Yves here. We ran an earlier Common Dreams article on Trump’s plans to establish concentration camps on a mass scale. Because the $50 billion total was slipped into another bill, without detail, one could argue that perhaps only a small proportion was intended for incarceration centers. Further disclosures now confirm that close to $40 billion is clearly dedicated to this part of the project alone. Mind you, there would have to be additional funds to round up and transport detainees, secure the concentration camps, and feed and at least minimally care for the inmates. In other words, this imprisonment plan is shaping up to be as big and bad as it looked.
By Julia Conley, staff writer at Common Dreams. Originally published at Common Dreams
President Donald Trump’s anti-immigration agenda has supercharged opposition in cities where he has deployed federal agents to conduct raids, and communities in states including New York and Missouri are already working to block the next step the Department of Homeland Security plans to take in its push for mass deportations: acquiring massive warehouses across the country to use as immigrant detention centers.
US immigration and Customs Enforcement documents that were provided to Republican Gov. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire—one of the states where ICE aims to acquire a building and retrofit it to house at least 1,000 people at a time—show that the administration plans to spend $38.3 billion on its mass detention plan.
It would buy 16 buildings across the country to use as “regional processing centers” that could hold 1,000-1,500 people. Another eight detention centers would hold as many as 10,000 people at a time, with the detainees awaiting deportation.
The Washington Post reported that a review of state budget data showed that the amount of money the White Houseintends to pour into the project over the next several months is larger than the total annual spending of 22 US states.
“Thirty-eight billion dollars,” said Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.). “That’s what Trump is spending to turn warehouses into human holding facilities. Not on schools. Not on healthcare. Not on veterans. On warehousing humans.”
Moulton also condemned ICE’s claim that the new network of detention facilities will ensure the “safe and humane civil detention” of immigrants.
At least six people died in ICE detention centers in January, and one of the deaths, that of Geraldo Lunas Campos at Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas, was ruled a homicide.
Medical neglect and abusive treatment—including some that amounts to torture—has been reported at multiple facilities.
ICE has already spent more than $690 million purchasing at least eight warehouses in Maryland, Arizona, Georgia, Texas, Pennsylvania, and Michigan in recent weeks. Documents posted on Ayotte’s website show the agency is pursuing additional acquisitions in New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, and Georgia.
Communities are already rallying against the plan and questioning whether the small towns ICE has selected have sufficient water and sewer infrastructure to support thousands of people detained in a warehouse.
In New York, Rep. Pat Ryan (D-NY) said last week that 25,000 people in his district have signed a petition opposing the use of a local warehouse to house immigrants and pointed to the “major corruption and graft” evident in the plan to purchase and run the warehouses.
“The site in my district that’s proposed is owned by one of Trump’s multibillionaire donors, who would directly financially benefit from this site,” said Ryan, referring to former Trump adviser Carl Icahn.
“I’m telling you, we are not going to let this happen in my district.”@PatRyanUC is pushing back on the Trump administration’s plan to buy warehouses across the country to turn them into mass detention centers, including one in his New York district. pic.twitter.com/KYOQb4WJx6
— The Recount (@therecount) February 5, 2026
As Common Dreams reported Friday, private prison firm GEO Group raked in a record $254 million in profits last year as it secured contracts with the Trump administration to build new ICE facilities across the US.ICE has attempted to make purchases in Oklahoma City; Kansas City, Missouri; and in Virginia, but those plans have fallen through, with the Kansas City Council passing a five-year ban on new nonmunicipal detention centers after the public learned that DHS was the potential buyer of a warehouse in the city.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) has also joined his constituents in speaking out against ICE’s $100 million purchase of a warehouse in his state to house at least 1,000 people at a time.
“This administration is spitting in the face of communities from Minneapolis to Maryland and wasting our tax dollars. We won’t back down,” said Van Hollen late last month.
Trump's ICE just purchased a warehouse in MD for $100M to hold 1,000+ detainees.
Last week, I joined Marylanders demanding that ICE stay out.
