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Events are moving so quickly that it's worth stopping to assess where we are.
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Just weeks into the new year, the Trump administration has surged ICE agents to American cities, overthrown a foreign head of state, threatened a military takeover of Greenland, and rewritten the history of January 6th.
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The US government is currently building massive detention facilities, according to new documents reviewed.
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By the Washington Post. That includes a new plan to hold.
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80,000 immigrants in warehouses, detaining tens of thousands of people there and elsewhere with incompetent and deeply racist secret police.
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Why are you asking me for my paperwork? Because of your accent. I still. You have an accent, too. Where were you born, sir? Where were you born at? Put your hands around your back.
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Sweeping undocumented immigrants, those with their paperwork in order, and U. S. Citizens alike off the street. You can hear him in the video as officers are putting him in a chokehold, screaming that he's a minor, that.
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He'S 16, he was going to school.
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That he's a US citizen, and yet he told us that that didn't matter. We're hearing grassroots calls to abolish ice.
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I am in support of abolishing ice, and I'll tell you why. Because what we.
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While opposition leadership instead speaks mostly about.
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Affordability issues, Democrats are going to focus on costs like a laser in 2026.
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And beyond when they do address the current crisis, as House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries did recently on Ms. Now they're.
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Targeting American families, brutalizing American communities, and now, as we've seen, killing American citizens.
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They're prone to saying things like, certainly.
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We need massive reform to the way in which ICE and the Department of Homeland Security are currently conducting themselves.
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Note that the massive reform mentioned is to the way that the agencies conduct themselves.
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The American people are going to demand it and Democrats are going to press.
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For it, not to the very mission of those agencies.
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You're going to see a massive scale up in enforcement activities all across the.
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Country set by the current administration.
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Not only is it going to be ICE engaging these raids, but also they're going to have support from their law enforcement partners in FBI, ATF, DEA and U.S. marshals. We're going to leverage the full power of federal law enforcement at President Trump's command and direction.
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I've looked at mass civilian detention around the world.
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Author Andrea Pitzer, who literally wrote the book on the subject, it's called One Long Night, A Global History of Concentration Camps.
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I've seen the facilities where people were held. I've talked to the people involved.
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History is full of moments in which hindsight provides the only clear view. This is not one of them.
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My goal is to warn you that the US has already been seized by the same camp dynamic. It's critical to recognize that each of the societies that has had camps underwent a whole process, one that is often easier to see happening in your own country. If you first look at an example in another one.
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It was understood right after the war that it was a horrific thing, that was a new innovation in sort of modern horror. But the thing that happened also as a result of that understanding was that the bar was kind of reset for concentration camps. And anything less than that somehow became not a concentration camp.
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It's not that I'm trying to tell you that bad things are coming.
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Patty O' Keefe is a 36 year old South Minneapolis resident.
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And you have to look out for them.
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We know that when there's more people around, federal agents are less likely to escalate to violence. Or if there's more people that are filming them, they're less likely to violate constitutional rights. Or at least that's the hope.
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What I'm saying is this is all already here and it's on a fast track to get exponentially worse.
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Even with all of the work that we are putting in, people are being ripped from their homes and their families.
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Still, our neighbors have.
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My neighbor has been killed.
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Yet there is power in that knowledge because in some big ways we can know what will happen next.
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You know, it's like we, we can't. This is totally unsustainable. We can't take more of it. And at the same time, like, we're not going to back down.
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And we have models for how other societies have moved out of our current perilous state. And we have a ton of tactics that we can use to move against the expanding harm being directed at all of us.
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We're going to keep standing up for each other and keep doing what we.
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Need to do to protect each other. I'll add right up front that nobody sane thinks today that the answer to abuses at Dachau was to give the guards more training.
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I talk about that when a system is sort of choking on itself. And I think that is a danger sign. It can also be a sign of health when it's choking on itself, that there's some remedies that are still available to allow it to choke.
