Recognizing these facilities as concentration camps is neither rhetorical nor extreme; it is an accurate and necessary classification.—Cameron McDonald, Immigration and Human Rights Law Review
Inhumane detention conditions aren’t uncommon; they’re part of the problem.— Alimatou Sarr, The Marshall Project
ICE is a fascist paramilitary force for Donald Trump and Stephen Miller.—Arizona Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari
Donald Trump’s immigration detention centers are not like our prisons in several significant respects. Convicted criminals are imprisoned by judicial order, and their attorneys and families know where they are. They are also allowed to protest inhumane conditions.
In stark contrast, thousands of immigrants are sent directly to detention centers all over the nation, and sometimes they are moved to confuse their lawyers and family members. In some cases, they are deported (or they self-deport under duress) without any hearing at all. The Trump administration is prioritizing punishment over justice.
A Civil, not Criminal, System
Immigration detention is supposed to be a civil system designed to hold people until they have a court hearing. These people are, however, being treated as hardened criminals even though most have committed only a misdemeanor for crossing the border. Under the Refugee Act of 1980, they have every right to apply for asylum in the U.S. Court appointed judge boasted that she has rejected every appeal that has come before her.
Since the beginning of 2025, immigration lawyers have filed 44,000 habeas petitions to locate their clients and demand that they have their day in court. Reuters has reported that since 2025 “federal courts had ruled more than 4,400 times that ICE had detained people illegally.”
Before the second Trump administration’s illegal crackdown, immigrants without criminal records (roughly 70% of those detained) were released on bond and allowed to return to their jobs and families awaiting a court hearing. Recently, the Ninth Circuit Appeals Court reinstated that right to immigrants detained in the ICE Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma. This decision applies to every other detainee in the Ninth Circuit’s jurisdiction.
Conditions at Alligator Alcatraz
Administration officials claim that these detention centers are not prisons and those detained are not there for punishment. This claim belies the names given to “Alligator Alcatraz” and “Speedway Slammer.” During a visit before the Florida facility opened, Donald Trump appeared to relish the possibility that alligators would attack any escapee.
Amnesty International reported that the conditions at Alligator Alcatraz (now closed) “are extremely harsh, with overcrowding, poor sanitation, limited medical care, and restricted legal access.” The report describes “prolonged use of small confinement boxes (2x2 feet), excessive shackling, and punitive outdoor exposure, which may constitute torture.” Since the beginning of the second Trump administration, there have been 70 reported deaths in these facilities.
Three immigration rights groups have filed multiple complaints about the ICE Detention Center in Basile, Louisiana, alleging “sexual harassment, sexual abuse, physical abuse, coerced labor, and neglect of urgent medical and mental health care at the facility.” One of the attorneys, Sarah Decker, charged that “these facilities are incapable of housing people humanely, and there’s no solution outside of shutting [them] down.”
Protests at Detention Center in New Jersey
On August 8, 2026, 40 protesters gathered outside Delaney Hall, an ICE detention center in New Jersey. They were shouting “Shut it Down” and “Free Them All” after learning of spoiled food and wretched conditions. Three detainees have already died in this facility.
“The conditions are brutal,” said Selenia Destefani, an attorney for the detainees. “People just sleep on the floor – overcrowded rooms, cold showers, no food, extremely cold in the cells with no blankets.”
Edwin Lopez-Cornejo, who suffered from diabetes, high blood pressure and epilepsy, died after being held with nine other men in one cell with an open commode in the middle. He complained that he had lost 30 pounds and that he had not received any medical help.
The Case of Roberto Mosquera
Roberto Mosquera came to the U.S. via the 1980 Mariel boatlift from Cuba. He soon joined a gang, and he says that he was wrongly charged in a subsequent shooting. Mosquera served his time, became a born-again Christian, got married, and now has four daughters. He trained as a plumber, and his boss was quoted as saying that “he wasn’t just a hard worker; he inspired the guys around him.”
Mosquera possessed a legal work permit, and every year he renewed it. This year, as he went to renew his permit, he was seized by ICE and, without a hearing, was held in several detention centers. Eventually, he was put on a plane and flown to the African country of Swaziland, where he now finds himself in a prison without charges and going blind because of an untreated case of glaucoma.
The Declaration of Independence is a philosophical document that establishes the right of all human beings (not just citizens) to the “unalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The 14th Amendment guarantees that all persons (not just citizens) cannot be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Tens of thousands of migrants (mostly brown people) are being systematically deprived of these rights by the Trump administration.
The History of Concentration Camps
The use of the term “concentration camp” antedates the Nazis, most of whose facilities are best described as “extermination camps.” During a military campaign in Cuba (1896-97), Spain set up “reconcentrados” to separate the civilian population from the rebels it was fighting. The British did the same with South African civilians during the Boer War of 1899. About 41,000 Boers and Blacks died of neglect and disease in these camps.
Two scholars, Alex Braithwaite and Rachel Van Nostrand, have laid out four criteria that define a concentration camp. It is a facility “targeting groups of civilians for imprisonment; where the state controls who enters and exits; which departs from standard detention practices; and where there is abuse and neglect.” After sorting through data from 150 known historical examples, Braithwaite and Van Nostrand conclude that “the network of detention facilities maintained by ICE fits this broader definition of concentration camps.”
According to Braithwaite and Van Nostrand, ICE targets people “often based on their perceived ethnicity, and many arrests have been based on physical appearance and location rather than evidence of unlawful presence in the United States.” On July 10, ICE agents, looking for a man they thought they had identified, shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, an undocumented construction worker who had lived in Houston for 30 years.
Donald Trump has declared war on brown people, and hopefully a new Democratic House majority and the courts can rein in this racist campaign.
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