Andrea Pitzer (2:34)

In August of last year, but since December, three people have died while in ICE custody.

Professor Linus Chan (2:41)

Beatings by officials, the denial of medical care, housing areas flooded with excrement, and inedible food that caused illness, access to.

Andrea Pitzer (2:51)

Medical attention and basic health care is just not happening. And meanwhile, in Camp East Montana, two tuberculosis, tuberculosis cases are being reported at that facility.

Host (likely Mark Joseph Stern or a Slate Amicus host) (3:03)

On this week's show, we're going to look under the hood of what's happened to the law of immigration and habeas corpus with two guests who point out that if you think this is all about immigration law, qua immigration law, think again.

Professor Linus Chan (3:16)

This administration is deliberately using detention as the tool and as the weapon to try to push as many people out. And they are explicit about this.

Andrea Pitzer (3:31)

This is not the end point of how horrible suffering can happen, right? What we're already seeing, people lying in feces, denied medicine, being beaten, sexually assaulted, not having access to food, no access to due process, even when courts are sometimes ordering it. All of that is the start point.

Host (likely Mark Joseph Stern or a Slate Amicus host) (3:49)

Later on in the show, we're going to talk to Andrea Pitzer, a writer whose 2014 book on the history of concentration camps has unfortunately become essential reading. Andrea explains what we are seeing, what we're not seeing, and most importantly, what we can do about mass detention. But first, Trump came in with day one executive order, shock and awe, much of it directed at immigrants in a nation of immigrants. Almost 13 months later, the accumulated directives and practices have been translated into brutal national policies targeting everyday people throughout the US and upending decades of immigration enforcement. We're trying to cover this as a legal story and to get our arms around the scale and the speed and the scope of this huge project. But there are people, like my first guest, who are trying to keep up with this in real time for their real clients and can convey for us the real stakes on the ground. Professor Linus Chan is the James H. Binger Clinical professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and the faculty director of the Detainee Rights Clinic. Through his work at the clinic, he represents people who have either been detained by ICE or are in danger of being detained by ice. Linus, I know you've had a really busy couple of weeks, but I want to start by just heartfelt welcome to Amicus and thank you for the work that you're doing right now.

Professor Linus Chan (5:18)

Well, thank you very much for having me. I've been a big fan and reader of yours for quite some time. I remember reading your column all the Way, you know, the early days of Slate, if I remember correctly. So thank you very much for having me.

Host (likely Mark Joseph Stern or a Slate Amicus host) (5:32)

So I thought maybe we could start because this is gonna be a pretty grim conversation. But we did have some slightly hopeful news. On Thursday night. A judge, a Trump appointee, issued a scorcher 41 page opinion that blasted ICE for barring immigration detainees from their right to counsel, their constitutionally protected right to counsel. And Judge Nancy Brissell issued a TRO about treatment at the Whipple Detention center in Minneapolis. Now, I know the DOJ is going to appeal this, and maybe they've already done that by the time this show drops, but could you just tell us when somebody is swept up by ice. How do they access council right now? How much of a difference? Assuming, per the new order, they're going to get 72 hours to do so, how much of a difference is that going to make for clients like yours?

Professor Linus Chan (6:24)

Oh, it's going to be a huge difference. And in some ways it's just returning things to what was a status quo quo. I will be frank. Not as if the status quo was a paragon of attorney access, but at the same time, there had always been an operative norm that the ability for people to talk to their lawyers and simply the ability of people to not suddenly feel like they have been transported and had no ability to let their loved ones know what's going on and themselves may not know what's going on is really important. So it does have a huge difference. One of the big changes we had seen, we had gotten to the point where their logistical acumen at being able to take a person that was arrested at, let's say, nine in the morning and have them on a plane by almost noon. It was working like clockwork in many ways. What you saw was people being detained with the old processes. They would get detained and then they would go through what's called processing. People might have their biometrics done. There might be fingerprinting, there might be an interview with an officer. They need to confirm information that they have in the system. They confirm their database information. And after that conversation, they. They would then be put in a holding area, usually for a few hours, and then put into short term deciding which of the county jails in Minnesota that they would be at. And most of the time the person's stay for detention would be either in Minnesota or around the Midwest. Right. And the big change here was people were not going through that longer process. They were going very, very quickly. And they could find themselves suddenly in El New Mexico, other places, most often in Texas, because the detention capacity in Texas has grown quite a bit and do so in a couple hours. The frustrating thing is, let's assume that this is a client of yours. Even if you know they were at the Bishop Whipple building, there was no easy way to contact. If you go online to the online detainee locator, a lot of the times it would say the person is in custody, but it won't tell you where they are at. And it says call ICE at this number. And of course I've done this, I've called the number and nobody ever picks up. Right. It's just a dead number during this period of time. So then you would have to not know at all what's going on. And because, of course, we've all heard of the stories of how quickly they have put people on an actual plane out of the country. And because we know they've done so even when they legally should not be able to do so. And on top of that, know that we have a Trump administration that says that even if they know that it was a mistake, that they don't have to correct that mistake because they kind of say that this is a foreign power problem. Right. That if the person's no longer in our custody, we don't have any means to fix it if they are out of the country, which is what's happened to a young woman, I believe, from Central America. She was deported in violation of the court order. The court asked for them to bring her back. And the Trump administration is demurred, saying we can't. She was on a student visa. That student visa is no longer around and we're not going to issue her a new one. And that's it. That raises the stakes quite a bit for people who really are, you know, I mean, obviously the biggest source of concern and trauma and whatnot comes from family members, many of which who are trying to figure out whether their family member has been kidnapped or whether they're in immigration detention and won't be able to know for several hours. So the fact that we have this order that is both trying to make sure that there is attorney access as well as to slow the, that process down of transfers can be tremendously important and powerful because it also gets into another issue which was in terms of habeas access.

Host (likely Mark Joseph Stern or a Slate Amicus host) (11:01)

I think you just anticipated where I wanted to start picking your brain when you said, let's be clear, Daya, this immigration system was not a walk in the park before. This was always an uphill climb. And I think folks don't necessarily realize that it has ever been almost impossible. Now it's just impossible with the side of Kafka, as you've just outlined. So I'm actually going to ask you to give us a little bit of context of what your job was like, what life was like for asylum and immigration seekers, say, I don't know, five years ago. Let's pick a day and tell us what the lay of the land was before, and then we can talk about what's changed in hopefully a systematic way.