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Today I want to talk about how a society comes to concentration camps. The process that we're already deep into, why the ways we're talking about events in the US may be unhelpful and how we can undo all this. So it's an ambitious day. So far in 2026, six people have died in immigrant detention that we know of. I'm joined right now by Doug McMillan.
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The Washington Post reporter.
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Two died by suicide despite facility responsibility. To keep this kind of thing from.
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Happening, you can read on ice's own website says that ICE detention is not meant to be punitive. It's merely a place to hold people while their immigration cases are being adjudicated.
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Two died of heart issues.
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What we've seen in Texas, and specifically this facility, which is on the Mexican border, in which the Trump administration created basically in the span of six months from what was an empty patch of.
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Desert, one is said to have died from fentanyl withdrawal.
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It's a series of large white tents and it's now the largest ICE detention center in the country.
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And one was reportedly choked to death by one or more guards.
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ICE's own inspectors have gone to this facility and found the health conditions, overcrowding, people are not getting recreation time, people are not getting the medical treatment that's adequate for their health.
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Even while we were recording this episode, reports of another death in El Paso have come out.
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This is the third death at the.
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Facility and the second detainee death this month. A recent report from the American Immigration council counts some 66,000 people in immigration detention at the end of 2025. We're joined by the council's senior fellow, Aaron Reichland Melnick. That's an increase of almost 75% since Trump returned to office.
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92% of the growth in ICE detention has been among people who have no interaction with the criminal justice system.
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But it falls far short of the goal they had hoped to reach. Having planned to expand capacity to more than 100,000 beds by this point and.
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To have filled on day one saw President Trump issue an executive order mandating that ICE use detention to the maximum extent possible. And that means that they are not releasing people. And that led to severe overcrowding as they arrest people more quickly than they can hold them in detention.
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So keep in mind that they are just getting started on their broader detention plan.
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Thanks to the so called One Big Beautiful Bill Act, ICE now has an average annual budget of $15 billion over the next four years. By comparison, the entire Federal Bureau of Prisons, their budget is less than $9 billion.
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And also keep in mind that the US is currently holding more than twice as many people as there were detainees in the Nazi concentration camp system in 1939, six years into the Third Reich. And the Department of Homeland Security, in its language and images, in press releases and on social media, is directly aping Nazi propaganda. Hannah Arendt said about the Nazis that when you get people to stop knowing what's true and false, it's very easy for them to stop knowing what's right and wrong. Because I wrote a book about concentration camps, I tend to use the phrase.
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When people think of concentration camps, they tend to think of Auschwitz and the death camps. Because looking back from today, it looms so much larger than everything else that's happened in history, as it should.
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We should remember it first.
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But I really wanted to look into how we got to that point.
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I do get that not everyone will want to call our expanding regime of detention concentration camps.
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What do you say to Americans, especially survivors of the Holocaust or individuals who are related to survivors of the Holocaust, who say, look, academically you're right. The term concentration camp did not necessarily mean death camp, but colloquially, when most people hear it, they think death camp, they think Holocaust. And you're. You're undermining your argument and you're.
- [09:18]
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And you're hurting us by using that term. I'm not trying to force some moral equivalence that A is exactly the same as B or less wrong or more wrong, or that the United States in 2026 is Nazi Germany in 1942.
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If we don't talk about the many.
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Times that this has happened in the history of humanity, then we also erase.
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The suffering of those people.
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And for those not familiar with my work, it's usually a good idea for me to make clear that concentration camps are often not DEC camps.
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We have also made sure that we explicitly use the term concentration camp.
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And we have to learn from the.
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Slow process, the slow dehumanizing process that leads to horrible things happening to people.
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The Nazi death camps were a handful of camps created mid war for the Third Reich's mass extermination project and were aimed particularly at Jewish and Roma and senti genocide. Though many others died in those camps.
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The Germans realized these other countries are still not going to take the Jews. And they've just tormented this community horrifically. And the world didn't really do much. I mean, there were protests, of course, but I think at this point, the Nazis begin to realize that if they want to solve this issue, they're going to need to do something else to do it.