This Admin is spitting in the face of communities from Minneapolis to Maryland & wasting our tax dollars.
We won't back down. pic.twitter.com/PixP52EapP
— Senator Chris Van Hollen (@ChrisVanHollen) January 27, 2026
The details of the administration’s planned conversion of warehouses were reported less than two weeks after Pablo Manríquez of Migrant Insider revealed that a US Navy contract originally valued at $10 billion “has ballooned to a staggering $55 billion ceiling to expedite President Donald Trump’s ‘mass deportation’ agenda” and to help build “a sprawling network of migrant detention centers across the US.”At Common Dreams last week, talk show host and author Thom Hartmann wrote that the warehouses Trump plans to use to hold people—purchased by an agency whose own data shows it has largely been detaining people with no criminal records—are best described as concentration camps like those used in Nazi Germany.“By the end of his first year, [Adolf] Hitler had around 50,000 people held in his roughly 70 concentration camps, facilities that were often improvised in factories, prisons, castles, and other buildings,” wrote Hartmann. “By comparison, today ICE is holding over 70,000 people in 225 concentration camps across America,” with hopes to “more than double both numbers in the coming months.”
“Germany’s concentration camps didn’t start as instruments of mass murder, and neither have ours; both started as facilities for people the government’s leader said were a problem. And that’s exactly what ICE is building now,” he continued. “History isn’t whispering its warning: It’s shouting.”
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‘Trump’s ICE just purchased a warehouse in MD for $100M to hold 1,000+ detainees.’
Wait a moment, wait a moment. They spent a $100 million on a lousy warehouse? Is it made of gold or something? Is it the best warehouse in the world? Did they buy it off a Trump donor? Look, maybe they should do a bit of research and find out if any of the camps that housed the Japanese detainees in WW2 are still standing and reactivate them instead. Or maybe use FEMA camps – the same ones that conservatives reckoned that they were going to be thrown into by the libs or something years ago. In any case I can imagine what those warehouses would look like. They would be concrete floors with scores of metal cages installed inside and each detainee would get one of those thin aluminium blankets to keep themselves warm at night. Something like Alligator Alcatraz. Real Turd World stuff.
The Whipple Federal Building is located at the site of one of the earliest concentration camps in the U.S. in which 1700 Dakota were imprisoned in the aftermath of the Dakota War of 1862 and were later forcibly moved to reservations in South Dakota.
Bdóte is sacred land for the Dakota and a group of Native activists have set up a prayer camp just outside of Whipple to remind everyone that the brutality inflicted in one of the darkest chapters of Minnesota history is happening all over again.
Am I correct in the assumption that insight and general acknowledgement of the US genocide and its consequences after a first surge of interest and discussion (Kevin Costner´s Oscar a debatable popular event) in the 1990s has now again considerably dropped? A case in point would be the little recognition “Killers of the Flower Moon” has received. Granted it was a different animal than crowd-pleaser “Dances With Wolves”, while former was a missed opportunity to appeal to huge audiences. Quite a pity tbh.
From my experience here in Minneapolis, I would say that it hasn’t dropped. These days, land acknowledgements have become very common but unfortunately do not do anything to improve the material conditions of indigenous peoples.
Minneapolis has a large urban population of indigenous people and the poverty level and conditions in that part of the city are shameful.
That´s actually good news, thanks.
As often: just because something is not national news and thus is not being picked up abroad that apparently doesn´t mean it´s not happening.
One thing that has to be remembered is that any plan by Trump will also include a healthy layout to wother himself or someone that will benefit him. Find out who benefits from that warehouse being bought and I bet there will be a link.
Things are bad enough. Comparison with Nazi Germany is not helpful. It almost seems as if people wouldn´t be alarmed were there no Nazi comparison possible. But do I really have to cry Hitler to make people understand? In the long run that might not help but lessen sensitivity. (Just like what Dems tried with “Trump”.)
Maybe teaching people that racism as such is the problem and neoliberal rhetorics (also often disguised as libertarian). We should rather aim to make people understand the issue is tied to what is standard in our ideological tradition which goes way further back than 1933.