Professor Linus Chan (11:52)

I think one of the assumptions going in for quite a few people was the only people who get detained by the immigration system are people who are either been convicted of a crime or who have otherwise provided some evidence of being a community or national security threat. And I would say that I've been doing this work for a little over 20 years, and that has never been true. There have been quite a few people that can find themselves in immigration detention who have never run afoul of laws and who most people would say are not a threat. What I think has changed, though, is even though that has always been true and always had occupied a certain percentage of people that were in immigration detention. And of course, immigration detention operates in a way where you have to prove why you shouldn't be detained, rather than the government having to prove why you should be right. And people who care about civil liberties might find themselves puzzled at that flip in the idea of who has the burden. But it is an important aspect of immigration that if you're a non citizen, you are the one that needs to prove why you shouldn't be detained. But two operative norms worked that were pretty strong. One operative norm was that once there was a decision about whether or not you should be released or not, that decision would be honored unless you did something to break that. So as an example, you know, you talk about five years ago, and five years ago, there was quite a bit of people that were trying to come through the border to apply for asylum. And there are many, many different reasons and causes for this. And that is something that quite a few people are looking at. But that was the reality. People who were processing people at the border had a choice, right? They could, in their choice, when they're processing them, they could say, okay, this person's going to be detained, or we're not going to detain them, we're going to give them paperwork, we're going to tell them that they need to show up to court, and then they'll show up to court. And at that point, I think it was like an 89% return rate to court, right? Because no one wants to be a fugitive. It's an awful feeling to constantly feel like you need to look over your shoulders. So most people, when they're told that they need to show up for an appointment, they'll show up for the appointment, even if the stakes might include having to be deported to a country that you fear being harmed. So that was one operative norm, is that if there was a decision, unless, of course, you know, you commit a crime, you do something, that that decision to release you would be a good decision. And that norm has been completely broken. Right? That norm is one in which people have either gotten released when they were at the border, or they actually went through an entire process, got a bond, right, Went to a judge, proved to a judge that they shouldn't be detained, received a bond, paid the bond, and have otherwise been doing, you know, all the things that they need to do. And then they suddenly find themselves now, under this administration, detained and arrested and having their bond revoked. And then the other operative norm was essentially like that there were certain ideas about whether and why someone should be detained, even though you don't need to have committed a crime. There was this rubric, right, that if you are a flight risk or you haven't had a whole lot of family ties, and then other rubrics that kind of norms would be certain things, like if you were pregnant, that's actually a written policy that this administration has decided no longer to follow. But if you were pregnant or nursing, if you were otherwise a victim of a crime yourself or a victim of trafficking, that you would perhaps not have immunity from being detained. The policy would be that they would have to have a really good reason to want to detain you in light of those factors. And right now, what we're seeing is the only operative norm is if they can meet their arrest quota. And that is something that has been pretty dramatic shift, and it's really impacted a lot of people's ways of thinking about their relationship to the federal government. Like, what can we trust? Like, you told us to be in court, we're in court, you're going to arrest us. Like, how? Why is that? We followed the policy. We followed what you told us to do. You know, one of the big things that we had to deal with was this idea that they suddenly started detaining refugees. I know that there's been some media attention to it, but I think what is remarkable and really scary is that their authority to detain refugees in that context is that they were not even trying to say that they could deport them, because not only did they come in lawfully, they had admitted they had paperwork, they went through a congressional approved process. They are here lawfully, and no one is claiming at this point in time that they could be removed or that they could have their refugee status taken away, it's just that they need to go through a process to get a green card. So the federal government now suddenly breaking with not only their own legal memorandum and processes, not only, you know, aspects of norms and laws, they suddenly say, well, there's a statute here that says custody. Because that one word of custody, we are going to. And this is what has happened to many of the refugees. Go to their house, follow them at work, follow them at the grocery store, take them, put them in handcuffs, transport them to Texas on the same day that they arrest them, right? Not tell them what's going on and then have them sit into, you know, when we say detention, there's no difference. In Minnesota, their detention is county jails. In this particular situation, it could be a private detention center, but it's a prison. And let them sit there for a week until we arrange for an interview. That to me is remarkable because detention, immigration detention was always supposed to be tied to deportation. Now they're saying that they can do it, even if all that you need to do is process them for paperwork. And it has caused a tremendous amount of fear, particularly to a very vulnerable group of people. These are people that are by definition been fleeing persecution, many of whom have had to, you know, right before coming to the United States, had to live in refugee camps, sometimes for years. And then they get flipped over and not properly explain what the heck is going on. They're talked to by officers who also don't know what's going on. And then, you know, many of them don't have lawyers to begin with because for most of the time, the refugee processing, refugee resettlement agencies, it's mostly paperwork, especially after they've come to the United States. That's sort of what I feel is like the largest changes is like one of the challenges is, well, what's different? Well, many of the laws didn't change. Right. Congress has not passed that many laws. The one which is the Lake and Riley act, which ironically has had probably the least impact on what's going on. But it's really those norm breaking ideas and the on the ground decisions to like pretty much try to assert maximalist power is what's really impacting people.

Host (likely Mark Joseph Stern or a Slate Amicus host) (20:10)

So in keeping with this theme, Linus, you've mentioned some things that have changed that have caused this really rapid disassembly of immigration protections. And you've talked about access to attorneys, you've talked about collapsing the distinction between refugees and, you know, folks with other statuses. You mentioned habeas. Do you want to talk about how that's changed? Because it seems to me that's another really cornerstone. People glaze over. It seems hyper technical, but I think your point when you mentioned it is this is not hyper technical at all. This is really where the rubber meets the road.

Professor Linus Chan (20:49)

