Deportation Plans, Detention Campsand a Democracy on Edge

Minneapolis looks like Trump’s Gettysburg, the turning point in the Civil War, as he tries to put the best face on his humiliating withdrawal of thuggish masked troops. But he’s pushing ahead with plans for his very own Gulag archipelago, a nationwide network of concentration camps with a $38 billion price tag. At the same time, he’s talking about “taking over” the midterm elections, while his popularity plummets. Just one month into Trump’s second year in office, the question of whether American democracy will survive has never been more inescapable, or more in doubt.

“Gettysburg was supposed to be the blow that forced the United States to negotiate an end to the Civil War.” Jamelle Bouie wrote in the New York Times on Jan 28. Instead, it was a catastrophic defeat from which the South never recovered, fighting on the defensive for the rest of the war. “What Lee did not anticipate was the iron resolve, the ferocious tenacity, of the Union defenders,” Bouie wrote. And what Trump did not anticipate was the same ferocious tenacity of the people of Minneapolis, people like Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who laid down their lives to protect their neighbors.

Driven by his own racism and specific hostility to Minneapolis Rep. Ilhan Omar, Trump apparently thought he could turn white Minnesotans against their immigrant neighbors, particularly Somalis. But this was always a ludicrous fantasy, given that Omar’s district is 60% white, and she’s always run as a unifying figure in a city that values just that.

And it wasn’t just Minneapolis. On Feb. 2, Minnesota Public Radio reported that nearly 30,000 Minnesotans had been trained as constitutional observers in 77 out of 87 counties in Minnesota. “The scale is unimaginable,” Edwin Torres Desantiago, manager of the Immigrant Defense Network, told MPE, “We have rapid response around the clock, seven days a week. We are actively responding to a case every six minutes across the state of Minnesota.” In addition, “another 6,000 volunteers are registered to help deliver food, give at-risk families rides, go to court hearings and translate documents,” MPR reported. And beyond that, untrained, thousands of others responded spontaneously to protect their neighbors when they saw masked thugs coming to kidnap them.

The Trump administration’s attempt to paint Good as a “deranged lunatic” who launched “an attack on the American people” quickly fell apart with the release of a video showing her last words, saying “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you” to her murderer. Similarly, Pretti was seen intervening to protect a woman attacked by ICE before they murdered him.

It wasn’t just middle America who saw themselves in Pretti and Good and saw ICE as a threat. It was elements of Trump’s base as well, furthering fractures that had begun with the Epstein files cover-up. A week after Good’s death, podcaster Joe Rogan compared ICE to the Gestapo. And on Feb 4, following Pretti’s death as well, the crowd at the AEW World Championship Eliminator match spontaneously burst out into chants of “Fuck ICE.” And this was the very sort of event that ICE recruitment efforts were reportedly trying to focus on.

By the time of Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show, the tide of public sentiment had clearly turned. Trump supporters tried to counter-program with a show headlined by an aged Kid Rock, but its abject failure to attract interest versus Bad Bunny recalled the Nazi’s embarrassment when their Munich Degenerate Art exhibition vastly outdrew the nearby exhibition of Nazi-approved art.

The Real Criminals

Two things were obvious from videos flooding out of Minneapolis: ICE was not going after “the worst of the worst,” and it was actually an agent of lawlessness, along with its agency partners, most notably CBP — Customs and Border Patrol. What’s more, hard data confirmed what millions saw.

On the first, a paper by economist Chloe East and colleagues, “ICE Arrests Across Trump’s First And Second Terms” found that Trump’s terms saw “marked increases in the number of arrests and much steeper decreases in the percent of those arrested with criminal convictions than during other periods,” and that “these patterns are much more dramatic following Trump’s second inauguration.” The percent with criminal convictions dropped from 52% in the year before Trump took office last January to 37% after the inauguration.

Worse still, most convictions were for non-violent crimes. A CBS news report, based on government data through Jan. 31, 2026, found that less than 14% had a violent criminal record, with the vast majority, 10.9%, guilty of assault, vs 0.9% guilty of homicide, kidnapping and arson combined. Another 2.1% were guilty of robbery or sexual assault, for a grand total of 3% who could credibly be considered “the worst of the worst.”

Equally disturbing is the record of lawlessness by ICE and border patrol. On Jan. 30, historian Garrett Graff testified before the “Illinois Accountability Commission,” established by Gov. J.B. Pritzker. The commission was to document what happened in Chicago, understand the roles of various Trump officials, with an eye on future prosecutions, and offer recommendations on fixing immigration enforcement.