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But those extermination camps were launched almost a decade after the establishment of the Nazi concentration camp system and that the.
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World may not act against them if they do so it becomes this sort of window onto this horrific possible future.
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And other concentration camp systems have existed around the world across the 20th century.
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The very first appearance of the Frase concentration camps in connection to civilian detention was in late 1890s Cuba.
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Concentration camps are the mass detention of civilians without due process on the basis of political, racial, ethnic or religious identity.
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How we get to that point and what comes after are also really, really critical. If we are concerned about anything like.
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That happening again, that's what we've got right now, folks. And as I've mentioned before, this kind of arbitrary rounding people up outside the existing legal system and putting them in a vast networks of camps doesn't happen overnight.
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When people ask me, do people know? Did they not know? Of course they knew and of course they couldn't fully understand at the same time. And so we have to be able to balance both of those things. Not to release anyone from accountability, but to say that even people who were covering it, who had some of this information, not the perpetrators, but others, it was in some ways an unknowable, unacceptable thing.
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In a lot of the systems I've studied, the country had some form of dubious detention. To begin with.
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American sympathy was very much with the Cuban rebels. And these camps, these first camps were a really important part of why we went into the Spanish American War in 1898.
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In some places like Russia, detention and exile were cornerstones of the Katurga system in prior centuries which combined exile, hard labor and arbitrary punishment in the penal system long before modern concentration camps existed.
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By 1901, the end of 1901, the US military in recalcitrant areas begins using concentration camps themselves. Again, domestic outcry is huge. Why do we go to war for against the butcher in Cuba to turn around and do this in the Philippines?
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In the US we currently have the existing brutality of our carceral system.
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Black Americans are more likely than whites to be stopped by police. Once stopped, they're more likely to be searched and arrested. Once arrested, they are more likely to be denied or simply not able to afford cash bail. And so they must wait in jail for weeks or months before a trial.
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The cultural acceptance of disparate treatment for people of color forced Native American exile to reservations.
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While things like the Spanish mission system in some places where it evolved and some Native American reservations come quite close to what we think of later as.
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Concentration camps, the long echoes of Japanese American internment During World War II, the continuing operations of places like Guantanamo, and the willingness of Both major political parties to use a detention based punitive approach to immigration.
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There is this sort of moment where we tip over into it.
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These are domestic weaknesses that helped make the country susceptible to becoming a concentration camp regime.
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In the 1920s in the US a white mob burned down. Black Wall street is known as the black community, middle class black community in Tulsa itself. And the people who survived, the African Americans who survived that assault were put into what was called in the newspapers at that time a concentration camp. They were not allowed to leave without a white employer coming to claim them. And white employers, often, it turned out, didn't know the names of their servants.
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In most cases, there's a three to five year window when a ruling party or leader or revolutionary brigade comes to power and asserts the right to arbitrarily detain and punish civilians.
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Usually they say, he's a horrible dictator type person. I'm a dictator. But sometimes you need a dictator at some point.
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Toward the end of that window, there's a struggle for and against the massive expansion of the quasi legal, quasi illegal sites of detention into a more permanent concentration camp system.
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Historically, what usually happens is military control is ceded to the military because they have to fight the bad guys. And you don't want to tie the hands of the military. Who wants to be the guy who ties the hands of the military and is responsible for military defeat?
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Or sometimes the power struggle is external. There's been celebrations on the streets of.
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News of the death of one of.
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The most hated men in Chile. Three years into mass detentions in Chile in the 1970s, the situation was volatile enough that the US which was the major state supporting the dictatorship there, pressed for changes to dina. The secret police. Manuel Contreras headed the South American country's dreaded DINA intelligence service during the government.
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Of Augusto Pinochet in the 1970s.
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The organization was then disposed of, disbanded and replaced by another group. Victims. Relatives say the organization was behind more.
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Than half the cases of murder, torture.
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And disappearance under the Pinochet regime. That next organization was still abhorrent. But one byproduct of the shift was that the expansion of mass detention into a permanent camp system was halted. This man says he's conflicted. I'm happy he's dead, he says, but he died from illness when he should.