After all it was the 19th century classical economy that humans first confronted with a new commodification of their existence – you had only rights if you were able to sell your labour on the market. Those who could not would be left to die or had to emigrate.
Think of the brutality with which Irish and black labourers were treated in the US. The brutality used to destroy US unions, drive out, maim and kill their leaders.
(Forgive another film comparison but director Martin Scorsese in the context of his 2002 period piece GANGS OF NEW YORK often talked about how awful NYC was at the turn of the century. Which is why he turned the film into such a slaughter that German DOP Michael Ballhaus had serious difficulties with shooting the movie.)
US history has enough to make us shiver. Otherwise one might make the same mistake Germany did with turning the Holocaust into the uniquely evil event which is the “benchmark” every other evil has to live up to to get attention and be acknowledged.
Just the past 20 years thousands of immigrants have been killed on their way to Europe. For years already extraterritorial camps run for the EU are known to be prone to torture. Emigrants are deported to the desert and left there to die.
Any Holocaust comparison? No. would it help? No. Does it make any different that Gaza has been compared to Holocaust? No. (Although Gaza is of course a different matter.)
You don´t teach people humanity by scaremongering.
As long as immigrants in the US are only seen as either an economic factor, either desired or despised, this scandalous practice will not be stopped.
To invoke the UN Declaration of Human Right: Everyone has the right to leave his country, and everyone has the right to a decent life (native and non-natives alike).
The legal space in between which is NOT regulated – that is, nations have no autmatic obligation as per UN Declaration to accept all immigrants as such – has to be organized in a humane and sensible way. In fact we need a new “contrat social” to borrow Rousseau´s term for that blank legal space which has turned into a black box of cruelties and experiments by our elites.
thanks for this, I get a similar knot in my throat every time an author practices this particular invocation Through (deliberate?) overuse and misuse “hitler/nazi” has been successfully neutered of specific meaning and is so often used — as here by Julia Conley —- as a lazy writer’s synonym for “ultimate evil,” which would be sad enough if survival of humanity isn’t already currently facing actual racists (as you point out), not to mention oligarchs, fascists, politicians, eugenicists, prosperity gospel-ists, accelerationists, etc.
Arguably any current comparison to Nazi Germany is not just devoid of meaning but operates to erase other historical and current tragedy as “less than” or “other than” this one approved act of cultural erasure, a bit of symbolic trickery especially evident at a time when the sanctified Holocaust is invoked to commit ongoing genocide of Palestine. Culturally the Unified HitlerNazi Theory of Ultimate Evil seems like the only ongoing survivor as the collective West’s “enemy of the month” shifts seasonally in popular culture — most recently back to now “non-communist Russians” and “Chinese” and “Generic Immigrants,” while somehow still trying to retain “Radical Muslims” and “Antifa” as the godless hordes trying to steal our women and horses.
So “Gaza of course is a different matter”?
Rather I think the compact between Washington and Tel Aviv has – for example – operated in Latin America with our two governments hand in hand supporting genocide in Guatemala. In the 80s as was reported on these pages by Nick Corbishley a former Mossad chief helped the US-aligned government in Colombia assassinate every candidate representing the popular movement that laid down its arms and followed the advice of “just run for office. You’re popular.”
This website has not looked away from the problems no matter how monstrous, but has analyzed the overarching causes. This warehouse story must somehow shake our political class into responsible directions. Can we help? We’ll see.
I was referring to the fact that an army with support of other armies has killed between, I dunno, 70k and 600k people in a genocide masked as war. The broader context and parallels are of course beyond doubt.
We need not look further than the software used to enable ICE conduct their ID controls or gadgets for “crowd control” (what a term). .
Thom Hartmann showed himself to be a partisan hack years ago now – he’ll excoriate Republicans while giving a pass when members of his party do the same thing. As Taibbi has noted, it is not at all necessary to look at every major world event through the lens of WWII and thus determine who in the present day scenario most resembles Churchill, Hitler, and Chamberlain.
