Americans during World War II showed the U.S. government was eminently capable of unjust detention of citizens and noncitizens alike. And Trump himself has hailed “Operation Wetback,” a lethal, abuse-filled deportation operation carried out by Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration that included detention camps.
Today in Florida, the U.S. is expanding on its own concentration camp legacy. We’re seeing other clues that police-state tactics are intensifying in America. Masked agents in unmarked cars or without warrants who refuse to show IDs are sweeping people off the street. Some who vanish reemerge; others have been effectively disappeared.
Meanwhile, the budget reconciliation bill would likely make Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in the words of the American Immigration Council, the “the largest investment in detention and deportation in U.S. history.” This expansion risks quickly making ICE the center of gravity for state overreach.
We’re still in the early stages of this arc, but Americans aren’t helpless before the administration and its allies.
In the Everglades Tuesday, Trump announced his interest in a multistate network of sites like the one he came to see. Florida proposed the facility as a temporary camp for deportations, but the historical term for this kind of camp is a transit camp, and they’re concentration camps, too. The U.S. also has already sent detainees to El Salvador, Panama, Rwanda and Libya, among other nations, and is in talks with dozens more countries. We’re watching the imposition of a global concentration camp network.
When people think of concentration camps, they think of more than a million people murdered at Auschwitz. But extermination camps appeared only after nearly a decade of Nazi rule and several evolutions in wartime detention.
We’re still in the early stages of this arc, but Americans aren’t helpless before the administration and its allies. Members of the Seminole Tribe of Florida are already opposing and protesting the Everglades concentration camp as a threat to sacred lands. Five Democratic state lawmakers tried to visit the camp Thursday, but were turned away.
In the face of ICE raids, many communities in Los Angeles cancelled Fourth of July celebrations. But activists continued their protests, including an installation of the disappeared outside City Hall.
The history of this kind of detention underlines that it would be a mistake to think the current cruelties are the endpoint. America is likely just getting started.