It’s Not Hyperbole to Call CECOT a Concentration Camp

Dachau opened almost immediately after Hitler came to power and began with imprisoning “criminals”—communists and social democrats. Sound familiar?

The United States has been facing a constitutional crisis for a long time now: over emoluments, over insurrection and January 6th, and over Trump subverting Congress’s authority to spend money. But the detention of  Kilmar Abrego Garcia has become emblematic of how the rule of law is collapsing in the United States. Garcia was mistakenly detained by ICE as a gang member and sent to El Salvador. In court, the Department of Justice has acknowledged that this was by mistake, but they also refuse to take any action to correct or return Garcia. Publicly, members of the administration, such as JD Vance, have called him a “terrorist” and insist that he deserves to be there.

To be clear, none of these “deportations” should be happening. They aren’t even deportations; they’re being snatched and sent to El Salvador (and soon Rwanda and Libya, the latter of which has migrant detention centers that are rife with torture and sexual abuse) despite the fact that they’re not from those countries. It’s a violent form of exile. Even if Garcia were a gang member, he would not deserve what’s happening to him, and nor would anybody else. The people being shipped off aren’t being convicted of anything because they’re not allowed to see a judge. They’re being accused of gang affiliation based on tattoos. They’re not being sentenced at all, and there’s no mechanism for their release: In effect, they’re being handed indefinite sentences and sent off to El Salvador, which has a notoriously violent prison system. The United States has been building a series of concentration camps and gulags overseas. 

You might instinctively argue with that framing, because it evokes Auschwitz and gas chambers and crematoria. But even Nazi Germany’s concentration camps began humbly. Dachau, another of Germany’s concentration camps, opened in 1933, almost immediately after Hitler came to power and initially only contained “criminals”—to the Nazis, criminals were communists and social democrats. 

As time went on, Hitler and the Nazis started targeting Jews and Romani. Some camps were true death camps, such as Sobibor and Treblinka—people were only brought there to be killed immediately. Others were more like labor camps where starvation, brutality, and disease were intended to kill off the prisoners while they worked tirelessly for the regime. As The Onion darkly commented: The point at which you’re trying to prove that something is a concentration camp is a sign that things are headed in a very bad direction.

What we’re living through is not some wild anomaly at odds with American history. We’ve had concentration camps before. Japanese-Americans on the West Coast were sent to concentration camps during World War II, driven by a combination of xenophobia, overwrought fear of espionage in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, and greed. Property owned by those who were interned was sold off at bargain prices to their neighbors. Indigenous Alaskans were interned during the war as well, often in brutal conditions so that the U.S. military could build their facilities. 

Deportations too have been a tool of policy for attacking people that the government disliked. In the Palmer Raids, anarchists and socialists were forcibly deported out of a fear that they were spreading socialism, and aligned with Moscow. In 1954, Operation Wetback (a slur used to refer to Mexicans) was used to stage mass deportations of Mexican workers in the United States. Many had come to work here legally as part of the Bracero Program, a U.S.-Mexican labor agreement intended to fill labor shortages. Over a million people were “returned,” which in practice meant being rounded up by immigration agents, forced onto planes or boats, and dumped in parts of Mexico they had never lived in. 

There are other precedents. Trump’s administration has relied on the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to justify his so-called deportations to El Salvador. That law was only ever intended to apply to foreign nationals, but Trump claims that MS-13 is a terrorist organization. The 1952 Immigrant and Nationality Act authorizes immigration services to deport people if it’s determined that their political views are hostile to the United States. Initially used against leftists, it has been infrequently used until now, but it serves as the legal basis for Mahmoud Khalil’s deportation, among others. Even Dubya’s black site prisons in the mid-2000s were operated under no legal basis and allowed accused terrorists to be taken to foreign countries, detained indefinitely, and tortured.

These are events that normalize these actions: They fit within a pattern that isn’t totally alien in American life. They provide pretexts that the Executive Branch can act on. But the major crisis that’s brewing is the fact that the Judiciary is unable to put a stop to this. The chief way that the courts can compel somebody is by holding them in criminal contempt and ultimately jailing them. But that is enforced by the U.S. Marshals, who also answer to the Attorney General. There are obscure ways of trying to enforce  civil contempt: a provision in the Federal Code allows anybody to be appointed to carry out. But it’s never been tried in a circumstance like this, and it’s unclear how the Executive Branch would respond. 

