Locked Down. Rounded Up. Warehoused. The Rise of America’s Concentration Camps
By John W Whitehead and Nisha Whitehead from Global Research. Reposted with permission.
“No doubt concentration camps were a means, a menace used to keep order.”—Albert Speer, Nuremberg Trials
In 2021, amid a global pandemic, warnings that the federal government might repurpose warehouses into detention facilities on American soil were dismissed as speculative, alarmist, even conspiratorial.
Five years later, what was speculation is a blueprint for locking up whomever the government chooses to target.
According to investigative reports, the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement are actively purchasing warehouses, factories and industrial buildings across the country for use as detention centers—often with little public notice, minimal oversight, and virtually no accountability.
This is no longer a warning.
It is a five-alarm fire.
With the Trump administration moving forward with plans to rapidly acquire warehouses for what could become a nationwide mass detention network, it’s no longer a question of whether the government will expand mass detention to lock up Americans for defying its mandates but when.
This is how it begins.
The government already has the means, the muscle and the motivation. It has spent decades building a vast archipelago of prisons, detention centers, and emergency facilities capable of imprisoning large numbers of people.
Almost 70,000 people are currently being held by ICE. With $45 billion burning a hole in its budget, the Department of Homeland Security is spending big on its concentration camps in order to hold more people, for longer periods, with fewer constraints.
While the Trump administration insists that it is only targeting the “worst of the worst”—murderers, rapists, gang members, pedophiles and terrorists—most of those being rounded up have no criminal record. Being undocumented is a civil violation, not a crime.
This is where we have to tread cautiously, because authoritarian regimes love to play Orwellian word games, and the current administration is no exception.
Image: Official portrait of Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem (Public Domain)
Case in point: DHS Secretary Kristi Noem claims that every single individual arrested or detained has committed a crime, but being charged with or even suspected of a crime is very different from being convicted of a crime.
When the Secretary of Homeland Security equates an arrest with a crime, she isn’t just playing word games—she is effectively nullifying the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments’ guarantee of due process and the presumption of innocence.
If the bar for being arrested is merely committing a crime, we’d all be locked up.
It may come to that eventually.
Given the over-criminalization of the American legal code, which contains over 5,000 federal criminal statutes and hundreds of thousands of regulations—translation: every single American unknowingly commits at least three crimes a day—every American can be rendered a “criminal” at the government’s whim.
When you have a government in the business of rounding people up in order to fill warehouses and play to the optics of being tough on crime, it won’t just be undocumented immigrants getting rounded up.
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, political theorist Hannah Arendt warned that concentration camps were not built primarily for criminals. They were built to imprison the innocent—people rendered “criminal” by the state simply for who they were or what they believed.
These camps functioned as laboratories for total domination, where guilt was irrelevant and innocence offered no protection. Individuals were stripped of rights, reduced to categories, and rendered expendable.
That is the danger we are facing now: rightlessness in an age of rights.
When detention quotas replace due process, when people are locked up not for what they have done but for who the government decides they are, the machinery of authoritarianism is already in motion.
Reports of ICE smashing car windows, grabbing people off the streets, and detaining American citizens despite proof of legal status offer a preview of what lies ahead.
We’re not supposed to live in a “papers, please” society, and yet under Trump’s leadership, America is rapidly becoming one.
History has a name for what happens when governments abandon due process and begin locking people up for who they are rather than what they have done.
The next step is always logistical. Once the decision is made to detain people en masse, the state must find places to hold them—out of sight, out of reach, and outside the law.
That is where the warehouses come in.
Make no mistake: these are concentration camps in their earliest form, rebranded and revived for a new age.
“We need to get better at treating this like a business,” ICE director Todd M. Lyons said of deportations. “Like [Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”
This language has been used before.
Concentration camps were not initially designed as extermination centers. They were built to intimidate, isolate, and neutralize those deemed undesirable—political dissidents, religious minorities, social outcasts, and anyone perceived as a threat to the regime.
As the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum explains,
“The term concentration camp refers to a camp in which people are detained or confined, usually under harsh conditions and without regard to legal norms of arrest and imprisonment that are acceptable in a constitutional democracy.”
That is the point.
This is not about immigration.
It is about what happens when any government claims the power to decide who belongs, who poses a threat, and who can be disappeared for the sake of order.
The legal framework already exists.
Under the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the President and the military are authorized to detain individuals—including U.S. citizens—without access to family, legal counsel, or the courts if the government labels them terrorists.
That label can now be applied so interchangeably with the terms anti-government and extremist that it doesn’t take much to be considered a terrorist anymore.
The Department of Homeland Security, for example, broadly defines extremists as individuals and groups that are “mainly antigovernment,” reject federal authority, or question the legitimacy of government power. Military veterans have been flagged as potential extremist threats simply for being disgruntled or disillusioned. Ordinary Americans exercising their constitutional rights—speaking freely, protesting, criticizing the government, owning firearms, or demanding warrants—can find themselves on a government watch list.
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Protest at Los Angeles City Hall (January 30, 2026) (CC BY 4.0)
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As a New York Times editorial once warned, you may be viewed as an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, believe the economy is about to collapse, suspect the government will soon declare martial law, or display too many political bumper stickers on your car.