I would not put it past the Trumpies to build moar ICE detention centers, but I’m with Rev Kev in wondering why a warehouse costs so much, and if the real angle here isn’t the financial grift.
And while I can’t out my fingers on a link right now due to search crapification, I do remember that during the Shrub administration there were rumors of mass detention centers that would be built, perhaps by Dick Cheney’s pals at Halliburton. If I remember right, those were not to be for immigrants, but for political opponents and it did seem plausible at the time given Cheney’s corruption and all the “you’re with us or with the terrorists” rhetoric being thrown around. Those never happened.
Interesting and helpful discussion here about the Hitler comparisons. As Norman Finklestein points out in his book “The Holocaust Industry”, this historical lens was uncommon before the U.S. alignment with Israel which happened after U.S. officials were impressed by Israel’s 1967 military victory. It remains to be seen how long-lasting this will be, but it’s certainly become the heart of moral discourse in the U.S.
As to the financial aspect of the ICE detention center build-out, I can’t help but think about the New Deal. This is one way for the Right to do counter-cyclical spending and create make-work positions, all while giving campaign donors a sweet deal. The border wall is the ultimate make-work project, and you can employ a lot of people by building prisons and staffing them, as well by taking all comers for positions at DHS. This way, however, no one gets helped, and many are thrown in jail or killed.
Concentration camps predate Hitler and the (Nazi) holocaust, and there have been other holocausts.
And I think it’s *always* helpful to compare and contrast with Hitler so as to avoid what happened from ever happening again. Not because it’s scaremongering, which i don’t think it is, but because what happened under Hitler and the Nazis happened so easily, and could happen to anyone, including us. We need to look not for the exact same pattern, but for the same principles at play. It’s important to understand the principles, and the principles ARE at play here, the comparison DOES work, even if the particular details are different this time than with the Nazis.
Obviously there aren’t gas chambers this time, the same forces which want to purge humanity have learned not to do that particular thing, are always improvising according to what we’ll let them do. Trump and ICE are an improvisation, a variation, a Nazi 2.0 if you will.
Ironically, Winston Churchill has been criticized for supporting the British concentration camps during the 2nd Boer War. The controversy continues.
https://winstonchurchill.hillsdale.edu/boer-prison-camps/
Then we have “Godwin’s Law” regarding HItler/Nazi comparisons.
There are many other atrocities to compare as well, not just the western version of holocaust/shoah. We can ask folks in the global south about that. Ask a Korean or Chinese person about Japan in WWII, for example.
There weren’t gas chambers that time, either, just one year in.
p.s. For the formative period German concentration camps and the entire dismantling/subjugation of law enforcement was directed against domestic German elites not the average rabble be it poor immigrants or average Germans.
To break it down: Nazi Germany was the perpetuation and intensification of the war between the new Prussian industrial Imperial elite created with the wars for German nationhood 1866-1871 against the nascent labour movement.
What had started with Bismarck´s fight against SPD and after WWI had led to Germany´s participation in the Russian Civil War to overthrow Bolshevism, experienced a first tipping point with the internement of labour leaders and oppositional politicians by March 1933 on German soil.
All this preceded by the informal but successful and very brutal grab for power of the street via violence and intimidation of a structural dimension. NSDAP was in essence a force of thugs first thousands then hundreds of thousands by 1930 1M+ strong. It did not start with concentration camps but an informal army covertly and openly supported by the state´s elites and its armed forces.
By it´s logic naturally the Nazis when in power divised the oldest trick – divide and rule – by instrumentalizing certain out-groups just as the elites in the US are doing it now but alread have been doing it for a long time with a certain complicity by the labour unions, the uniparty and its academic offshoots need no further mention.
So the undivided mainstream power elites are all in line with anti-immigration-think one way or another. That strategy however has been invented long before the Nazis.
Ultimately it doesn´t mean anything how you name it. It has to be opposed to, resisted against, and stopped.
And in that tradition, mind me, Chomsky or Parenti, it doens´t matter, should never be sacrificed on any altar of righteousness as we experience it now. To abandon their work accomplished is a disgrace especially if we look at who benefits.