This has happened before. There’s a history of judges being unable to enforce their decisions if the Executive Branch wishes to do otherwise. Worcester v. Georgia was a landmark case that dealt with the Cherokee in Georgia over a law that prohibited missionaries from living in Cherokee territory without permission from the state. The law had been passed because some missionaries had encouraged Cherokee resistance to abandoning their land, which Georgia wanted to seize. In the case, the Supreme Court ruled that Georgia had no authority to pass laws affecting the Cherokee. The state simply ignored the ruling, and President Andrew Jackson refused to force Georgia to comply with it. Instead, he continued working to negotiate a treaty with a splinter Cherokee group that signed away their land. The end result was the Trail of Tears, the ethnic cleansing of the Cherokee from their homes into Oklahoma and the death of thousands. 

Similarly, during the American Civil War Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, a foundational right that any person who is detained has the right to be in court and before a judge. Confederate sympathizers in Maryland were carrying out sabotage, and Lincoln used it to detain suspected sympathizers indefinitely. In 1861, Chief Justice Roger Taney attempted to block this in Ex Parte Merryman  by asserting that the president had no right to suspend habeas corpus. Lincoln simply ignored this and carried on, with Congress formally giving him the power to suspend it nationwide two years later. Taney admitted that in the end he was powerless to stop Lincoln. Taney was no saint. He was a committed racist and believed that secession was justified. But this episode exposed a weakness in judicial enforcement that was never rectified. If anything, in the intervening 160 years, the presidency has only become stronger.

If we don’t interfere, where will we go from here? The trajectory for societies that normalize concentration camps and gulags is not a good one, even if they never turn into the death camps of the Third Reich. They create extrajudicial spaces where laws and oversight cannot protect people. The ambiguity and absurdity behind the accusations is actually part of their power: If you can be considered a “terrorist” because of a tattoo, all kinds of behavior and activity become terroristic. It’s no different than Stalin accusing his former revolutionary peers of being spies for Great Britain, France, and Nazi Germany simultaneously before having them arrested. If they could be accused of an absurd crime, anybody can be.

Trump has made it very clear that he wants to expand what he’s doing in El Salvador by sending U.S. citizens. He’s made vague references to sending “subway pushers” there. Who does he mean by that? Perhaps people with mental illness, who have been in the spotlight after a spate of highly publicized attacks in the New York City subway system. Targeting people with a mental illness or disability is straight out of the Nazi playbook; they were some of the first people targeted by the Nazi regime. RFK, Jr. is already talking about a registry for people with autism. Will the work camps he was fantasizing about be in El Salvador? Or what about all of those Barnard professors who were texted to ask if they were Jewish? This administration has already established that any kind of Palestinian solidarity is grounds for removal if you’re a resident alien. Are citizens next?

Moreover, what does this warn us about the future of the Global South? El Salvador and Rwanda and Libya are  authoritarian states—ones that people are already fleeing. It is beyond chilling to think that we will normalize whole governments setting themselves up to be rental concentration camps, especially when climate change is only going to accelerate the flight of people into the Global North.

Whatever the plan, if it comes to fruition it narrows the bounds of what we all can do and say. That’s the real enforcement power behind any camp system: Once the government can easily manufacture a pretext to detain you, your whole behavior has to change. We all will start self-censoring at some level, and the bounds of acceptable political activity will shrink.

The courts cannot save us at this moment. By themselves and with an acquiescent Congress, they cannot force the Executive Branch to obey. But that doesn’t mean that things are hopeless either. Garcia is emblematic of a nightmarishly cruel system and has become a highly public symbol, and a rallying point for people and politicians. As long as the federal government remains paralyzed and at odds with itself, the next place to take this fight is down to the states.

Normally, states trying to nullify federal laws are standing on incredibly shaky legal ground. But in this case, the laws themselves, or at least their enforcement is being challenged by a different branch of the federal government. What would happen if governors in blue states simply refused to cooperate with ICE, or actively tried to block their deportations on the basis that the court systems are being ignored? It would stoke conflict, but it would likely also further isolate the Executive Branch.

Other ways might be targeting El Salvador and Rwanda, since they’re willing accomplices in this evil. Governor J.B. Pritzker in Illinois has already signaled that the state will review investments and contracts with Salvadoran companies. By itself, it’s a symbolic gesture, but more states can come together to put pressure on these governments. And we have international allies that should be working to marginalize them as well. El Salvador is doing this because it’s being paid to do so; it ought to be an international pariah over it. Meanwhile, visits to those who are imprisoned offers assurance that they’re alive, keeps the spotlight on their cause, and offers at least some protection: they cannot totally be made to disappear if senators keep visiting them.

For those of us who don’t have access to the levers of political power, the options in front of us are protests and civil disobedience. Authoritarian systems function because of complicity and docility. It’s on us to become ungovernable for this administration.