Yeah. So habeas, right. The Great Writ, it's in our Constitution. It is a English Tradition that predates our country is the general idea that if the government wants to imprison someone, then at some point or another, they need to justify that imprisonment. And if that imprisonment violates any law, and in this case the United States violates the Constitution, then a court can order that person to be released. There are only a couple of situations, right, that allow for the writ to be suspended. And there has been a lot of fear in Minnesota that the federal government would use protests and other legitimate aspects of the First Amendment to then justify the invocation of the Insurrection act, which would then potentially be a precursor to justify the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus, in which case then you would have very few options for people who are detained unlawfully to be able to get released. That's the whole point of suspending the writ of habeas corpus. Now, the history of the writ of habeas corpus and immigration is a very long one. In fact, it goes all the way back to the Chinese exclusion cases, which is back in the 1870s, 1860s, 1880s, where the federal government were trying to exclude Chinese people from coming to the United States, saying that they were not in fact allowed to come to the United States, even if in some cases they were US Citizens or had the proper documentation again. And the way that the people would challenge the laws or challenge the policy was through the writ of habeas corpus. And there was a period of time, which was before what's called the administrative period, where the writ of habeas corpus was the only way to challenge an order of deportation. Right. Let's say you were order deported and you face now banishment from your country. The only way to get any sort of judge to look at, and what I mean by judge, I mean federal judge. Article three, meaning, you know, they are part of the written, part of the Constitution, was to give a writ of habeas corpus. Now, in the intervening years, there's been a dramatic shift that started most dramatically in the 1990s, late 90s, where Congress started to really not want immigrants to file writs of habeas corpus to challenge removal orders. And they started to take away the ability of courts to do that. And there was very dramatic was in 2005, there was a passage of what's called the Real ID act, which was a culmination of post September 11th sort of commissions and reports. And really this idea that the problem with immigration enforcement was too much review, too much legal process. Right. This is similar to the era of death penalty. The problem with the death penalty is there's too much access to courts. So they cut it off. And they basically said that no court can look at the lawfulness of immigration deportation orders, even through habeas. That there is one way, and the only way is through circuit court review, having federal appellate courts eventually review it. That was a huge, dramatic change. What it did it didn't do, though, is it didn't prevent people from arguing that their detention was unlawful. And so while it prevented people from arguing that their removal or their deportation order was unlawful, it didn't prevent them from saying their detention was unlawful. And so one of the reasons why that becomes so important is because this administration is deliberately using detention as the tool and as the weapon to try to push as many people out. And they are explicit about this. When the students were getting notices that suddenly their visas were being revoked, they were getting letters that said, by the way, if you don't want to end up detained, you might want to leave. Now, on the CBP1 Home app, they say, hey, you don't want to get detained, you can then go ahead and sign up, get $1,000 and leave. There's a reason why they are gleefully talking about all the money that they're using to build Alligator Alcatraz, and because it's driving that. So when they expand detention, when they expand its usage, when they go back on the former norms, well, there's only one way to actually get people to examine whether they could do that or not, and that's through the writ of habeas corpus. The writ of habeas corpus, as powerful as it is, and it is, there's been all of these legal doctrines lately that have sort of made it more difficult to use. And so one of them is what's called the immediate custodian rule. You can only file a habeas in the district court where they are actually being detained. So when I referenced earlier how people didn't know where they were going, how quickly they were getting transferred, that has become one of the controversies between litigants, the court, and immigration and customs enforcement, where a lot of the time lawyers, we would file a habeas. I had this situation where a client of mine was detained on one morning. I filed it the next day, right? This is before how quickly the transfers became clear. I filed it. I looked at her up on the detainee locator, couldn't find her family, didn't know where that she was. They couldn't call her. No one knew where they were. No one was picking up. And this was a weekend. It was Saturday that they picked her up. I filed the habeas corpus on Sunday. Their first reply to that habeas corpus was, oh, you filed in the law in court. By the time you filed it, she was already in Houston. Right. And again, September 11, Rumsfeld v. Padilla, which is this case post September 11 said you have to file it within the District of Confinement, which meant that I was supposed to have filed it in Houston even though I didn't know where she was. Now that has led to arguments and discussions about whether or not that immediate custodian rule applies. If you don't know the immediate custodian and you've done everything you can to try to find out. So at least on that one area, there has been more and more understanding from the courts as they have also seen what ICE has been doing with these transfers and realizing that there is a need to protect the ability to file writ of habeas corpus.

Host (likely Mark Joseph Stern or a Slate Amicus host) (28:10)

More in a moment with Linus Chan of the University of Minnesota Law School.

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Professor Linus Chan (29:28)

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Host (likely Mark Joseph Stern or a Slate Amicus host) (31:04)

Let's return now to my conversation with Professor Linus Chan. You mentioned Article 3 judges in robes, neutral arbiters constitutionally designated as such. And there's two sides of the judicial coin that I'd love to hear you reflect on. One is the determination last year at the Supreme Court when they were ostensibly hearing the birthright citizenship case about no more nationwide injunctions. And I know that has absolutely fundamentally changed what a judge can do. And then it's an ancillary question. But I know you're living it, which is there are judges who are issuing orders day by day by day all around you, and they're just being ignored. So it feels to me that there are two flavors of disempowering the judicial branch.

Professor Linus Chan (31:55)

Yeah.

Host (likely Mark Joseph Stern or a Slate Amicus host) (31:56)

I would just love to hear your thoughts on. You know, we always say on this show, Linus, like, people have this fanciful idea that the constitutional crisis will come when, like, someone rings a giant bell and the sprinkler system goes off. But, like, you have judicial power being thwarted and judicial orders being disregarded every day in your world.

Professor Linus Chan (32:17)

Well, the administration was clear. Someone who was representing the views of the Department of Justice essentially said that they do not view district court decisions as binding law that they had to follow. And that has huge implications. If you don't mind, I want to talk about one of them because it intersects with the question of nationwide injunctions and intersects with the question of habeas and class action, specifically class action habeas. So there was a decision earlier this week that the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals basically allowed for a new way of reading the immigration statute that provided for what's called mandatory detention for quite a few people. How that decision came about started way earlier than that. It started with one immigration judge in Tacoma, Washington, who was the first immigration judge who decided the statute, as written, allowed for this idea of mandatory detention. Now, lawyers in that case disagreed. But and this is a unique part of immigration law, you can't appeal to a federal circuit court about questions of detention. So what they did do is they went to the federal district court on an action of habeas, and the federal district court agreed with the litigant, saying that application of the law is incorrect. It's an incorrect reading of the law. You cannot deny people a bond hearing simply because they are inadmissible under 212.

Host (likely Mark Joseph Stern or a Slate Amicus host) (33:59)

Right.

Professor Linus Chan (34:00)

