Trump Camps

February 15, 2026

The ongoing saga of ICE’s immigrant detention centers is at the core of the Trump administration’s murderous racist project of ethnic cleansing.

What can we know about what happens to immigrants and others caught in the ICE crackdown once they’ve been arrested and hauled away? Very few outsiders have access into the jails and detention centers, where an estimated 73,000 people are currently warehoused on any given day. But stories are emerging, told by the lucky ones who get released, or reported to their lawyers or relatives from inside.

The Minnesota Star Tribune reports that a young Muslim woman was shackled at the ankles and held inside a bathroom with three men at the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis. They were given no bedding or pillows. Meals consisted of one sandwich a day. The sink faucet didn’t work, but the one toilet did. When the men pulled down their pants to use it, the woman hid her face. After 24 hours with the men, the young woman -- a refugee with legal status to be in the U.S. -- was moved to a different bathroom in the building's basement, where she was locked in for five more days.

A January report from the American Immigration Council documents the overcrowding at the Krome Processing Center in Miami. Krome’s maximum capacity is 611, but ICE has been keeping hundreds more there, peaking at 1,806. The crowding was so bad that multiple women were left in chains for hours on a bus outside the building; with no access to a restroom they were forcd to urinate and defecate on the floor of the bus. Inside the center, people were being fed just rice and bread for days at a time. (And in Texas, a Russian family told NBC News about the worms in their food.) Illness ran rampant through the Miami facility, including a tuberculosis outbreak. We know measles is running through the Dilley camp in Texas too.

Women with small children, people who had the bad luck of being refugees from oppressive regimes, all languish in these facilities side by side with criminals, the disabled and sick, and US citizens. US courts have ruled 4,400 times that ICE has jailed people illegally. It hasn’t stopped despite those rulings—and most of those 4,400 lucky enough to have lawyers are still incarcerated.

Back to the camps. Here’s the dictionary definition of a concentration camp: a facility where people are confined, typically without trial, because of their affiliation with a given political or ethnic group. A concentration camp’s inmates are detained outside the rule of law, often for exploitation, forced labor, or punishment. Well-known 20^th-century concentration camps include the Nazi labor camps and death camps in Germany and eastern Europe during World War II, the Japanese-American internment camps in this country during World War II, the Soviet gulags from the Thirties to the mid-Fifties, and the forced herding of indigenous people in the US and Canada into reservations and boarding schools. Make no mistake: today, concentration camps are housing those tens of thousands of victims of Trump’s and Stephen Miller’s white supremacist cruelty.    Immigration detention centers are located nationwide, with high concentrations in Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, and California. New York Times writer Jamelle Bouie writes that the administration “is using detention to inflict pain on anyone—immigrant or citizen—caught in its grasp. […] What we see now, with the immigration dragnets in American cities and the horrific conditions in the detention facilities, is what the president promised in his campaign.”

DHS is now undertaking a massive expansion of its network of Trump camps. With $38 billion in funding exclusively for that purpose, they are buying or leasing huge warehouses to convert into mass detention centers in their ethnic cleansing project. $38 billion is more than the total annual spending by twenty-two states combined. As Rachel Maddow says, if you build them, you’re planning to fill them. And to fill facilities of this size, ICE cannot limit itself to "the worst of the worst." They’ll have to be sweeping up families, workers, asylum seekers, taxpayers. They’re starting with immigrants, but we know they harbor no warm feelings toward any people of color, toward sexual minorities, or toward people who don’t agree with them.

They say these prisons are just way-stations for deportations in a week, two weeks, three weeks. What do you think? What do you think Hitler’s deputies told the detainees they brought in cattle cars to their camps in Dachau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald? “Here, step this way, have a refreshing shower.” And what was it like to be an average good German living in a city of, say, Poulsbo’s size? Why did so few ordinary Germans object to those camps being built? They couldn’t imagine something as inhumane as a labor camp, let alone an extermination factory. They were comfortable, happily shopping, strolling down their version of Front Street on a sunny day. In 2026, we have no excuse; in this media age, we know what is going on. If we are shocked that the German people did nothing to about the camps in their midst, we need to be even more appalled at the passivity of Americans, unless we Americans get loud and fight back.

Who benefits from this massive expansion of Trump camps? Billionaires, Trump donors and their companies. The beneficiaries of the Trump camp boom are businesses in the private prison industry. The GEO Group, for one, in late 2025 was already reporting $254 billion in profits from their government contracts to build new facilities. A quarter of a trillion dollars. ICE’s model is to turn the building, outfitting, and maintenance of the detention centers entirely over to private companies. Here's what they don’t want us to know: opposition is underway, and it’s working. Communities are learning about DHS’s purchases of these properties, they’re fighting back and winning. So far, nationally, potential sites in five states have already been blocked by local opposition, and at least twelve more are being actively contested right now. In a Virginia town, a warehouse deal was killed by protests and a unanimous resolution by a county board. In Utah, residents picketed until the property owner refused to sell. In Kansas City, a county official refused to stay silent and that brought national attention that derailed ICE's plans. Even in reddest Oklahoma, a deal was stopped following intense public outcry and opposition by local government. The administration wanted to do these acquisitions quietly. But the secret is out -- and when people show up, the deals fall apart.

How can we stop this activity locally? Just three days ago, King County started taking aggressive measures to block the establishing of more of the for-profit Trump camps. An executive order signed by the King County Executive and supported by the county councilmembers prohibits using county property for federal immigration enforcement. The order also proposes a moratorium on new detention facilities in unincorporated areas. The document is unambiguous in its intention to protect the rights of immigrants and to use all legal means to limit ICE’s reach in the Seattle area. Pierce County is also on the move, staging vigorous protest against the abuses in the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma.

Why can’t we ensure that Kitsap County takes the same initiatives? Who among us will pledge to work with the county to encourage them to issue similar policy statements?

The very least we must all do is stay informed and vigilant, continue to show up to protest, refuse to buy the Administration’s lies, and educate our friends and neighbors. Unlike Germany eighty-five years ago, we have the lessons of history to learn from and to refuse to repeat. If Oklahoma can reject ICE prisons, certainly Kitsap can too.   

Our biggest obstacle is our own passivity. Let’s launch into action and preserve the rule of law in our community.