Trump Regime’s Massive Buildout of Immigrant Concentration Camps Meets Resistance

Interview with Andrea Pitzer, journalist and author of the book, One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, conducted by Scott Harris

ice facility warehouses

Andrea Pitzer examines Donald Trump’s current violent mass deportation campaign and the haunting similarities to Germany’s rounding up, brutalizing and imprisoning immigrants, Jews and other minority groups in concentration camps in the 1930s.

SCOTT HARRIS: And right now I’m very happy to welcome to our program, journalist Andrea Pitzer, author of the book One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, and much appreciation, Andrea, for making time for our program tonight.

ANDREA PITZER: Thanks for having me on here.
SCOTT HARRIS: So you certainly tackle a wide range of issues and I just wanted to mention your most recent book is titled Icebound: Shipwrecked on the Edge of the World, about William Barents, the Dutch explorer and his exploits in the late 1500s. So you tackle a lot of important issues, but we’re so glad you could be here with us tonight to talk about some of the most disturbing things we’re seeing unfold in our country today.
And that’s Donald Trump’s violent and sadistic mass deportation campaign. In your book, again, the title of which is One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, you trace the concept of mass civilian detention without trial from its beginnings through the Nazi era Holocaust of infamous concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau and Treblinka. And today, President Trump’s U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Department is spending $38.3 billion in a plan to acquire warehouses across the U.S. to transform them into massive immigration detention centers that would house tens of thousands of detainees.
And as an opening question for you, Andrea, from a historical perspective that you have studied what’s going on in Donald Trump’s America with this build-out of hundreds of potential concentration camps.

ANDREA PITZER: So the first thing I want to say up front, just because not everybody knows it, is that when we’re talking about this as a concentration camp system, I do want to keep this death camp system from the Nazi era a little bit separate. So we’ve got this handful of death camps that were added to the existing Nazi concentration camp system midwar. So right around 1942, we start seeing basically the rise of these killing factories at a specific set of camps.
But what a lot of people, and almost everybody when they think of concentration camps, they think of Auschwitz. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that the Nazi concentration camp system with Ravensbrűck and Dachau and some of the other places you’ve heard of, that existed for almost a decade beforehand. And so when I’m comparing these to camps—those are the camps I’m talking about, which we’re not even yet in the universe of something like Auschwitz.
But what I always say is why would you even want to start out with something that was like Dachua, why would you even want to head in that direction? And I’m afraid that heading in that direction is the kind of thing that we are doing right now. And I think it’s a little hard.

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—so even before he was elected— he 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 the 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, at 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: Thank you for that, Andrea. So as you said, 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. We’ve always heard that the kind of torture, the kind of misery that’s been part of this program is 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 kind of went through before, is a thing that most tells us this is a 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 in the 20th centur—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 1,000 of them are being held longer than the court mandatory limit of 20 days. So a 1,000 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, is 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. And one of the huge issues is this ignoring of court orders. In many cases, there are times that judges have demanded certain things happen and the system is simply not responding.
Now I want to cheer on the judges that are trying to stand up for rule of law. And in some cases, like with bringing Kilmar Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador or releasing the little boy Liam Ramos—these things make a huge difference.
But we have to also acknowledge that a lot of administration officials and a lot of these people who are running these facilities are ignoring a lot of the constitutional requirements that they should be hewing to. And in fact, we even see elected representatives—in terms of the arrests that are being made—when they’re saying, well, they shouldn’t have to have judicial warrants. If ICE had to have judicial warrants, none of this would happen. I mean, that’s been all over the news outlets for the last few weeks and it just shows you that this whole project, as you were sort of summing up before, I think of that Adam Serwer line: “The cruelty is the point,” right? They’re doing this to demonstrate, to terrorize this community. But to demonstrate to everybody what they’re capable of doing. And I love to see that Americans are in fact standing up to that because they’re doing some pretty scary things.
SCOTT HARRIS: And as you said, there’s 3,800 or 4,000 children that have been abducted by ICE over the past year. I’ve read up to 400 is the daily population in these detention centers. One of the big concerns is the spread of disease. Tuberculosis, measles. And we saw an uprising in Dilley, Texas, which is a facility I think that mostly had children detained in that prison. Tell us a little bit about the disease angle here, because you’re totally at the mercy of the folks who control and manage —or mismanage—these facilities if it’s vulnerable to the spread of disease.

ANDREA PITZER: Well, I think that this is—I would say a double tragedy, but it’s probably a triple tragedy or a quadruple tragedy at this point. But this is the very moment at which we have Health and Human Services RFK Jr. also in charge of stripping down the recommended vaccine schedules and approvals for certain things. And so you have an administration that is already very vaccine-resistant and very anti-vaccine in so many ways. And we have this disease measles that is quite preventable with a vaccine. And yet we see this most vulnerable community forced to go through this because of the cruelty from multiple directions from this administration. And it’s important for people to know if you didn’t grow up with measles at all, if you look a little bit into it—in unvaccinated and unvaccinated populations, it’s a lethal disease. So we are going to see some terrible repercussions because it is so contagious.