So don't get into technical. But they basically, the district court said they disagreed. Now, the other immigration courts said, well, you can free that one person. But what started happening is the immigration judges, your decision is not binding on me. You're not my boss, right. You're not in the Department of Justice. I read your decision and I disagree with it. But you're the judicial branch, but you're a district court judge. I'm the executive branch and I'm over here. We're co equal interpreters of the Constitution. I don't have to listen to you until you review a case in which I prevent someone, right, Essentially saying, I don't have to change my practice. I can continue to deny bond hearings. So what did the lawyers do in that situation? Well, the lawyers said, all right, then we're going to go ahead and seek what's called a declaratory judgment. Not only are we going to force you to give that one litigant, the one that you denied, a bond hearing, a bond hearing, we're now going to say that we're going to declare this policy and this interpretation unconstitutional or illegal. So they did. So what did the administration do? Says declaratory judgments are not binding. They basically said, oh, it's just like an advisory. It's a practice. So then it was starting to spread, right? Because of course, this administration liked what was going on, liked that interpretation, and they started spreading nationwide In California, they decided to go ahead and start bringing a class action challenging this policy. Now, there was a case in the Supreme Court that looked at the intersection between habeas and class actions. And what they said was, yes, you can bring a class action habeas, but the only thing that can result from the class action habeas is a declaratory judgment. You cannot individually create relief for all members of the class. This is weird, right? Because one of the justifications that the Supreme Court used when talking about preliminary injunctions as not being authorized nationwide was they said the real way to get around this was to Use class actions. If you wanted relief nationwide, then certify a class. You could even certify a class. That is what's called prospective certification. So that's what they did in California. But of course earlier the court had said you can only get declaratory relief. Built into that norm is, well, if you get a declaratory decision, then that means right there's a understanding you would follow that decision or you will appeal it. You can't just ignore it. But that's exactly what happened. In fact, they got guidance from Department of Justice saying you do not have to follow that decision. Immigration judges throughout the country who were put in this impossible situation because even if they agreed that the declaratory judgment was correct, they were being told up top, they you don't have to abide by it. So you had basically chaos that forced everyone to start filing habeas and non class action habeas. They forced everyone to file habeas to try to individually get people released. And that's exactly what started happening in Minnesota. Why there was this jump right from December 1st. I looked at it was 12 habeas a week to at some point deep into it in mid January, I saw more than 130 habeas filed in one week. And that was because at least half of them at some point were all based on the fact that they were trying to get the government to release someone when there was already a class declaratory already a declare the policy unlawful and unconstitutional. So this intersection between nationwide injunctions not being allowed, the Supreme Court justice saying, well, you have class, but then habeas class actions not allowing for immediate release, but only declaratory and combined with the administration that says district court decisions are not ones that we find binding. In other words, if we disagree with a district court judge or we can continue the practice that the district court judges found as unlawful or unconstitutional. And unfortunately, what I will say is that strategy has played out for them. When the 5th Circuit came around and said we are going to disagree with that district court decision that found this unlawful and unconstitutional, we're going to go ahead and uphold the administration. And now you have more chaos because you have people going and saying, well, what's going on? There's a declaratory. You know, there was a class action, then there's the fifth Circuit saying, well that interpretation is wrong. And now you have a whole lot more incentive. Right? Remember, you can only file the habeas where someone is actually detained. So the incentive to transport people from Minnesota to Texas becomes huge. Because in Texas the habeas courts cannot release people based on that theory because the fifth Circuit has agreed with them. So that is sort of the chaos that's going around and why all of this is now getting funneled into the federal courts despite the fact that Congress had tried over the many years from the 1990s and on to actually prevent federal courts from looking at the immigration system.

Host (likely Mark Joseph Stern or a Slate Amicus host) (40:01)

Linus, I want to end, if we might, with this question about detention because I think the point you have made is that the conditions of detention and the scope of what is coming is the end in itself here because we want people to self deport and that what we are really seeing here is a weaponization of the detention itself. And I think that that seems intuitive, right? We are hearing about the conditions, abuse and hunger and lack of medical treatment. I mean, it's all broken through, I think, to some degree. But I think that your larger point is detention has become the objective. And the crueler the detention, the bigger the win for this administration.

Professor Linus Chan (40:56)

One of the things that's always been a remarkable, and I use the word remarkable because I don't know, I kind of get stuck on these adjectives. But I will say this is one of the things growing up as a Gen Xer is there's always this idea of freedom and the American view that we are a free country. And if you look at what freedom means, it seems pretty axiom. I just think, oh well, freedom means not being put in jail, right? But what I think has really become true generally in our society and now more specifically with immigration, is that we have gotten so used to this idea that we can be detained, that we can be imprisoned, that the justifications that the government has to imprison us, which there are justifications. But it wasn't until I would argue one of the most important decisions in the 1980s which justified denying criminal bail really has led to this idea that as long as the government says you're a danger and you're a flight risk, you are going to have to disprove it before you can get released. And even though the criminal system has a very important idea that the burden should be on the government and not on the person being detained, and many immigration folks are trying to push the immigration system to more resemble that burden. I think if you speak to most on the ground criminal defense attorneys, it's just words on a piece of paper that there has been an unfortunate acceptance of the idea that it's okay to be detained. In fact, this whole thing in Minnesota, where they are arresting protesters or arresting observers, then they might spend eight hours or overnight and then being released in negative 20 degree temperatures in the middle of a park without any of their possessions or their phone, which has been happening. And then the government not even bothering to charge them because they don't think that they actually can make a good case is just another example of how we've accepted as a society that when people get arrested that there must be good reason to do it. And that's amazing to me, like how, you know, doesn't that completely strike at the heart of us being a free country? Like the fact that we are all, at one point or another could have people, just as happened here, break down the doors to our homes and arrest us without a warrant and then haul us in. And then the only thing we'll get after they release us after several hours is oh, not even an apology. Right. Like, I mean, that's the thing that is. Shouldn't shock me but does is like they killed two people with witnesses and video recording. They won't apologize for that. Of course they're not gonna apologize for shooting a woman five times in Chicago. They're not gonna apologize for taking people and putting them in a cell powers and then releasing them with no justification. Right. They are not apologizing for the amount of trauma that they are imposing. And they're doing it completely in a way that they believe makes them unaccountable. And that's the thing that I think we really need to try to fix. I appreciate the fact that the Democrats are fighting on the funding fight and I appreciate some of those reforms, but without accountability, without really making sure that these practices can be held accountable and not by individual habeas petitions, because we now know what the administration thinks about individual district court habeas opinions, then we're going to continue to see them push these practices.

Host (likely Mark Joseph Stern or a Slate Amicus host) (45:22)

Yeah. And I think it's an important note to end on. Voting rights expert Mark Elias made the same point last week with respect to training us to give away our voting rights. There's this effort to force us to normalize the idea that if someone has been detained, they must have done something wrong. And you really have in some sense embodied the fight of our lifetimes right now, which is to not normalize that which horrified us three weeks ago should horrify us again today. That's the struggle. Professor Linus Chan is the James H. Binger Clinical professor of Law at the University of Minnesota and the faculty director of the Detainee Rights Clinic. Through his work at that clinic. He represents folks who have either been detained by ICE or are in danger of being detained by ice. Linus, I cannot thank you enough for your clarity and for the explanation of that which can sometimes be unwieldy but is, as you know, really the defining feature of freedom. Thank you.

Professor Linus Chan (46:25)

Thank you so much, Dalia, for having me.