According to the FBI, espousing conspiracy theories or holding views that are contrary to the government’s can also qualify someone as a domestic terrorism concern.
This is what happens when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, courts, and police, but also give those agencies sweeping authority to detain individuals and lock them up for perceived wrongs without due process.
It is a system begging to be abused. And it has happened here before.
In the 1940s, Japanese-Americans were rounded up and imprisoned in concentration camps based solely on their ancestry. The Supreme Court upheld the policy in Korematsu v. United States (1944), concluding that national security concerns outweighed individual liberty.
Courts have a habit of recognizing injustice only after the fact, and the government has a tendency to sidestep the rule of law when it suits its purposes. As Justice Scalia once warned, “In times of war, the laws fall silent.”
The groundwork has been laid.
The infrastructure for domestic concentration camps has existed for decades.
FEMA—the Federal Emergency Management Agency—has long been tasked with emergency planning that includes large-scale detention capabilities.
Created by executive order in the 1970s, FEMA’s mandate expanded quietly. By the 1980s, it was involved in classified military-type training exercises carried out in conjunction with the Department of Defense. Code named Rex-84, federal agencies, including the CIA and the Secret Service, were trained on how to respond to domestic unrest and carry out mass round-ups.
FEMA’s role in planning for domestic internment and mass detention is well-documented.
Now if you’re going to have internment camps on American soil, someone has to build them— or repurpose existing structures to serve that function—and then staff them—and eventually fill them.
In 2006, the government awarded a Halliburton subsidiary a $385 million contract to build American detention facilities for use during “emergencies,” including mass immigration, “natural disasters,” or to support the rapid development of new programs in the event of other emergencies.
That rationale has now been updated for a new era.
Today, DHS and ICE are buying up and converting warehouses, factories, and industrial spaces across the country into detention facilities. These buildings—designed for storage and logistics, not human beings—are being outfitted with fencing, surveillance systems, holding areas, and makeshift sleeping quarters. Many operate outside the standards that apply to traditional correctional facilities, with fewer inspections, limited oversight, and little public visibility.
The government insists these warehouse detention sites are necessary to handle prisoner overflow, respond to emergencies, and maintain flexibility.
History tells a different story.
What begins as temporary becomes permanent. What is justified as exceptional becomes routine. And what is done to non-citizens has an uncanny way of expanding—especially when dissent, protest, or noncompliance are rebranded as threats to national security.
Once again, the language of emergency is being used to normalize extraordinary abuses of power.
Now, detention camps require not only buildings but lists of potential detainees, and here, too, the government is prepared.
For decades, the government has acquired and maintained, without warrant or court order, databases of individuals considered threats to national security. One such database—reportedly known as “Main Core”—contains millions of names and is intended for use during national emergencies to locate and detain perceived enemies of the state.
As Salon reports, this database, reportedly dubbed “Main Core,” is to be used by the Army and FEMA in times of national emergency or under martial law to locate and round up Americans seen as threats to national security.
In 2026, the static lists of the past have been replaced by “living” databases.
Fueled by agentic AI and mass data-scraping, the government’s surveillance architecture no longer relies on manual updates. These AI systems autonomously crawl social media, financial records, and geolocation data in real-time, creating high-accuracy “threat profiles” that are virtually impossible to escape.
Once you are flagged by an algorithm that operates without human oversight, you aren’t just a name on a list—you are a permanent node in a digital dragnet that follows you from your keyboard to the warehouse door.
This AI-driven dragnet is on the hunt using a specific, long-established ideological map. The technology has simply caught up to the government’s decades-old desire to categorize dissent as a national security threat.
Remember back in 2009, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released two reports, one on “Rightwing Extremism,” which broadly defines rightwing extremists as individuals and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely,” and one on “Leftwing Extremism,” which labeled environmental and animal rights activist groups as extremists.
Incredibly, both reports used the words terrorist and extremist interchangeably.
That same year, the DHS launched Operation Vigilant Eagle, which calls for surveillance of military veterans returning from Iraq, Afghanistan and other far-flung places, characterizing them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.”
These reports indicated that for the government, so-called extremism is not a partisan matter.
Anyone seen as opposing the government—whether they’re Left, Right or somewhere in between—is a target.
Which brings us to the inevitable conclusion: when the government claims the authority to broadly define who is a threat, uses taxpayer funds to erect a network of concentration camps across the country, and methodically builds databases identifying anyone seen as opposing the government as an extremist, the question is not if that power will be abused—but when and how often.
As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is the slippery slope.
If the price for fighting illegal immigration is the complete abdication of our constitutional republic, that price is too high.
The means do not justify the ends.
The police state’s solutions to our so-called problems pose the greatest threat to our freedoms.
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This article was originally published on The Rutherford Institute.
Constitutional attorney and author John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute. His most recent books are the best-selling Battlefield America: The War on the American People, the award-winning A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction novel, The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be contacted at staff@rutherford.org.
Nisha Whitehead is the Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.
Featured image: Clashes occur during an ICE protest in Chicago (June 10, 2025) (CC0)
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