Not to detract from your point, but Chomsky apparently was friends with Epstein, Parenti apparently was not. That might explain the different opinions the two had about Palestine, the JFK assasination, the so-called 9/11 attacks etc.
One half of Chomsky is now cut from the other half.
Which is which and what does one do with it I cannot say, for now.
Parenti was on firm ground, though not as slick as the former.
The history of their remembrance has entered a new phase and the latter rises.
I personally doubt very much that the potentially different views on these issues had anything to do with Epstein. By the time Chomsky met Epstein he was in his 80s. His serious political research and work had started in the 1950s. Besides Epstein was to him a businessman not a scholar to my understanding.
If people did influence Chomsky´s views those would be such individuals like David Graeber or Vijay Prashad or David Noble or Ed Herman (and many more).
https://davidgraeber.org/
And: None of these scholars should be played off against the other. Nor would they want this themselves.
In general looking at how discussions nowadays are conducted by putting short quotes – often out of context – in lieu of a person´s entire body of work and life and condemn them or hail them for that matter, I find shocking.
re: Chomsky – who I have studied thoroughly unlike Parenti – I suggest to read the books.
The range of his scholarly research is especially helpful for making connections and finding other sources. One could argue the breadth amounts to a weakness on the other hand. But that´s a different topic.
Haymarket has an interesting selection on Chomsky, e.g.:
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/authors/28-noam-chomsky
Maybe add “WORLD ORDERS OLD AND NEW” and “WESTERN STATE TERRORISM” (where he is only a contributor)
His excellent homepage has a very helpful indexed search option with text/video/audio
https://chomsky.info/
David Barsamian on his still operational ALTERNATIVE RADIO which introduced me to many of the established scholars and activists offers various selections of interviews and lectures both digital and print (I got my first Parenti lecture published by Barsamian as print sent to Germany in the 1990s along with audio-cassettes.)
There Chomsky and Parenti are presented side by side with the others.
Of course in the last 40 years – ALTERNATIVE RADIO was founded 1986 – Barsamian has expanded his selection a lot.
Parenti e.g.
https://www.alternativeradio.org/products/parm001/
whole program
https://www.alternativeradio.org/collections/programs/
btw: MONTHLY REVIEW, Parenti
https://mronline.org/author/michaelparenti/
ZNET is getting more and more valuable because their archive goes back to the 1990s and is still free.
https://znetwork.org/
Type in the name. (Their contributors´ list offers only a tiny franction.)
p.s. It strikes me as absurd to now see Chomsky being often attacked as some form of covert MSM-agent while for most of his life that very MSM were denouncing him as a “conspiracy theorist”.
That´s quite a success for the establishment frankly.
(Perhaps you are not aware of the recent revelations about Chomsky/Epstein)
Thank you for the links. Yes, I’ve listened to Barsamian’s program for years. I’ve got Graeber on the shelf etc. We should include Michael Hudson, who was a mentor to Graeber. If you have read Chomsky, but not Parenti, I would recommend it. I personally find , Graeber, Parenti, and Hudson more useful, not to detract from Chomsky’s prolific work of which I have read much.
Of course Chomsky was not an MSM darling, however if you have seen some of the Epstein material on Chomsky, it is disappointing to say the least. We should not elevate our heroes on too high a pedestal. We are only fallible humans, even the most “intelligent” among us. I am not the only one who was disappointed in some of Chomsky’s hypocrisy, his private views, and the known Mossad assets he was apparently friends with.
Speaking of Vijay Prashad:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/feb/04/jeffrey-epstein-files-noam-chomsky
and
https://www.thecanary.co/opinion/2026/02/03/chomsky-epstein/
Chris Hedges and others as well
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/noam-chomsky-jeffrey-epstein-and
This does not detract from his legendary academic work, but apparently, the dude was not a beacon of moral virtue
I believe we owe “concentration camp” to the British, who dealt with Boer guerrilla activity by rounding up the civilian population in said camps.
Worked eventually, but at considerable reputational cost.