Host (likely Mark Joseph Stern or a Slate Amicus host) (46:35)

The Department of Homeland Security has thus far spent an estimated $714 million on warehouses that it plans to convert into detention camps. It's going to spend billions more on converting those into huge facilities, up to twice the size of the largest existing prisons in America, in order to lock up people caught up in ICE sweeps that will be ever more common with vanish access to due process for lawful immigrants. These detention camps are avatars for the darkest chapters of human history. Andrea Pitzer is a journalist and writer who unearths lost or forgotten history. Her newsletter, Degenerate Art, is always provocative and important, and her most recent post, building the the Warehousification of Detention and Initial Thoughts on Stopping it, is an extremely sobering reminder of why this administration is building these sprawling detention camps and what is required if we want to stop it. Her writing has appeared in many places in print and online, from the Washington Post to Scientific American to our very own Slate.com, and Andrea is the author of several books, including One Long Night, A Global History of Concentration Camps. Andrea, welcome to Amicus. It's really this week of all weeks, feels really important that you're here with us on the show.

Andrea Pitzer (47:59)

I've been an admirer of your work for several years, Dalia, so I'm not happy to have to talk about this, but if we have to talk about it, I'm glad that I am talking about it with you.

Host (likely Mark Joseph Stern or a Slate Amicus host) (48:11)

I think Americans are waking up, like in the last month maybe, to the reality that this vast detention and deportation machinery is being built right under our noses. It has already existed. It's now being supercharged. It's adapting. But if outrage, local town hall meetings and local council meetings are anything to go by, it actually seems like Americans are starting to put together what that will actually materially look like on the ground. And correct me if I'm wrong, but they're horrified. What is being built? At what speed is it being built? At what cost is it being built? How is it that we're at the place where the language that you use in your post concentration camps is actually not just apartment but, like, fairly obvious.

Andrea Pitzer (49:01)

So the US has already had, as you mentioned earlier, a pretty extensive immigration deportation system and in the First Trump administration, they wanted to prioritize these optics of we can kind of go after anybody at any time. And it led to a sort of a Keystone Cop approach to a lot. And so the numbers, in fact, were lower than Obama in terms of actual deportations. But the optics things, family separations, the deliberate cruelty was really apparent. Unfortunately, Trump has been returned to office. And they learned from that first outing that they needed to do more planning and they needed to be more strategic. And while we're still seeing a lot of Keystone Cop stuff that, that they probably didn't intend for people to see, and we're seeing a lot of deliberate cruelty on the streets that they do intend for people to see. Meanwhile, they are hoovering up warehouses, which is the most recent thing. But even before that, there was this turn toward Fort Bliss and Camp East Montana, which is this enormous facility that was stood up just last August. They were literally building it out with tents as they were bringing people in. And they tried to do these impromptu facilities. And what they've decided is that that doesn't really meet their needs. And so they are now turning to acquiring these warehouses. And there's over 100 that they're in the process of working toward, as you mentioned. You know, we're almost at three quarters of a billion dollars in purchases at this point. And the infrastructure of all that is extraordinary. And so I think what caught a lot of the attention in the post that I wrote was, is the fact that when you actually look at some of the biggest concentration camp systems around the world, we are actually approaching or ahead of the numbers for those massive famous ones. And so just for a couple examples, the Nazis came to power in 1933 and immediately, within weeks, had opened Dachau, which I will note was founded on a converted factory site. Right. So we're already kind of echoing this history right from the beginning. And it was done in the first weeks of Nazi rule. And it was not until more than five years later, about five and a half years later, that this famous night a lot of people have heard of called Kristallnacht, that actually it took them five years before they started doing large sweeps of German Jews into camps. And in that 48 hour period, a little less than 48 hours, more than 30,000 Jews were sent into concentration camps. And that was five years into Nazi rule. We are at the end of the first year of this second Trump administration. And even when you look at, let's say, 1940, 1941, the war had started, World War II had started. Germany was putting it a lot more people. They exponentially upped the people they were putting in camps at that point. And yet we have more people in immigrant detention today than Nazi Germany did seven years into the Third Reich, which I think is just astounding when you think about it. So the other factoid from history that most people wouldn't know that I'll give you, is that historians debate about how many people moved through the Soviet Gulag and the debate is whether it was 18 or 20 million people in more than two decades going through that system. And what the Trump administration is talking about are those numbers up to 20 million people in a four year period. And if you know anything about how horrific the Soviet Gulag was, how it transformed the country for generations that followed, how it wrecked lives, they didn't know in advance what they were doing. But Stephen Miller has that context. And so we know how this plays out, right? And that is something that key people in the administration are openly embracing. And we already see conditions in those camps that rival early Nazi concentration camps with illness, with disease. We've had killings, we've had a killing in Camp East Montana that hasn't yet been ruled murder or not, but was ruled as homicide. People have already died. Their stories of no access to medical care and certainly as you noted and as your background is like due process, actual responsiveness to court orders, they are ignoring huge amounts of all of that.

Host (likely Mark Joseph Stern or a Slate Amicus host) (53:15)

We are going to take a short break.

Dalia Lithwick (53:24)

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Host (likely Mark Joseph Stern or a Slate Amicus host) (54:45)

Every Mazda is engineered to give you effortless control.

Professor Linus Chan (54:51)

I wake up.

Host (likely Mark Joseph Stern or a Slate Amicus host) (54:56)

And we are back with Andrea Pitzer. You made the point. And I want you to say this really explicitly. This is not something that this administration stumbles into sideways. Right? This was the plan. This was the blueprint. And last April, acting ICE Director Todd Lyons was heard to say that what he really, really wanted to do was to just run deportations like a business. This is Amazon prime, but for human beings, he said, a system for just warehousing systematically and cleanly. And put aside just how chilling that is. It does raise this question that you flicked at. How long has this strange, like, Amazonification sort of bloodless business, ification of detention been imagined? And how much of what we are seeing playing out right now is just the tip of the iceberg for what is imagined?

Andrea Pitzer (55:59)