You can come into a room hours later and still get infected. And so just imagine living in these crowded quarters and these unsanitary conditions and not being able to have hygiene for yourself very often. That’s terrible. And we see also this TB outbreak, which is another, there’s no reason to have a TB outbreak in this kind of facility. And yet here we are.

And the thing about the measles in particular is so contagious. If it is in a facility near your community, the likelihood of it escaping that facility and affecting surrounding areas as well is really large because there’s going to be people who work, who serve food, they’re going to be guards, they’re going to be different people going in and out of that facility and they’re going to carry it out themselves.

And so this is first and foremost something we need to be thinking about for the people that are detained. But then those secondary effects of what’s happening in the larger population. You know, this isn’t something you can do in isolation, just as doing this to immigrants destroys American democracy for U.S. citizens doing this to their health will also have health effects on people who do have their papers and people who are citizens here in the U.S.

SCOTT HARRIS: That’s a very important point. In fact, I did want to ask you about the local residents and cities and towns all across the country that are organizing to oppose the location of these massive detention centers in their own communities. They’re concerned about things like inadequate capacity for sewage, water—a whole host of things. But the disease spread is a huge issue you just mentioned. 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 (Project Saltbox), 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. Just yesterday or today, there’s a Dallas county warehouse that ICE was going to use as a mega-detention center. And they announced, I think it was just today, that 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. And it isn’t just a—which I think is a perfectly fine response—to say, “Not in My Backyard.” I think people should absolutely be going out and saying, “Not in My Backyard.” But at the same time, it is also what you mentioned, it is literally some of these tiny communities, I think of Tremont, Pennsylvania, which is slated for warehouse that will outnumber its residents. The detainees will outnumber residents by 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.

SCOTT HARRIS: Thank you. We’re speaking with journalist Andrea Pitzer, author of the book One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps. We’re talking about Donald Trump and the Republican party’s mass deportation campaign and the resulting mass incarceration and detention centers and concentration camps all across the country. Andrea, I did want to ask you about the Democrats. The Democratic party and Congress is now engaged in a partial shutdown of the government in an effort to place conditions on the conduct of ICE agents. Part of their conditions are no masks. They must wear body cameras. They must have judicial warrants to enter people’s homes. But there’s not been much pushback on these massive ICE detention or concentration camps. Tell us from your point of view, what should the Democrats be doing beyond the issue of the individual ICE agents’ conduct?

ANDREA PITZER: So I do think that there should always be pushback when—I mean the judicial warrants question is a legal issue. That’s not a concession. That’s what they ought to be required to be doing by law as it exists. So I worry sometimes the Democrats are trying to impose these things without acknowledging that there are already many things ICE should be doing. So it’s not a huge concession to get them to hew to that. At the same time, wherever we can reduce that suffering, absolutely let’s reduce the harm that can come to the people that are being targeted in these communities. But at the same time and you see this with some individual congressmen and congresswomen—an occasional senator like (Chris) Van Hollen, but with Democratic leadership, I would really like to see…

I think it’s imperative that somebody be out there framing the vision for how this will be dismantled, because if you build these camps and they are sitting around, that’s like a loaded gun. I mean, you don’t do that historically, that leads very bad places. And so I would like them while they’re pressing back to also articulate a vision of how all this is going to be undone, not just the behavior of individual agents, but on a larger structural level. We are setting ourselves up for something because again, Dachau in 1933 looks similar to some of what we’re seeing today. But a lot of things happened after 1933 and U.S. does not want to be on that path.

SCOTT HARRIS: Absolutely. Well said. Andrea, thanks so much for spending time with us. I hope we can have you back to talk more about this and hopefully it’ll take a better turn than where we’re at right now. But do you have a website or any other resources you’d like to share with our audience before we say goodnight?

ANDREA PITZER: Sure. I have a newsletter and every week stuff comes out about how people can actually take action close to home. The easiest way to find out where you can also find out about my books and everything else is andreapitzer.com and it’s all on that homepage. You can look it all up.

SCOTT HARRIS: Alright, well, thanks again for what you do to spread the word about the warnings from history here and the situation we’re in currently in the U.S. of A. Thanks, Andrea. We’ll talk soon. Again.

ANDREA PITZER: Thank you so much. Take care.

SCOTT HARRIS: You too. Bye-bye. That’s journalist Andrea Pitzer, author of the book. Again, the title is One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.

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