It’s useful to remember that one of Hitler’s inspirstions was the American treatment of the native Americans and the very succesful genocide and land grab against them.
Well, as may be, but certainly Jim Crow…
From what I can tell through open sources these facilities do not seem to be planned to be other than Transit Centers.
In my experience, in such places the lack of medical care, reasonable sanitation,good food and any privacy is seen to be a part of a structure to motivate people to move on.
There will always be many problems for each person in these kind of places.
That’s the point
I can imagine that some of these places are vacant because they are Brown Fields and can’t be rented or sold. I know they don’t care about the folks they are rounding up, but the staff would be exposed to whatever toxin might have been there.
Also, its hard for me to imagine all the money spent ( currently and in future) of the ICE actors, ongoing law suits, warehouses, 32 million $$ spent to deport 300 people and … Can be justified in any way at all.
My guess is that they will be Labour Camps. The inmates, being deemed illigal and in breach of US laws will be given the “opportunity” to apply for some of those trashy H1-B visas and work for minimum wages and have no rights and be transported to and from work. Of course they will have to pay for their lodgings and food and will always be in debt. They might not even be given the chance to return to their home countries. As for their assets accumulated in the US, because they are the proceeds of crime (being illigal, they will be taken by one of US layered governments under the Asset Forfeiture laws. So much blueprint and experience out there, just think of the Japanese in the 1940s… As for the Roman Republic, who serves as a template for US Republic, just remember the civil wars and the dispossesions and worst. Oh, boy, it can get so much worst, including for the Americans themselves.
I doubt someone had imagined de-industralization turning out so wrong. It is not only about job loss but also about imprisoning labour power – that is no longer consdered ‘needed’ – in warehouses, the very symbols of modern industralization.
Miller’s Army needs POW camps. Hey, at least they plan to take some prisoners rather than just obliterate their enemies on sight.
I think this is a continuation of the privatization of the prison industrial complex.
Sorry I did not link as I save a PDF to my library.
A 2022 report from CATO
Cato Supreme Court Review
The Court of Mass Incarceration
Rachel E. Barkow
I. Sweep of Criminal Law
Let me start by getting everyone up to speed on just how nuts
America’s commitment to incarceration and criminalization is be
fore I turn to the Supreme Court’s role in its evolution. America used
to look like most of the rest of the world and certainly other Western
democracies when it came to incarceration. Until the 1970s, we had
a stable incarceration rate on par with other countries.
1 But then our incarceration rate started to explode. We now lead the world in both
the total number of people incarcerated—nearly 2.3 million
2—and the rate of incarceration per capita.
3 The U.S. incarceration rate is more than five times what it was in 1972, when it began its record
climb upward, and is a rate 5 to 10 times higher than that of other
industrialized countries.
4 America has less than five percent of the
world’s population but almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.
Wouldn’t it be much less expensive to simply buy a plane ticket and send people back to their countries of origin?
Or, is Steven Miller setting up precedent to excuse Israel from a certain mass expulsion of Gaza Palestinians? Maybe to Sudan’s soon to be built camps?
Some USAID programs kept people from immigrating, but it too got eliminated. The question is who’s going to take the billions to build the concentration camps? Blackrock’s Larry Fink?
Per the IIRC Firth and Fourteenth Amendment, everyone in the US, even undocumented migrants, has due process rights. They need to go through a judicial process to be expelled.
Obama deported far more people than Trump has, and focused on criminals. If Trump wanted to get rid of “illegals” quickly, he could go after employers. Start with raiding Marriotts. Tell dairy farmers to reassure their workers that the Administration ants them to stay (like it or not, if undocumented dairy workers fled, we would soon have dairy farms full of dead cows).
In other words, what Trump is doing is much more clearly explained by a plan to implement authoritarian control than by immigration.
I agree, “the illegals” are just a scapegoat and mobilizing tool for the US regime. And if we assume there are around 12 million undocumented immigrants, how long would it take to deport all of them? The objective appears to be to intimidate the public into submission, and to have an unaccountable, anonymous armed force loyal only to the emperor. In addition to the usual financial grift and corruption mentioned above..