If we look at that Amazonification Concentration camps evolved over time in different ways. And I would say that I often use the Nazi example when talking to people, because it's almost the only concentration camp system they know, even though there's been a bunch of different ones. But in fact, the Nazis were the very first ones who took this Amazonification logistical approach that we think of now. In fact, there was a detainee named Margarita Buber Neumann who wrote an amazing memoir. She was in the Soviet system, and then she was in the Nazi system. And when she first comes into the Nazi system, she was traded between them while they were allies at the beginning of World War II. So the Russians turned her over to the Germans, and she came to the Nazi camp, and she was like. She got issued, like, clothes, and she got issued, like things to eat with. And it was this whole system that was very sadistic, but everything was scripted, everything was organized. Of course, that went to hell once the war started. But the warehousification of people was exactly the initial Nazi goal. And then the extermination of them through those warehouses became the later explicit goal. And I want to just make clear this can only happen in a country when things have been deeply wrong for a number of years in a number of ways. And so the stuff we've seen with US Prisons already, the decades of demonizing immigrants, and the already existing nature of our punitive immigration system, where detention is literally used as a deterrent and to do harm to people sort of gives Trump these initial tools that they clearly are now planning to expand on in tremendous ways. People are waking up to what's happening on the ground, which is amazing and offers all kinds of potential for things to do. But I don't. I don't think people understand the scope of it. If they end up with all these warehouses, what automatically follows from that is that you have transit camps and you have hub camps, and you have whole communities whose identities become bound up with these warehouses. This is what we see some of these small towns and cities already working to reject. You know, Dachau is the name of the town right now. Just think, you know, how many other places in our country is that? What is going to be meant by their names going forward? And according to the plans that we see from Miller and from Trump, that is where we are headed. It will be as large, potentially a larger system than the US Prison system, which is already so much larger than almost anything else in the world. And it will exist almost entirely outside the realm of oversight, of accountability. And concentration camp systems are always an end run around the existing legal system in a country at a given time. It isn't just going to be criminal detainees. We're already seeing that is not the case. We are already seeing people with documentation who disappear in here, people who are here legally. We have seen US Citizens that have ended up in some of these settings. And so the goal is never just to do detention against the targeted group. The goal with these is always the expansion of political power and the entrenchment of political power. And by definition, that means other people will be going into these camps over time.

Host (likely Mark Joseph Stern or a Slate Amicus host) (59:19)

So I think you've slightly just answered my next question, but I'd love for you to unpack it a tiny bit, because you write, and you've just said it, that this is just not about borders anymore. This is not about immigration anymore. This is a massive set of signaling about consolidating the administration's power. This isn't about Stephen Miller's quotas anymore. All that stuff is the pretext. But the context is bigger. Garry Kasparov noted in a tweet earlier this week that at this scale, this is just not a deportation project. This is something much, much darker. And I know this is where, you know, the beating heart of your work lies. Andrea. But what is the darker thing here? What is the performance? What is the objective really tilting at?

Andrea Pitzer (60:08)

The objective is really tilting at expanding and locking down control over public life in America. It is the ability to silence any kind of dissent. And if people haven't actually gone and looked at footage of what's happened on the streets of Minneapolis, what's happened in la, what's happened? I mean, just, you know, this week we saw car wrecks, people, you know, dragged out, automobiles left. We've seen babies left in cars as Their parents were hauled away. The violence that is being applied at this early stage, while we can still show up, while we can still dissent, while there is still some media that will cover it, while there is still a partially operating judicial system, the fact that they are willing to go in the streets and do this, the fact that they are willing to sweep people into these facilities and that they are looking at expanding them so greatly, it all aims toward nothing to do with actual immigration policy. In the end, it is an ethnic cleansing project. And that we can actually just take. Take from Stephen Miller's own words, right? This is not like guessing. He has explicitly stated that America is for, quote, Americans as he sees them, of course. And of course, his own family has denounced this because his own background was that as the family came here as immigrants under great duress and in great danger. And so it's particularly a historic tragedy that that's where he's coming from. But he has said what it is he wants to do. Trump has also. He says it as if he is kidding on the square, but it is very much on the square. That dictatorship from day one, as he said, and then he always sort of minces around at a third term and. But we have hats on his shelf, you know, in the White House that are saying this kind of thing. It is in our irony, poisoned world. It is all too easy to not take them at their word. But by the time you have this kind of warehouse complex and network, literally a gulag archipelago, I mean, that was the idea, was this island series of camps stretched across the vast expanse of Russia, right? And that is what we are seeing constructed. And the farther across the country it gets, and the more expansive it becomes, the easier it is to put down resistance on local levels. When you have those kinds of facilities and agents working already nearby, I will say they are still in a stuck place because the number of agents, they can only ramp up so quickly, even when they abandon all their standards and everything. And that is a sticking point. And the warehouses are a sticking point. And so I've been encouraging people to work on both of those sides because they can't complete this project without enough personnel and enough beds and spaces, even if they do overcrowding. And we do have an election coming later this year, which is another great opportunity. But I think a lot of people are sitting around waiting for the election, right? And the answer is we're in a race right now, and the election by itself is not going to be sufficient. The things that people are doing on the ground, that's what we have to be doing more of.

Host (likely Mark Joseph Stern or a Slate Amicus host) (63:17)

So, Andrea, one of the things that I've seen in your writing, and we had a guest on the show, I think two weeks ago, Professor Joe Margulis made the same point that you make, which is that this sort of tacit acceptance of violence and second tier rights toward the other starts after 9, 11 starts with the war on terror. And that morphs really easily and seamlessly into the moment we're in right now. And having heard you make that point, I'd love to now hear you connect what it was that that was sowing the seeds of that we are reaping right now.

Andrea Pitzer (63:57)

Okay, so here is an example for you and this will answer your question. And one favorite things for me to talk about is that war on terror switch that you're talking about, but specifically about Guantanamo. And you are probably aware, but a lot of your listeners might not be aware, that Guantanamo started out as a mass immigration detention facility for tens of thousands of detainees to keep them from getting to US Shores. So they were taken to the naval base on the island of Cuba, which is this sort of quasi American soil of our naval base. And they were detained there because they would not not have the same rights was the idea. And that was in the 90s. Clinton campaigned against it, but then when he was elected, he didn't end it as it was such a political hot potato. And I think therein lies the immigration side of part of how we got to where we are is that we have allowed the whole issue to be reframed on who can be cruel to immigrants to what I call the Goldilocks amount. Right. And Democrats say no, we shouldn't be this cruel, we should just be some cruel. And Republicans that say we should be very, very cruel, we have seen that Goldilocks ideal be pushed farther and farther into really horrific treatment. So that's the immigration side of it. And there was a legal clinic out of Yale that actually did an amazing job getting a group of detainees who were in detention out of detention because the judge had been making noises in the 90s that she was going to allow the case to proceed and that the government's case did not look good. So to make that go away before the judge had a ruling, the government allowed those detainees to be taken out of Guantanamo. And that was a tremendous win for those students. But the upshot of what happened was there was never a ruling that said that Guantanamo, the people that are there, do have these same due process rights that they might have if they had to touched shores in Florida, they might be able to bring cases this way. And so the upshot was it left Guantanamo in a legal gray area. 9, 11 happens, and the administration in the White House is looking for where to send prisoners, where they can be tortured, put on show trials, where they can be secretly held in large numbers without constitutional rights coming into play ever. And so the answer was, because that earlier court case was gone, we have a perfect place to do it. And so then you see this use of Guantanamo, you see how that expanded. And just to bring it back around to your point, the war on terror allowed all kinds of detention. It allowed treatment of people in the US that were simply suspected of things. And to be Muslim at that moment was to be a suspect or right. It allowed overreach around the world. People in Guantanamo who are still there have not yet started their trials. In many cases, there are not many people left. But we are literally 24 years on. And think about every single one of those warehouses in the U.S. now that's being created as a potential Guantanamo of its own. So an important thing I would love people to get, today is day. This is not the end point of how horrible suffering can happen, right? This what we're already seeing, people lying in feces, denied medicine, being beaten, sexually assaulted, not having access to food, no access to due process, even when courts are sometimes ordering it. All of that is the start point, right? And the phrase I use sometimes for it is from there, we are walking toward Auschwitz. We have a really long way to go before we would get to those wartime death camps that the Nazis built a decade almost into when their rule started. But why on earth would you walk that direction? And what we are doing is we are not just walking that direction. We are laying a foundation, right? We are laying a path by which we can move that direction. And it really can. It can go terrible, terrible places. We are already doing this at a much faster pace than the most legendary authoritarian states turned to this kind of detention. And I say that not to terrify people, but just to say it's critical to act. But also I will say, out of all the places that I studied across 130 years, around the globe, six continents, we are also absolutely the best poised to act and respond because so we have these two heritages, right? We have this heritage, of course, cruelty to the other, to minorities, but we also have this heritage of the civil rights movement. We also have this heritage of Latino farm workers. We have Black Lives Matter. These places, these communities, these networks across the country have shown us A lot of what we need to do, and we are well poised still to do that, but that window is getting smaller for us to get through.