“Criminality is so rampant inside CBP that it has seen one of its own agents or officers arrested every 24 to 36 hours since 2005,” Graff testified. “In total, according to CBP’s own discipline reports, over the 20 years from 2005 to 2024 — the last year numbers are available — at least 4,913 CBP officers and Border Patrol agents have been arrested themselves, some multiple times.” He went on to note that “The population of CBP agents and officers who have been arrested would make it roughly the nation’s fourth largest police department — equal to the size of the entire Philadelphia police.”

This historical baseline has yet to be compared with what’s happening now, but on Feb. 14, Reuters ran a story, “Courts have ruled 4,400 times that ICE jailed people illegally. It hasn’t stopped.” Immigrant detainees have filed more than 20,000 lawsuits seeking release from custody, they reported, while the Trump administration continues detentions, ignoring court rulings. And the flood of lawsuits “threatens to clog the judicial system.” In one decision, a George W. Bush appointee, Judge Thomas Johnston, wrote, “It is appalling that the Government insists that this Court should redefine or completely disregard the current law as it is clearly written.”

Against this state of lawlessness, Graff concluded, “America cannot survive as a free society if ICE and CBP continue to operate as they have over the last year — let alone as both agencies are turbocharged and empowered with even more funding, more officers, more guns, and more arrests.”

Concentration Camp Push and Pushback

But the turbocharging of ICE and CBP is already well underway. As the Washington Post reported on Feb. 13, government documents show plans to spend $38.3 billion turning warehouses into detention centers.

Days before the exact figures came out, Rachel Maddow interviewed a leader at Project Salt Box, a volunteer organization that tracks and disseminates information about this concentration camp project, so that local citizens can know what’s going on and organize to stop it. They’ve been successful enough that, for example, Mississippi GOP Senator Roger Wicker intervened to block plans to convert a warehouse in Byhalia, Mississippi, into a detention center. It’s a striking example of how citizen activism is leading the way in fighting against turning America into a police state.

On Feb. 10, Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps published a Beehive post, “Building the camps: The warehouseification of detention and initial thoughts on stopping it.” The post explains this warehousing of humans — why it’s a threat and why it’s necessary for everyone to move against it as quickly as possible.

We’re living through part of a common pattern. “Concentration camp regimes in their early stages often make use of large open infrastructure to convert into detention spaces,” Pitzer wrote. “Dachau was converted from a shuttered factory into a concentration camp in 1933.” With Trump’s declared intention of deporting up to 20 million people, “What we’re witnessing is the express repetition of a project on the scale of the larger concentration camp systems in history — the Soviet Gulag, the Nazi concentration camps, and Chinese labor camps in the People’s Republic of China.”

Although Democrats have limited power in Washington now, House and Senate Democrats held a joint oversight hearing on Feb. 4. In his opening remarks, Rep. Robert Garcia said, “We’re here because the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, and of course, broader agencies across DHS are completely out of control. … It is stunning to see how much we are spending across this country to terrorize, disfigure, in some cases kill U.S. citizens and people across this country.”

The family of Renee Good testified along with others who had survived ICE violence, including Marimar Martinez, a teacher’s assistant who was shot five times by an officer who then bragged about it to colleagues.

Writing about the hearing, Bouie wrote, “there is the power inherent in giving victims of wrongdoing a chance to tell their stories,” and referenced two historical precedents, the 1871 Klan hearings and the 1980s investigation of the World War II internment of Japanese Americans. He went on to say, “Any serious push to account for the actions of this government — to abolish the president’s private army, restructure immigration enforcement and punish anyone responsible for wrongdoing — must include recompense and repair for its victims,” with public investigation and testimony as its first step.

Bouie noted that we’d already had examples, including here in Los Angeles, which happened in late November. And he looked forward to a Democratic-led House, or Senate, or both, to further the process. But we should not fool ourselves. Trump will do everything he can to prevent such a future, including using ICE to intimidate voters on a mass scale, as other strongmen have repeatedly done for the past century and more. Political leaders need to do everything possible to fortify the people’s strength in fighting back against tyranny.

A hearing here, a hearing there, will not do much compared to the dramatic escalation of force that everyone knows Trump is capable of. If we want to preserve our democracy and the chance to secure justice for all those whose rights have been trampled, we need leaders to commit to an organized, ongoing process of letting the victims be heard and putting the perpetrators on notice that they will not be in power forever, and a day of accountability will come.