The continuing deterioration of the rule of law, lack of checks and balances, executive branch flat out ignoring court orders etc. combined with concentration camps, and lawless jackbooted thugs – are not going to be “good for business” in many ways. Thanks for covering these important issues,
“Obama deported far more people than Trump has”
You think this will have changed by end of this term in a substantial way?
I think there is an element of it that is directed at illegal immigrants. Not brcause they don’t want them available as cheap workers. But because they want them in an even mkre precarious situation so their wages and conditions drop even further.
Some USAID programs destabilized foreign governments, fomented coups, and made people want to leave their countries. Not to fear, that part of USAID’s mission is still going strong.
Unfortunately, I think it’s very expensive, so if the U.S. wants to solve its immigration problem, then the U.S. will have to pay.
As Yves notes above, first there’s due process. To process all these undocumented immigrants, we need to hire tons of judges and lawyers. Then where do you house the undocumented while they await trial? In this sense, you do need a lot of housing/detention facilities. The U.S.’s strategy is sometimes to create Alligator Alcatraz facilities that look awful. In most cases, the U.S.’s strategies have been shameful and embarrassing (and too often illegal) to most Americans, including the KKK/Gestapo tactics.
As I envision it, we need a bunch of detention facilities that look like fenced-in Marriotts that can handle the suspected undocumented immigrants and even their families. This would be a major undertaking. Team Trump’s solution to everything is the quick/easy PR stunt that results in tons of mistakes, false arrests, and deaths of protestors or imprisoned detainees while the government’s agents look like camouflaged KKK.
The goal should be to create a system that treats undocumented humanely as possible and then send them back to their countries after due process. There will still be a ton of sad stories and injustices even then. Team Trump can’t stand the messy details, so we wallow in the chaotic mess of Stephen Miller’s sick dream. I’m not sure if the U.S. in general could handle the decades long cost and investment to solve the problem in a manner that doesn’t bring shame to a majority of Americans.
Then where do you house the undocumented while they await trial?
Geez – innocent until proven guilty?
I guess by making special provisions for south of the border brown folks – the justice system would never let that creep into the broader base of american citizens…dream on.
The lack of holding pens is not the problem – the problem is the need for them in the first place.
Obviously, the dems (Charlie brown) took another stab at looking like they are fighting….. I am still trying to find out where Hakeem Jeffries has drawn his hard line……with Schumer as coach…I guess they are practicing and drawing lines on some distant shore?…still looking. So ICE is fully funded for 5years and Hakeem and the Dem party are beating up on FEMA, TSOs and anything else unrelated to put pressure on ICE….them posers certainly dropped the fish lure in a dead pool.
Anyway – more from the 2022 Supreme court review
The Court of Mass Incarceration
Rachel E. Barkow
“Alexander Hamilton observed that
“[t]he creation of crimes after the commission of the fact . . . and
the practice of arbitrary imprisonments, have been, in all ages, the
favorite and most formidable instruments of tyranny.”
The Framers knew they were setting up an architecture that was not an efficient one conducive to mass processing That was the point: it is supposed to be hard for the government
to put people into cages and stigmatize them with the label of criminal.
We have about half a million people in America locked in cages without having been
convicted of anything and without having pleaded guilty.
So as a public-policy matter, pretrial detention is just awful.
The Court has played a critical role in the expansion of criminal law and punishment in America in many other ways. It has created immunity doctrines that prevent prosecutors and police officers
from being accountable for gross abuses of their authority, which has allowed these actors to be overly aggressive without fear of reprisal.”
The tools being used to fight these new concentration camps are the exact same tools that
trickledown Republicansabundance Democrats want to eliminate.Having personally worked on water and sewer planning projects for warehouses, sewer service for these things are essentially the same as for a townhouse at best. And it’s not simply the sewer service line- the trunk sewers in the street are ~8, 9, 12 inch lines typical of a residential block. Warehouses are not typically constructed in prime housing sites, either close to a city center or at the top of a hill, which means that the sewers from these sites are connected to lift stations where the sewage is pumped to the main interceptor sewers for conveyance to the treatment facility. The lift stations are carefully designed for specific volumes and rates of sewage because they are expensive to build, maintain, and operate.