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Have suffered much of more like his victims did.
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Another example is four years into the Khmer Rouge's complete destabilization of Cambodia. In the 1970s, Vietnam invaded.
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Much to their horror, Vietnamese soldiers discovered.
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Mass graves of those killed by the Khmer Rouge. But more often, as in Russia or in Nazi Germany, the struggle was between different parts of the solidifying police state under Hitler. Nearly three years into Nazi rule, the camp side of that struggle won, leading to an expanded camp system which eventually blanketed the country. Concentration camps are typically the means by which a police state maintains or extends its power. In the US Our system was already extremely vulnerable because of the things I mentioned before, especially the ongoing brutality of immigration detention and the continued existence of Guantanamo.
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I would bring back waterboarding attempts in.
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Trump's first administration to expand arbitrary detention and create official undesirable groups.
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And I'd bring back a hell of.
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A lot worse than waterboarding included efforts to institute a Muslim ban, the embrace of warehousing immigrants in cages, and deliberate family separation.
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I've been speaking with both Republicans and Democrats. We can come together.
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All of these got pushback from the public, from institutionally minded Republicans working for Trump at the time, and from Congress.
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We ought to all be united and say, of course kids should be with their parents.
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And remember, Congress was controlled by Democrats by the time the country approached that three year mark of Trump being in power. And some data suggests that the election of Joe Biden appears to have happened in part due to the Black Lives Matter protests that resisted arbitrary police violence and institutional racism.
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Black Lives Matter, period. I'm not afraid to say it.
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This progress could have been the kind of setback that permanently derailed the looming potential for the US to become a concentration camp regime. But Trump has now returned to office.
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That is why as soon as I take the oath of office, we will begin the largest deportation operation in the history of our country.
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And if we count the Biden administration as just a pause on the Trump agenda, in some ways, we use the.
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Entire force and power of the federal government to get them all home.
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Now, the US Is sitting on the back end of that three to five year window.
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So I was just denied entry to the detention facility here in dilly. There are 1200 people inside. There are 400 children. The majority of them are under 5 years old.
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We are already into a concentration camp regime.
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I gave them 24 hours notice that I was coming. So I didn't show up unannounced, and they still denied me entry. That is unacceptable.
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But it hasn't yet hardened into the kind of vast system that is extraordinarily difficult to reverse.
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So you get to see the videos of what's happening in Minneapolis. You don't get to see anything that's happening behind these walls. And the fact that they denied me access with 24 hours notice should make everybody deeply, deeply fearful of what is happening inside this facility and facilities like it.
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Nevertheless, we are on the brink of that and in a bad place. It's my opinion that we have a limited window to act and that what happens this year will be critical in ways that will be hard to undo if we do not significantly dismantle the opportunity and capacity for building the extrajudicial camp network the US Government is in the process of constructing.
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This very minute cited an apparent ICE document as describing this as setting a feeder system where newly arrested detainees would be booked into processing sites before being funneled into one of the seven large scale warehouses that hold up to 10,000 people.
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Again, we need to do more than stop the construction of additional facilities or get ICE agents to behave more politely. Instead, we need to dismantle the current system and remove the possibility for it to exist. Again, in my opinion, that is what abolish ICE should mean.
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I'll tell you why. Because what we, What we see is an entity that has no interest in fulfilling its stated reason to exist. We're seeing a government agency that is supposed to be enforcing some kind of immigration law, but instead what it's doing is terrorizing people, no matter their immigration status, no matter the facts of the law, no matter the facts of the case.
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In every concentration camp regime, there's a network of camps in which both illness and abuses are allowed to flourish. And there also exists a secret police, sometimes more than one, with loyalty to the supreme leader. In Soviet Russia, over time, the secret police transformed from the Cheka to the OGPU to the nkvd. In Nazi Germany, the secret police were the Gestapo.
