Here's a question for you: How did U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, more commonly known as ICE (though its actions are hot as hell), get the right to swarm over this country, arresting, even killing people, while creating -- yes, TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon has it right! -- concentration camps across the United States? I must admit that, if I were able to return to my childhood in the 1950s and tell my parents that, in the distant future, there would be a masked national police force (acting as customs agents) with nothing short of its own national system of detention centers (significantly created from shuttered and abandoned old "zombie" prisons), they would have thought their son had gone over the edge.
And yet, here we are in 2026 in a distinctly ICY world. Worse yet, ICE, as the ACLU reports, is now drawing "state and local police away from the needs of communities, and into a national deportation force that acts as though it answers only to the president." And that, sadly enough, is just the beginning. As the Washington Post recently reported, the Trump administration is now also launching "a $38 billion plan to convert industrial warehouses into a new breed of large-scale holding centers." (What could possibly go wrong?)
In the meantime, ICE agents, armed with guns, are striking out at Americans who are anything but immigrants, including using tear gas (or "projectile munitions") against those protesting their actions. As a judge in Portland, Oregon, who issued a preliminary injunction against such acts, wrote: "Plaintiffs provided numerous videos, which were received in evidence and unambiguously show DHS [Department of Homeland Security] officers spraying OC Spray directly into the faces of peaceful and nonviolent protesters engaged in, at most, passive resistance and discharging tear gas and firing pepper-ball munitions into crowds of peaceful and nonviolent protestors."
In truth, ICE should undoubtedly be renamed HOT, and DHS should be relabeled the Department of Homeland (In)Security. And with that in mind, let Gordon explore an America in which concentration camps are indeed becoming part of the scenery. Tom
People Die While Companies Profit
As Concentration Camps Metastasize Across the U.S.
The March 4, 2026, edition of the Arizona Daily Star put the facts succinctly: "A Haitian asylum seeker held for four months at Florence Correctional Center died Monday at a Scottsdale hospital due to complications from an infected tooth." It seems the infection spread from his tooth to his lungs, and he developed the pneumonia that killed him.
In other words, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) allowed a prisoner to die of a toothache. His name was Emmanuel Damas. He was 56 years old and the father of two.
And we can only expect medical treatment at ICE centers to deteriorate further. As Judd Legum at Popular Information reported in January 2026:
"ICE" has not paid any third-party providers for medical care for detainees since October 3, 2025. Last week, ICE posted a notice on an obscure government website announcing it will not begin processing such claims until at least April 30, 2026. Until then, medical providers are instructed 'to hold all claims submissions.'"
Emmanuel Damas's unnecessary death would be outrageous enough, were it the only one of its kind. In fact, 32 people died in ICE custody during 2025, the most in two decades. Another six died in January 2026 alone, among them Geraldo Lunas Campos, a Cuban father aged 55, at Camp East Montana detention center in El Paso, Texas.
Although ICE initially claimed Lunas Campos had attempted suicide, the American Immigration Council reports that "the El Paso County Medical Examiner ruled his death was a homicide arising from asphyxia due to neck and torso compression." Of course, it's pretty hard to strangle yourself to death. Witnesses, however, described his murder this way: "Mr. Lunas Campos was handcuffed, while at least five guards held him down and one guard squeezed his neck until he was unconscious." At least one other man has died at the Camp East Montana detention center, where tuberculosis and measles are also spreading.
Damas and Lunas Campos were among the roughly 73,000 people whom ICE currently holds in a tangle of detention camps sprawled across the country. And more centers are under construction. Many of them are former warehouses designed to function, as ICE acting director Todd Lyons put it last year, "like Amazon Prime for human beings." (Like many Trump appointees, Lyons has not received Senate confirmation. His actual title, according to ICE, is "Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.")
What Is a Concentration Camp?
Taken together, this network of prisons or, more accurately, concentration camps, constitutes an American gulag. "Gulag" is not so much a word as a Russian initialism that came to stand for the Soviet Union's concentration camp program, originally developed under Joseph Stalin. The term stands for "Main Directorate of Correctional Labor Camps" and originally referred to the officials running the camps. Later, "gulag" came to indicate the camps themselves, which were a central instrument of Soviet political repression. Most Americans first learned about those camps through Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's 1973 internationally bestselling memoir, The Gulag Archipelago.
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