Now consider the concentration camps: they want to put hundreds of not thousands of people in these facilities. That’s a small town of people in one place, quite literally concentrating them in a camp, where the sewer system for that parcel and the surrounding parcels is designed for maybe 25-50 people per parcel at peak occupancy.
Are they going to replace the services and trunk sewers with much larger ones, going from the 9″ typical for these facilities to 24 to 36″” lines that would be the biggest sewer in a town of 2000? Will there be a 5- to 10- fold increase in the size of the lift station wet wells, pumps, and forcemains to accommodate a small city equivalent of sewage to pump? Can the treatment system handle the increased volume (will the overflow be dumped into the local river)? If so design for these improvements had better be already underway because design will take a few months and construction up to a year.
Then there’s water supply. The water mains for these facilities are sized for fire protection, i.e. oversized, so the pipes themselves might be adequate to supply a 1000 person concentration camp. But fire suppression is a temporary use. These people will be present for days or months. Can the municipal water system produce and store enough water to provide drinking water to these camps? Provide that water and still maintain adequate fire protection for the area? Can the water source, the water body or aquifer, provide enough water to the municipal system to expand? Each of these will take months to figure out, or to build if the figuring out part is hand-waved (see: data centers, mega-dairies).
The whole concept of concentration camps is ipso facto appalling, but the details involved add a layer of ridiculous cruelty to that. Sewage management by itself is going to be, at minimum, a big ongoing problem. But there’s more:
Who is going to build the water and sewer improvements for these systems? This is heavy civil construction that the local Joe’s Sewer & Water isn’t equipped to build. Also, they are actively disappearing the labor force. Will they use the camp occupants as slave labor to build their own sewer system?
This regime is incredibly stupid in addition to being downright evil.
There is this book “The First Clash” by Jim Lacey, that posits that the battle of Marathon had a different development. The Persians only partly deployed when the Greeks trapped them at Marathon, in quite a confined and lower position. After several days of standoffness, time in which the Persian shit and piss started to accumulate (neither had the chops to launch an attack), the Persians decided to withdraw to their ships, as secretly as possible. But the Greeks got wind of it and attacked the retreating Greeks…
Not being able to handle shit is the thing of legends and managing shit is considered a Herculean task…
This is assuming that these facilities will be held to 19th century standards. There are older, much “cheaper” and less resource intensive methods to achieve the task. Say, honey buckets and inmates impressed to carry said receptacles out to the dump pits daily. If there happens to be an outbreak of cholera say, so much the better. More “undesirables” eliminated through the machinations of Divine Providence.
If we resort to the Godwin’s Law transgression, the Jackpot looms large in the background.
Do not underestimate the depravity of our present day elites.
Apparently one of my points was missed: wastewater from concentration camps will create major problems for 1. the city where they are located, 2. The regional sewage treatment system, 3. Local to regional potable water, 4. Regional water resources important to regional ecosystems and recreation.
It’s a much bigger and far reaching problem than how the concentration camp inmates are treated. Local city and county administrators (even Republicans) are well aware of this and are opposing these camps for the reasons i described above.
That the Feds don’t seem to understand these issues speaks to their stupidity and/or incompetence.
yes, if such nonsense comes to pass….a shit-show is brewing. Deconstructing the word/concept…Warehouse……..a facility to house wares…goods that require space only, no amenities. Warehouse complexes not plumbed for human outflows of more than a few office people. Infrastructure matters for the sane…developers have licenses to protect.
Good points also on municipal water build outs at said complexes.
The US has encouraged employment immigration for decades. This open invitation plus US foreign policy in Centra America demands a reckoning. We owe immigrants, if not citizenship, then certainly not ICE’s ethnic cleaning that destroys established patterns of life that we all rely on for our safety and sanity.