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Created by combining existing political police agencies. The organization was tasked with identifying and neutralizing political opposition to the Nazi regime.
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And the fanatical Hitler loyalists were the ss. The Dachau camp a few kilometers from Munich, a little more than a year after the start of Nazi rule. It was a section of the SS that became responsible for running the concentration camp system.
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It is created by Himmler and placed under the direct control of the.
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In the US we have the longtime Trump supporting Customs and Border Protection Agency, also known as Border Patrol. We also have ice, which is bad enough to start with in terms of its role.
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Growing friction in the Department of Homeland Security is leading to a mass shakeup of ICE leadership over deportation tactics and priorities.
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Now it is expanding rapidly and taking on the more violent and extrajudicial culture of Border Patrol agents. As it grows, the overhaul affects U.S.
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Immigration and Customs Enforcement field offices in at least eight cities and will replace many senior leaders with Border Patrol officials, marking an unprecedented power shift and exposing sharp divisions inside.
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DHS Border Patrol Commander Greg Bevino has become the public face of these ICE raids as the two agencies combine efforts.
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Even as the snow has picked up. The forces of Greg Bovino are out in a way that I think we're now used to seeing on the streets of Minneapolis. A guy who just said he was a veteran of war in Afghanistan walked by me and said he's driving around town like an Afghan warlord. He's never seen anything like it.
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He's aware of this role and he relishes it.
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And I want to show you some video of Greg Bevino earlier today personally throwing canisters of some type of chemical agent.
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You often find him on the front lines of confrontation, egging on the most brutal and illegal tactics. He overtly dresses like a nice Nazi. Sometimes people who know U.S. history talk about the ways in which we don't need to look to European fascism or its horrors to understand what's happening in America.
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Hitler is very aware of concentration camp history in his own writings.
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I think, however, that both the international history of camps and domestic US History are critical to understanding what's happening today and where we are in the current process.
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He has been talking since 1919 about concentration camps. He specifically mentions the Boer camps and the shame of this Dutch people who he sees as Aryan, the descendants of these Dutch people being put in these camps. And if the British can do it, then we'll do it too. And the camps of World War I, of course, he's quite aware of those.
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Organizations like the Ku Klux Klan have a long history of committing extrajudicial violence against people of color and immigrants in the U.S. and slave patrols combined a quasi official role with citizen vigilantism.
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But he's also talking about the Native American reservations. And he sees, he actually frames this in terms of US Western expansion, their eastward expansion in the same way.
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And the US has a vicious history of harming civilians from its founding with native genocide and chattel slavery as two very large examples. But the rise of the modern form of concentration camps that I wrote my book about relied on two technological advances, the patenting and mass production of barbed wire and automatic weapons.
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I actually found a record of the contract from Oliver Brother in Pittsburgh who supplied the Spanish empire with all this barbed wire that they were going to use to fortify buildings and things, but also for these concentration camps.
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Those two developments took took earlier Forms of arbitrary civilian harm and detention and revolutionized the ability of a small guard force to control a lot of people. I've described prior forms of detention as an atomic bomb and concentration camps as a hydrogen bomb.
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This thing that could not have been imagined.
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The situation that we are careening toward right now will build on prior and existing abusive systems of detention, immigration and policing.
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Slave patrols were armed groups empowered by the government to control, intimidate and terrorize.
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People solely based on color. That's what's happening now. We are effectively reviving the klan and the slave patrols and putting them not adjacent to law enforcement officials, but in charge of the systems themselves. Congress has already allocated funding that will bring us to a camp system that will be larger than our existing prison system. The state is already trying to use modern surveillance methods to control communities both inside and outside these facilities. Concentration camp systems take the worst abuses of the existing system and then expand and weaponize them. People always ask for worst case scenarios, but I don't like to make a most terrifying possibilities list because a lot of people seem to want to scare themselves with them. And there's really so much that we can do to stop the situation from getting worse or even end this nightmare completely. But if you are one of those people who's waiting for that nightmare list to come to pass before you act, I would ask, what are you waiting for?