Host (likely Mark Joseph Stern or a Slate Amicus host) (68:55)

I think I have to ask the just chip shut question, which you know the answer to and most of our listeners don't, which is who is being enriched right now by this programmatic effort, as you say, to scale and to warehouse and to do this like Amazon Prime.

Andrea Pitzer (69:13)

So there are literally people being enriched financially. And that's one of the things that we can target is who is benefiting financially from this and be a serious cost to those contractors, to the people that benefit financially. But ultimately, who always benefits from this, at root is the political actors that then can rule through dictatorship and appoint and not appoint people and control resources, can control the whole country. And I think that sometimes the oligarch class believes that they will secretly be pulling the strings forever if they back these kinds of efforts. But one of the things that we can learn from what has happened in Russia is that you're pulling the strings until you aren't right? And then there comes a point when you empower authoritarians, when you empower authoritarianism, everyone, oligarchs included, can be subject to the same rules. And this is why I'm not in the Oligarch Preservation Society League myself. But the fact that it can come even for them should be a wake up call to all of us.

Host (likely Mark Joseph Stern or a Slate Amicus host) (70:26)

And you said this twice earlier in the conversation. You wrote it very, very expressly in your piece. But we are now seeing, and I think it's why Americans are waking up to the reality, just horrifying. Reports from Camp East Montana, located within Fort Bliss near El Paso. Reports of hunger, as you say, reports of violence, sexual assault, death. We're hearing about a Cuban immigrant, as you said, who's de was ruled a homicide. We're hearing from an Irishman who is describing just horrifying, filthy, dehumanizing conditions and amicus. Plus listeners on this show heard an account from Kristin Clarence about conditions in the Family Detention center in Dilley, Texas, where Liam Ramos has been held. This is what we are seeing everywhere. And, and I guess my question to you before we turn to how are we going to push back is who is accountable for this?

Andrea Pitzer (71:31)

I think everybody involved has to run the risk of accountability. And the sooner we can shut down the largest wave of this, as it's growing, the smaller that number will be. And it is better not only for less harm to come to people, but even on the other side of this, the fewer people, people who will have to be held accountable in some way, the better it is for society. So even for the perpetrators, it is better for society if we can shut this down, but especially for the people that will have harm done to them. And I think that it is critical to be identifying everybody, and it may be hard in this moment when so many systems are not being accountable to imagine that day. But I think of the people I talk to in Argentina who. Who had been tortured and held and in some cases, sexually assaulted, their friends were killed. There was never a hard end where the military made itself accountable there, right? So dictatorship ended, but there was never this moment of accountability. And it came years later. And one woman I interviewed literally remembered. She was blindfolded, and she remembered peeking under her blindfold, and she could. Could see the floor, the tile pattern on the floor. And so when it came time to testify, they testified to everything that they could remember. And somebody went and found that tile pattern, and they found the floor, they found the house she had been held in, and they talked to the neighbors, and the neighbors recalled hearing the screams. And they were able to work their way through these unbelievably difficult investigations to bring leading military figures to justice, but also people underneath them. And so I think the answer is you have to, first of all, for PR purposes, make everybody think they're going to be accountable for everything going forward. And then in the end, on the other side, you decide how you deal with the small potatoes. Right? But I think that there is going to have to be some kind of accountability. And it was a serious shame, I think, from the Obama era, that this was not done when he came to power, when he began his first administration in early 2009, because the lack of doing that in the face of what had happened in the war on terror enabled, I would say, much of what has followed. And he's not personally responsible, as if he had launched the war on terror himself, but he also bears some of that responsibility, because without those accountability moments, moments, this is exactly where you end up. And this is one of the reasons with reforms, why I'm very cautious. Reforms are good, for sure, but if you're focused on reforms, one of the lines I've been using has been that, like, the correct response to Dachau was not better training for the guards. Right? And so we can talk about better training and we can talk about standards, but that ultimately is not going to be what addresses this. And so everybody needs to face accountability.

Host (likely Mark Joseph Stern or a Slate Amicus host) (74:29)

So I actually, I've been thinking about that line about Dachau and the guards. And I've also been thinking President Obama had an opportunity to answer to and think about what get moment and failed to meet the moment. We failed to meet the moment post Korematsu for decades. And it brings me to this question, which is really what you've been trying to get to and I've been holding off. But but a huge part of your post is this is not necessarily going to come from leadership that is still entrenched in a decades old conversation about immigration in the abstract. This is going to come from people on the ground, we are seeing it now who are saying not in my backyard for the best possible reasons. And I would love from the most granular level to the most macro level for you to take us out of this conversation with what you said is there is an equal and opposite reaction to this horror, which is what people can do on the ground every day starting today. Can you just walk us through what that looks like? Andrea?

Professor Linus Chan (75:37)

Sure.

