In late December, Donald Trump deployed thousands of heavily armed ICE agents to Minnesota, who killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti, and over nine weeks harassed, assaulted and abducted thousands of immigrants and U.S. citizens alike. In the face of this unprovoked violence, the courageous people of Minneapolis rose up to both non-violently protest this masked secret police force in their city while activating volunteer citizen networks to support and protect their neighbors.
Although the Trump regime announced on Feb. 12 that most ICE agents will withdraw from the Minnesota, the president’s foot soldiers in his mass deportation campaign continue to lay siege to communities of color across the U.S.
With ICE agents ordered to fulfill a daily quota of detainee arrests, the White House is now in the midst of spending an estimated $38 billion on a plan to acquire warehouses across the country and retrofit them into new immigration detention centers with capacity for tens of thousands of detainees who are remanded there without charge or trial. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with journalist Andrea Pitzer, author of the book, One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, “who examines the Trump regime’s mass incarceration of immigrants, haunting similarities to 1930s Germany and local communities opposing the siting of these detention camps in their cities and towns.
ANDREA PITZER: You see maybe footage of really awful things happening in Minneapolis. You hear about U.S. citizens being shot. You hear about masked law enforcement kidnapping people, essentially moving them from facility to facility so their lawyers can’t find them. Those all feel and are in fact part of the inheritance of 20th century concentration camp systems. But I think it’s still hard for people to think about the larger project of what’s going on, not just these individual terrible stories, but what is the bigger picture? And so right now, there are about 70,000 immigrants in detention in the U.S. right now. And this plan of acquiring these warehouses is a goal to add another 80,000 people to that total in pretty quick order. And what I want to say is that before the election, Donald Trump was talking about deporting as many as 20 million people, which is actually more than the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. right now.
But to put that 20 million in context, historians of the Soviet gulag and the Soviet gulag existed for more than two decades. Historians argue whether it was 18 million or 20 million, that altogether across more than 20 years went through that system. And so what President Trump himself is claiming as a number that they’re aiming for is something on that scope in one-fifth at a time. So when you combine those police state tactics, you combine this kind of inaccessible detention where they ignore court orders and you see a lot of harm already happening, and you look at that size, those numbers, we are talking about potential for some really grim future for Americans if we don’t put a stop to it.
SCOTT HARRIS: The detention camps, the concentration camps that Donald Trump is now setting up across America are not death camps like the Nazi era. And that’s a huge differentiation. But there are major concerns today about the inhumane conditions that exist in these camps. People have died. I’ve read that 32 people died in these detention centers in 2025. That may be an underestimate. And we’ve had reports of minimal or no medical attention that’s available to the thousands of people in these detention centers. There’s inadequate access to edible food or potable water, which contributes to a lot of misery, which may be the point. What can you tell us about the conditions that we’re aware of inside these detention centers today?
ANDREA PITZER: Well, I think that how you get to one of these detention centers, which I went through before, is the thing that most tells us this is the concentration camp system, but certainly the conditions in them are already also reminiscent of camp systems from the past in which I would say a majority of camp systems around the world, the 20th century, the majority of illness, the majority of deaths were from women and from children. And we’re seeing, we have a lot of reports of children suffering right now and we know that there are some 4,000 children at least in detention, and a thousand of them are being held longer than the court mandatory limit of 20 days. So a thousand of them have already exceeded that. ProPublica did a great story with actual letters from these children and what their lives are like.
And we hear yes, conditions of people lying in feces, not having adequate food, people going to the doctor sick and being told to drink more water. But it’s, in fact the fact that they don’t have good water to begin with. They don’t have clean water—it’s a huge part of what’s making them sick. And again, this echoes history of camps going all the way back to 1900. There are camps very much like this, and these are often the complaints that we hear out of them.
SCOTT HARRIS: Tell us about the hope you take from residents around the country who are resisting the siting of these detention or concentration camps in their own backyards.
ANDREA PITZER: Well, it’s extraordinary. It’s been a very organic and fast response, and I think as people have a chance to get more organized, we’ll see more of it. There’s an online site called the Saltbox Project, and they have a warehouse map, so you can actually go there and see if something is coming near where you live and you can be thinking about what you might do. But we’ve already seen in Ashland, Virginia locals took against it, and the Canadian company that was going to sell the warehouse to the government decided not to. There’s a Dallas County warehouse that ICE was going to use as a mega detention center, and they announced that actual company that was going to sell it to ICE said that they will not sell it or lease it. And it was partly because of the local response. So reaching out to your local officials, making your displeasure known, finding out who owns that facility, and I’m not saying physically threaten, but I’m saying you can do economic threats for them.
See what their businesses are. See where they have holdings. Try to hit them where that money would hurt or appeal to their humanity in a public way that will disgrace them if they are willing to have this happen. I think people should absolutely be going out and saying, “Not in my backyard.” But at the same time, it is literally some of these tiny communities, I think of Tremont, Pennsylvania, which is slated for a warehouse. The detainees will outnumber residents by like a five to one ratio, they simply do not even have the infrastructure to do it if they were willing to.
And I’m glad that so many people aren’t. You see them just doing all kinds of things—working with city councils to make it so that people who work in these facilities who contribute as contractors will not ever get municipal contracts, will not be able to work as individuals in law enforcement or in teaching or in healthcare in the public. I mean, there’s all kinds of ways you can attack this. And people are coming up with such creative ways to do it.
For more information, visit Andrea Pitzer’s website at andreapitzer.com.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Andrea Pitzer (18:06) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the related links section of this page. For periodic updates on the Trump authoritarian playbook, subscribe here to our Between The Lines Radio Newsmagazine Substack newsletter.
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