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They asked me to see my id.
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And while they were asking me to.
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See the id, that man, he called me. He called me the N word. They pushed me hard. They used a lot of violence. My body still hurts. I got a concussion.
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Miami police went this week to the house of a woman who criticized the mayor. Random civilians on the street have been deliberately blinded by immigration enforcement officers in response to their disapproval of ICE and its tactics. A local school district who's sounding alarms.
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They say about 4 of their students.
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Take it into ICE custody, including a 5 year old boy who they say was detained with his father in the family's driveway. The district alleges that another adult in.
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The home begged agents to leave the.
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Child with them, but that the agents refused.
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The secretary of defense has put 1500 troops on alert for the possible deployment to the city of Minneapolis.
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I was actually detained with a native American woman and God bless her heart, she went through a lot too. She was also detained by ICE and she was also used to US citizen and like me, and she had gashes on her face.
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While the FBI has made clear there will be no investigation of the officer that shot and killed Renee Good.
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She was so scared for her life. We were both crying together. We were holding each other tight. And I'll never forget, like, the fear that we both felt in our hearts that day.
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We are hearing that lawyers are unable to access their clients at Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minnesota. One attorney remarked that they were told, if we let you see your clients, we would have to let all the attorneys see their clients and imagine the chaos. This kind of denial of rights and refusal of access counter to existing law have happened at a number of cities across the country as federal buildings were converted into holding facilities. Citizens in Minneapolis are in hiding with church networks delivering food to them. The Trump administration says it's opened criminal investigations into Minnesota Governor Tim Walsh. In Minneapolis, Mayor Jacob Fry, who've sharply criticized ICE's tactics. A woman from Minneapolis reported that agents came to her home asking her where Hmong people lived in her neighborhood. Within days, a squad of agents broke down the front door of a home, handcuffed and marched out. An older Hmong man named Sally in Crocs.
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Yeah, my grandson watched everything.
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They arrested him despite his being a US citizen.
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After they took me, he was crying, looking for me.
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He has since been released.
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This isn't sorry or anything.
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They just, okay, you're good.
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Just laugh.
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That's about it.
- [28:59]
A
The way camps work is they come into being in a police state. This helps the police state become more of a police state. But camps ratchet up the speed and the efficiency of harm that the state can do, particularly lethal harm. People often think the Nazi system was a single static thing, but it evolved over time, just as our system of detention is evolving right now. It was in 1938, just over five years into Nazi rule and five years into the existence of their concentration camp system, that the Nazis first swept up tens of thousands of Jews into camps in Germany and its territories during Kristallnacht. And many arrests famously happened at night with people marched out in their underwear and their slippers, just as Saleh was marched out in the video we can watch on our screens. And if you find yourself saying, well, that gentleman was let go, I want to tell you that more than 90% of the 30,000 or so Jews that were arrested in Kristallnacht sweeps in 1938 were eventually released by the Nazis as.
- [30:08]
B
Well, with the expectation they will leave the country.
- [30:10]
A
But some died in captivity. And meanwhile, a reign of terror was established. Abuses continued with impunity until unthinkable possibilities began to be considered for the camps. And if you say, well, The Japanese American detention camps were stopped. America has already refused all that. I would answer that. The stopping happened within that critical three to five year period that I've been discussing today. Yet even in that case, the seeds remained. It was not until 2018, during the first Trump administration, when the conservative majority that Trump created on the Supreme Court while trying to whitewash the President's attempt to create a Muslim ban. At that point, Chief Justice John Roberts tried to insist that the Muslim ban case was nothing like Korematsu.
- [31:05]
C
Check this out from Sonia Sotomayor today.
- [31:07]
A
And that the Korematsu case authorizing that detention during World War II was a gravely wrong decision with no place in law.
- [31:16]
C
This formal repudiation of a shameful precedent.
- [31:18]
A
Is laudable and long overdue. But it does not make the majority's.