Andrea Pitzer (75:37)

I'm going to walk you through, but I'm going to say up front first of all, that the things I'm going to suggest by a week from now, by two weeks from now, may not even be the best responses because people are on the ground coming up with amazing ways that they are dealing with this. So don't look at this as a fixed final list of these are the things you must do. Look at this as like a brainstorming, you know, suggestion. And really people on the ground who are out in the communities are the ones who are seeing where those openings are. So I'm just going to suggest what some possible openings can be. A lot of people have probably already heard in terms of dealing with ICE in your community. You know, ICE observer networks, church groups, vigils, outside facilities, going to city council meetings, getting them to break these 287 agreements where they exist. There's lots of good things you can be doing there. I'm going to turn a little more to the warehouse side because that I think people won't have thought about as much. So if ICE hasn't come to your community yet, if there is no threat of facility near you, and there's a wonderful project called the Salt Box Project which is laying out all the places that are being targeted and what's happening with them. So you can go online and look at that if they are not coming to you, there are two things you can do, which is first of all, it's like the oxygen mask in the plane. Fireproof your community first preemptively is always better. And so if you can make your town council adversarial or your city council or your state reps adversarial to the presence of ice, you will be much less attractive if you've already laid out that opposition. So building that from the ground, making your community hostile to ice, making it hostile to warehouse purchases, figuring out what facilities are near you, getting agreements now from those companies that they will not sell to ice, that they will force ICE and the federal government to try to go through with more of an eminent domain seizure type thing, which again is just more work and more delay for the government, even though they do have tremendous powers in this arena, make your community preemptively as hostile as possible to ISIS presence. The second thing you can do is if you're not in danger of having anything like that, which there really aren't a lot of places that aren't, but if you feel you've already dealt with the fireproofing issue or you don't have an immediate need to do more in your community, pick a sister city or community near one of these facilities and find out what you can do to help them. Whether it's legal needs, whether it is families in the area or families even outside it, but who are detained there, they want to come and stand outside it for optic purposes if they need legal support. If the communities themselves are strained, which they will be when you have a warehouse that might outnumber the local residents five to one in terms of the detention that's going to be done there, helping that community deal with its own strains and stresses. So that is, if it hasn't come to you yet, if you find yourself on that saltbox project list, work to do as much as you can. We have already seen in process plans get canceled in six cases. I think last I changed checked, as you mentioned, the NIMBY thing, this is the perfect moment to nimby. And we have seen actually Republican officials, Senator Wicker in Mississippi contacted Kristi Noem because people did not want the facility in their backyard and he got it delayed. And you might say, well, it's just going to go somewhere else. And I would say in this process, delay is great. And if it shoves it to blue areas, that's terrible. But the blue areas are going to be more oppositional and more active and more able to prolong that. And red areas and people who don't support ICE in those areas can then support people in the blue areas. But anytime something that's already in process is shut down, it is absolutely a win. We have to take the partial wins along with the big wins, and so mobilize in that way, get every politician of every party and non party involved to press back. We saw in Ashland, Virginia, a Canadian company realized, oh, they did not want to be known for this. And so they, they canceled a sale. It is possible to stop these things even when they're in process. Realistically, I will say it's unlike. We can stop all of them. The federal government does have a lot of power in this arena. And so in that stage, punishing contractors because they will be reliant on subcontractors, punishing contractors, making it so that employees who are there as well as these companies understand they will not have municipal jobs, they will not get municipality, municipal contracts. Work that up to a state level, if you can see if your state legislature will pass that. And so we were down at the granular level. But then to bring it back up for a second to a higher level, I would love to see states entering compacts with each other, that they will respect each other's compacts, that anybody who is identified in that facility at that state will not be allowed to work as a teacher, say, or a fireman or a law enforcement person anywhere in those groups of states. Document illegal activities. There will be lots of illegal activities that you will see. Even Gitmo, isolated as it is, we were able to find out what was happening there through various, you know, we had whistleblowers, we had different people come out. The government often brags about what they're doing and actually gives ammunition unwittingly when they do so. So follow all of it, document all of it. Identify people who are involved. There is no one weird trick, unfortunately, that we can do to stop this. But keeping vigils outside the facility, keeping awareness in the community of what's happening, don't let it just become a normal thing. All of that, even in the smallest ways, is really, really critical so that your town doesn't become known as the next Dachau. I think that's important. But even for those people who have to care for elders, who have small children or who have disabilities that keep them from sort of being out on the ground. And being out on the ground is absolutely the best thing that you can do because that's where you're really going to figure out, out how to do stuff with people. So don't just stay online if you can avoid it. But if you're hampered from being out in the community on the ground for some reason, people are 3D, printing whistles they've come together to buy a 3D printer. We see people creating zines that inform people about their rights or how to deal with ice in your neighborhood or what resources are available near you. And so one illustrator has been making those for everything across the country. Every place across the country, across the country. And then people can just download that and to turn them into zines. That person doesn't have to be out in the streets. So find your skills, find your interest level. And the main thing is if you connect with other people, you will see the way the doors open. And if we do this kind of descent, if we do this kind of pushback, a lot more additional doors are also going to open that we can't even imagine ways to stop it yet. That will be obvious when they arrive.

Host (likely Mark Joseph Stern or a Slate Amicus host) (82:16)

Andrea, I feel like you have just put on like a mini clinic on what civic responsibility and resistance actually has to look like. And I think you also ended where you started this conversation, which was that long before it was the name of a camp, Dachau was the name of a town. And one should really be asking oneself now whether that's really how you want your hometown to be known. Andrea Pitzer is a journalist and a writer. You can find her newsletter, Degenerate Art via her website, which is andreapitzer.com we're going to link to it in the show notes and direct you toward her new piece, Building the the Warehouse Ification of Detention and initial thoughts on Stopping it. Andrea, I think it's been a really powerful embracing privilege to have you on the show this week and I thank you for your work and I thank you for the time that you spent with us today and thank you for.

Andrea Pitzer (83:12)

What you're doing, Dalia. I really appreciate it.

Host (likely Mark Joseph Stern or a Slate Amicus host) (83:17)

That is all for this episode. Thank you so much for listening and thank you so much for your letters and your questions. Keep them coming. We are reachable by email@amicusatslate.com you can also find us@facebook.com Amicus Podcast. You can also leave a comment if you're listening on Spotify or on YouTube and you can rate us and review us on Apple Podcasts. We have a jam packed Amicus plus bonus episode for you this week. Mark Joseph Stern and I are talking about where we stand in the growing hum of speculation over whether Justice Samuel Alito has plans to retire this summer and what that means for the rest of us. Also, we're going to talk about Attorney General Pam Bondi and her disgraceful performance before Congress this week and much, much more. You can subscribe to Slate plus directly from the Amicus show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or you can visit slate.com amicusplus to get access wherever you listen. That episode is available for you to listen to right now. We'll see you there. Sara Burningham is Amicus senior producer. Our producer is Sophie Summergret. Hilary Fry is Slate's editor in chief, Susan Master Matthews is executive editor Mia Lobel is executive producer of Slate Podcasts and Ben Richmond is our senior director of operations. We'll be back with another episode of Amicus next week.

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