Japanese Americans gather at Santa Anita Assembly Center in 1942 shortly before being shipped off to one of the 10 internment camps set up by the U.S. government in World War II.
Is there a Trump Internment Camp in your future? In addition to scooping immigrants up off the streets and disappearing them, will the Trump administration start arresting and incarcerating its domestic political opponents? Will Trump Inc. partner up with Geo Group, the nation’s largest private prison company, that gave a million dollars to a super PAC supporting Trump’s campaign? Imagine the manosphere humming with snatch-and-grab job opportunities for the now-pardoned January 6 insurrectionists?
Consider some recent developments: The abduction by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents of Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident who was clearly detained because of his pro-Palestinian activism at Columbia University; a video of masked ICE agents — essentially secret police — near Boston stopping and arresting Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national and PhD student at Tufts University, who is in the U.S. on a valid visa; the deportation of 250 purported Venezuelan gang members to a notorious gulag in El Salvador with no due process, in defiance of a federal court order that the plane deporting them turn around and come back to America.
Internment/Concentration Camps
The terms “internment camps” and “concentration camps” are sometimes used interchangeably, but they have had distinct historical and functional differences. Internment Camps have been primarily used to detain specific groups considered security risks during wartime, and political opponents. During World War II, more than 100,000 people of Japanese descent living on the West Coast were rooted from their homes and forcibly relocated to 10 hastily constructed camps. The interned lost their property, were isolated and suffered major deprivations.
Concentration Camps — also known as Death Camps — have generally been associated with mass detention, harsh conditions, forced labor, and extermination. Historically, they have been used to imprison perceived enemies of the state, political opponents, ethnic groups, or other marginalized populations.
The historian Roger Daniels, author of Words Do Matter: A Note on Inappropriate Terminology and the Incarceration of Japanese Americans, concluded that “scholars should abandon the term” Japanese internment and use the term concentration camp.
Setting the stage
During the 2024 presidential campaign Trump said that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of the country” — rhetoric eerily reminiscent from Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. On the campaign trail, vice-presidential candidate JD Vance escalated immigrant-bashing rhetoric with claims that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets.
In a Truth Social post, Trump said he was looking “forward to watching the sick terrorist thugs get 20 year jail sentences for what they are doing to Elon Musk and Tesla.” He added that “Perhaps they would serve them in the prisons of El Salvador, which have become so recently famous for such lovely conditions.”
As people are being dragged off the streets across America, it is time to consider the revival of internment camps in this country not only for immigrants, but for Trump’s political opponents as well.
The U.S. used internment camps during World War II, and more recently for alleged terrorists at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba. Justification for internment in these camps vary from military necessity, to national security, but the underlying function remains consistent: isolating and punishing perceived enemies of the state.
Alternet’s Alex Henderson recently reported on the possible reintroduction of detention camps to sequester opponents of Donald Trump. “Some fear that the U.S. could emulate the ‘illiberal democracy’ model of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in Hungary, where technically, there are still voting rights, but checks and balances are so eroded that the Fidesz Party is entrenched and dominant,” Henderson wrote. “Others fear an even more disturbing scenario in which the U.S. embraces an outright military dictatorship like Chile under Gen. Augusto Pinochet or Spain under Gen. Francisco Franco, a.k.a. ‘El Generalísimo’.”
Journalist Christopher Mathias’ forthcoming book is called To Catch a Fascist. In a recent MSNBC op-ed, he noted that, “over the last eight years as a reporter covering the far right, … neo-Nazi talking points, especially around immigration, [has] enter[ed] the mainstream discourse with horrifying, accelerating speed.”
Mathias noted that in a conversation with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, “JD Vance asserted that Germany is suffering an ‘invasion’ of people who are ‘totally culturally incompatible’ with ‘western civilization.’ This purported ‘invasion,’ Vance said, will lead to a ‘civilizational suicide’ if it’s not stopped. It barely triggers a 24-hour news cycle anymore when the vice president and …Trump, use the same language as fascist mass murderers.”
Mathias interviewed Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, who told him that “Concentration camp regimes always need a group they can turn into outsiders by making its members seem so dangerous that the government needs to remove those people from society. You can’t typically do that without years — years! — of rhetoric demonizing them. Even with the Nazis, it took more than five years from Hitler becoming chancellor of Germany until the mass roundup of Jews as a group began with Kristallnacht in November 1938.”
Pitzer’s One Long Night, which looks at concentration camps from their origins in the late 19th century to modern-day detention facilities. Historically, these camps, across different countries and political ideologies, have been used as tools of oppression, control, and genocide. Concentration camps were used during the Spanish-Cuban war, by the British during the Boer War, Nazi concentration camps, Soviet gulags.
Terrorizing the opposition
Mathias noted that “In Myanmar in 2015, the regime allowed journalists to visit the camps where Rohingya Muslims were being detained. In Augusto Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s, photographers were allowed into the National Stadium, where people were being detained and tortured. ‘Even the Nazis allowed New York Times and Times of London reporters into their early concentration camps in 1933,’ Pitzer told him. ‘They wanted their targets to be terrified, but they were proud of what they were doing.’”
“The arc of concentration camps is twofold,” Pitzer told Mathias. “First, there’s supposedly some very bad group so dangerous that the government says they have to be removed from society. Second, the definition of who’s dangerous expands, often coming to include political opponents and rivals.
“If the government can arrest civilians with no criminal record and put them on planes out of the country without accounting for who they are or for any actual legal process — as has been happening in recent weeks — what would stop them from deporting whomever they like?” Pitzer continued. “Or from saying they had deported detainees while actually disappearing people to black sites internally? If the courts can’t enforce due process and find out who’s being detained, where they are now and what’s happening to them, then we’re all vulnerable.”
Given the Trump Administration’s predilection for demonizing political opponents and the mainstream media, defying judicial orders, and trampling on the rule of law, is it wishful thinking or delusional to believe that internment camps can’t happen here?
The post Are There Trump Internment Camps for Political Opponents in America’s Future? first appeared on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Bill Berkowitz.