American Gestapo: The Worst Takes Time But It Comes Around Fast

“The hard-working men and women of DHS continue to break records as they defend the homeland and protect the American people. For the third straight month, ICE set a new record for the highest number of illegal aliens arrested in a single month, nearly 51,000. This is promises made and promises kept in action. Under President Trump’s leadership, ICE is working around the clock every day to arrest and deport illegal aliens from American communities. If you are in the country illegally, LEAVE NOW. If not, we will find you, arrest you, and deport you.”— DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin

Clearly, August was high-five time in I.C.E.-World. In September they hope to reach their quota of 2,000 arrests a day, 60,000 a month. They really are earning their “up-to-$50,000” signing bonuses and proven themselves players in the Universal Secret State Pol-Ice League. Not Hall of Fame quality yet, like the Nazi Gestapo; the OGPU, NKVD, KGB, and FSB of the Soviet Union and Putin’s Russia; East Germany’s Stasi; South Africa’s apartheid era Vlakplaas; the Spanish Inquisition; and death squads, torturers, and violent militias of scores of modern nations.

State-sponsored sadism is not only widespread but contagious. Even the U.S. was hit by this pandemic of abuse early this century, per Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and “renditions” to nations allowing torture. Often overlooked, however, is that even the worst abuses usually require a build-up, starting with violations of civil liberties that become normalized and then descend step-by-normalizing-step to the ultimate genocidal “solution”. This pattern has been well-documented and while such descents have been halted or reversed before the most catastrophic outcomes, the damage done before the final destination is reached can ruin millions of lives and shatter a nation’s legal protections and legitimate governance.

I.C.E. has certainly left its stain on America: mass seizures and imprisonment based on race; parents separated from children; arresting elementary students in class and whisking them directly to prison. “Of 751,861 children with pending removal cases, 57%—or 425,093 children—lacked legal representation, according to the most recent data.” Hmm…I wonder how many of those children are included in the one million deported “illegals”.

A.I. companies are eagerly selling surveillance programs to our government that can easily be expanded from immigrant targets to the entire population. And if comparisons to the Gestapo seem overblown, the Colorado Department of Public Safety issued a warning that Homeland Security’s I.C.E. recruiting materials are “mirroring popular white supremacist rhetoric and imagery.” Asawin Suebsaeng reports on Zeteo.com that Trump and I.C.E. have turned Springfield, Ohio, home of a large Haitian community, into a virtual testing ground for occupational terror, much as Israel has done in Gaza and the West Bank as reported by Naomi Klein; B’Tselem, the Israeli Information Cebnter for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories; and other sources.

Meanwhile, U.S. detention camps are abysmal. Inmates die from denial of medical care. Beatings and rapes are frequent, legal recourse virtually non-existent. No phone contact. Food awful. Texas accounts for 25% of U.S. I.C.E. arrests for which they’ve outfitted 27 facilities. Florida 11%. No surprises there. The locations of the four largest detention centers in the U.S. are easily available on Google Maps and Google Earth. They are:

ERO El Paso Camp, East Montana, a few thousand feet north of U.S. Route 80 (not the Interstate) which serves as a barrier for the residential neighborhood south of 80. It’s on a largely empty tract spotted with warehouses and government sites. Ironically, directly across from it on the south edge of 80 is the Gringo Theory Patio Bar which looks lovely. The name “Gringo Theory” serves as a fitting comment on the camp across the way.

Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana is on a dirt road bulldozed off a two-lane asphalt strip about five miles east of Lake Saline. The nearest town seems to be Calvin, population 242. To the southeast is a state forest.

Adams County Correctional Center in Mississippi nestles deep within a very sparsely populated area two miles south of Lake Natchez. It abuts an unpopulated state park.

Stewart Detention Center lies a mile southeast of Lumpkin, Georgia, population 891. The region’s dramatic landscape attracts many tourists who, presumably, do get to return home.

Like the Russian Gulag, camps are located in remote, sparsely populated, hard-to-reach wilderness, be it swamp, desert, forest, or barren land on the edge of El Paso, perhaps the last frontier city left in the U.S.

I.C.E. doesn’t run the prisons. Stewart Detention is run by Core Civic, a private company that has received hundreds of millions of dollars in I.C.E.-related contracts. Core Civic has an alleged history of prisoner mistreatment, forced labor, and understaffing. A 2024 federal investigation of its Trousdale Turner Correctional Center in Tennessee cited sexual abuse, murders, and staffing shortages. The intensively referenced Wikipedia entry for Core Civic details many law suits and investigations into company abuses, including one of the founders running a “Manhattan-sized” cotton plantation where black prisoners were forced to work for no pay, as Time magazine reported in 2018. “Arbeit macht frei” indeed. Core Civic’s Otay Mesa immigration detention center reportedly covered up seven sexual assaults and four attempted sexual assaults in 2025, having gotten permission from the San Diego County Sheriff’s office to be the investigatory authority for criminal complaints registered against itself.

The Obama administration in 2016 awarded Core Civic a one billion dollar no-bid contract to detain asylum seekers from Central America. Later that year, however, Deputy U.S. Attorney General Sally Yates announced an end to Bureau of Prison contracts with private for-profit companies. However, Trump took office five months later and rescinded the order.

Winn Correctional in Louisiana is managed by La Salle Corrections, also investigated for prisoner abuse and financial irregularities. The case of Holly Barlow-Austin, incarcerated in 2019 in one of La Salle’s standard prisons, is particularly gruesome. Despite serious health issues, she received no medical care or medication. She died—”Dehydrated, malnourished and in pain, Barlow-Austin gradually went blind and could not find cups of water left in her cell. She received little help, water or medical care from jail staff, according to the lawsuit, which alleged that she became ‘so thin and emaciated that her bones were jutting out. Her last 48 hours were tantamount to torture.’”

It is disturbing how we’ve normalized the arrest, abuse, and removal of one million people, most of whom lived here ten years or longer and are innocent of any crime. Many of the rest are guilty of minor infractions. In fact, non-citizen Latinos and other non-citizen immigrants pay billions in taxes, created countless businesses, and have a lower crime rate than native-born Americans. One wonders whether Trump and Netanyahu’s plan to remove all Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank was inspired by our own inept opposition to I.C.E.’s mass removal of non-citizens and citizens alike from the United States.

Many Americans downplay the comparison of our detention centers to concentration camps. Technically, though, they are concentration camps. In Nazi Germany, Jews and other target groups such as Roma, the disabled, gays, intellectuals, artists, and political opponents were “concentrated” in prison camps. Eventually this convenient concentration of “undesirables” made it easy to build camps designed to kill people en masse. But wait, we’re Americans, not Nazis—we’ll never go that far! Well, we’ve gone quite a ways down the same road. It’s not reassuring to set the bar so low it might as well be buried.

The soul of our nation, our survivability, depends on reversing course—now. Secret police, given a license to violate what we think of as “civilized norms”, always descend into savagery. Their functions and operations always expand unless firmly resisted. Since January, 2025 a massively funded equivalent to the Gestapo and KGB has been put in place and 200 camps outfitted. Countless lives have been torn apart. Rapes, killings, beatings, and fatal denial of medical care are taking place right now in filthy camps far from public view.

The Holocaust, twelve million people killed in massacres and death camps, needed time to develop. At some point before it shifted into gear in 1939, it looked like what is happening in America today. Are we certain this runaway betrayal of morality and law and decency has peaked? Or will we stagger, complacent and complicit, out to the farthest reaches of history’s most shameful path?