@Mongoose, it looks like most Americans don’t really want concentration camps in the United States. Wrong side of history by the looks of it. From the start, and every time you post, you stand for what is ugly in America, you promote hatred of “illegals”, relishing in your dehuminization of them. One of the pundits last night mentioned how this ugly chapter in American history will be looked at as a dark time when we allowed our darker angels to dictate our behavior. Hopefully, we won’t match the extremes of other fascistic eruptions. I know we will come to our senses someday. Some of us had our good sense and understanding of what was happening from day one.
The next phase of ICE’s big ramp-up: a nationwide network of vast detention facilities. But guess what? Even parts of Red America are saying no.
newrepublic.com
When Stephen Miller
offered his first big rollout of Donald Trump’s immigration agenda during the 2024 campaign, he demonstrated great enthusiasm for the idea of giant migrant camps. He gushed about creating “vast holding facilities” built on “open land,” which would enable Trump to escalate the volume and speed of deportations to unprecedented heights. Trembling with excitement, Miller vowed: “President Trump will do whatever it takes.”
But a funny thing has happened with Miller’s authoritarian fever dreams. As plans for these new detention facilities have become public, they’re encountering opposition in some very unlikely places. Notably, that includes regions that backed Trump in 2024.
Which in turn captures something essential about this moment: The public backlash unleashed by Trump’s immigration agenda runs far deeper than revulsion at imagery of ICE violence. It’s now seemingly coalescing against the goal of mass removals as a broader ideological project.
We’re now learning that this year, ICE
plans to retrofit around two dozen vast new facilities. In keeping with Trump-Miller’s visions, ICE vows to detain an additional 80,000 people in them. Some
will reportedly hold up to 10,000 detainees apiece. In other words, the Trump-Miller threat to create a system of new detention camps is just getting underway in earnest.
To put a ghoulish twist on the oft-discussed ideal of bureaucratic “capacity,” this will allow Trump and Miller to imprison and then deport vastly more people a whole lot faster. Right now,
more than 70,000 migrants are languishing in detention—a record—but the administration is running out of space. Add another 80,000 beds and it would supercharge expulsion capacity.
Yet these detention dreams are hitting stiff opposition. ICE wants to buy a warehouse in Virginia’s Hanover County, which went for Trump
by 26 points in 2024 and combines rural territory with Richmond’s northern suburbs. Residents recently
turned out in force and angrily condemnedthe proposed sale, with local reports
suggesting only a “handful” backed it. The GOP-heavy Board of Supervisors
opposed the transaction. The warehouse owner
canceled the sale.
Meanwhile, in New Jersey, the Republican-dominated Roxbury Township Council, in slightly-Trump-leaning Morris County, recently
voted unanimously to oppose ICE’s plans to buy a warehouse there, with some locals
sharply protesting the scheme for humanitarian reasons. The Republican mayor of Oklahoma City
came out against a proposed ICE warehouse, with the owner also nixing the sale. Officials in places like Kansas City, Missouri and Salt Lake City, Utah
are also dead set against plans for ICE camps in their locales.
Guess what: The opposition is only getting started. As MS NOW’s Rachel Maddow noted in a
useful overview of the opposition Monday night, we’re already seeing mass protests outside
existing facilities. Those are smaller than some of the gargantuan new camps ICE hopes to create, yet migrant
deaths are already soaring in the current facilities, and the bigger ones will be even worse. “If they build them, they will fill them,” Maddow said, labeling them “prison camps.” She added: “How do you think those facilities are going to be run?”
The pushback has come together surprisingly quickly. What explains this? A bizarrely overlooked finding in a
recent Pew Research poll sheds some light: It finds that a huge majority of Americans oppose mass immigrant detention. The wording is critical here:
Do you favor or oppose keeping large numbers of immigrants in detention centers while their cases are decided?
Favor: 35 percent
Oppose: 64 percent
Note that huge majorities are against keeping immigrants in detention
while their cases are being decided. This is a decisive repudiation of a key pillar of MAGA ideology. Trump and Miller have long treated the release of immigrants awaiting court dates as something akin to profound national humiliation, even a harbinger of cultural decay and civilizational decline.
But the broad American mainstream—including 59 percent of white voters in the Pew poll—appears to oppose detaining them. With majorities also
opposing deporting non-criminal undocumented immigrants and longtime residents, that MAGA understanding is just not widely shared. For Trumpworld, mass detention isn’t merely about facilitating deportations. It’s also supposed to correct the grievous national wound that previous presidents inflicted by releasing migrants into the interior. Is it really possible that majorities are actually okay with such a horror? Apparently it is.
Rachel Maddow looks at how communities around the country are finding ways to prevent Donald Trump from establishing immigration prison camps where they live. From pressuring real estate firms, to speaking out at town council hearings to revoking permits, Kristi Noem's Department of Homeland...
www.ms.now