- [31:21]
C
Decision here acceptable or right by blindly accepting the government's misguided invitation to sanction a discriminatory policy motivated by animosity toward a disfavored group, all in the name of a superficial claim of national security.
- [31:37]
A
And in recent days we are seeing federal courts in Alabama using a law last applied during the US internment of Japanese Americans to charge immigrants who don't register themselves. We will continue to see people arguing over whether or not the phrase abolish ICE race is the right slogan.
- [31:56]
C
And I'm tired of waking up every day and seeing a new image of someone being dragged out of a car, dragged out of their home, dragged out of their life.
- [32:04]
A
Just this week, one of the people making the case that the phrase was too extreme was discovered to be a corporate consultant at a shadow lobbyist for defense and tech firms. It's just one more example of how all this money and all these facilities create a self perpetuating bureaucracy with its own stakeholders whose main interest is in its continuance.
- [32:28]
C
What we need to see is humanity.
- [32:30]
A
Politicians back mass detention for the expanded power that it brings them money interests back. This kind of detention because they have financial stakes in building or maintaining them.
- [32:41]
C
And there is a way to to care about immigration in this city and in this country with a sense of humanity.
- [32:48]
A
And to be clear, any approach that slows this process down does give us more time to act. Yet we know from history around the world and in America's own past that without a complete dismantling of the targeting and detention systems we have created, we are bound to return to this again and again. If it isn't stopped, it can and it will get much worse.
- [33:12]
C
What we're seeing from ICE is not it and we have not seen that from them in a long, long time.
- [33:16]
A
Just as the US has a heritage of oppression, it also has a vast, vast history of those who believed and worked for the best that the country could become. From Reconstruction to the fight against the KKK to Native American resistance, the underground Railroad, the farm worker labor movement, and the civil rights movement, we have ancestors and role models in this work. Countless communities are already rising to the occasion in Chicago and Minneapolis and LA and DC and churches and synagogues and much mosques in PTA meetings and neighborhood anti ICE groups. Remember when I said at the top of this episode that the real answer to sloppy and violent and cowboy immigration enforcement is not to give them more training? Well, in 1934, a year into their rule, the Nazis decided that the abuses that had come to light from similarly cowboying guards improvising and taking matters into their own hands in concentration camps, camps had to stop. That was the point at which the SS was given control of the camps. Formal training was instituted. Dachau became the model camp at the head of a regimented and more structured camp system. While certain kinds of abuse did stop, more training did not prevent the much worse atrocities that followed on a larger scale. You can't reform a concentration camp regime. You have to dismantle it and replace it. We have a thousand ways to do it. And most US citizens, particularly white ones, have the freedom to act for now with far less risk than many people who are currently targeted.
- [34:55]
B
Joining us now is New York Congressman Adriano Espallad. He is the chair of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus.
- [35:02]
A
City councils are voting on cutting ties with ice. Hotels in the Twin Cities are closing in order to refuse them shelter.
- [35:09]
C
Right now, the entity ICE is gripped in a violent culture that I think warrants it to be dismantled.
- [35:19]
A
Lawyers are working to represent those in detention. Constituents are working to elect politicians that express a serious willingness to stand up against ice. Whistle brigades have formed meal delivery and safety patrols.
- [35:31]
C
The name ICE should disappear. Should disappear.
- [35:34]
A
Get food to families or walk their children to schools. If not all this is happening where you live yet, then you should get ready and help keep as much of it as possible from ever arriving in your hometown.
- [35:49]
C
Over and over. I'm really proud of the community for standing up and fighting back any way they can. And all they're looking for when I say fight back, is accountability. Accountability, due process and respect of human rights.
- [36:01]
A
All you have to do is pick one of these tasks that you think you could help with with. One way to undo the brutality sweeping the country right now, build community close to home and larger networks between groups to share and learn from each other. We can do this if we're willing to act. And that's it. Thanks for listening to Next Comes what? Please share this with one person who's looking for ways to survive this message to support this podcast. Please become a paid subscriber@Andreapitzer.com and consider giving Next Comes what? A five star review where you get your podcasts.