If we don’t call for the camps to be closed, no one will

Democratic politicians have spent thirty years trying to be the second-best Republicans on immigration — out-deporting, out-detaining, out-brutalizing. The result is they handed Donald Trump a machine already built, already legally insulated, and now freshly loaded with $191 billion in new funding that should be going anywhere else. Trump didn’t invent this system. He inherited it—twice. And now he’s running it with people who post “banger” neo-Nazi memes on the DHS Instagram.

That’s the truth that cuts through this week’s episode of Next Comes What by Andrea Pitzer, which I produced. Trump II is worse than Trump I or Obama or Biden or both Bushes or Clinton when it comes to immigration cruelty. But he’s not an aberration. He's an accelerant poured onto thirty years of bipartisan kindling. And that’s a truth I think is more urgent than almost anything else being said right now. Because when we accept it, our moral obligation becomes obvious.

We must make Democrats in Congress—who have spent thirty years building calluses over their conscience on immigration—understand that now is the time to state an intention with a little bit of the bravery and clarity of those Americans who ended enslavement and segregation. If not now, we'll build a camp system so big and so bipartisan that the next fascist won't even have to campaign on it. He'll just show up, say thank you, and get to work. Tearing it down starts with saying that's the goal. So let's start there.

Because the unbearable truth is, we already know enough.

ICE Isn’t Law Enforcement. It’s a Story.

Democratic messaging mastermind Anat Shenker-Osorio, in a recent interview with Greg Sargent at The New Republic, explained what’s actually happening here with the kind of clarity that should be mandatory reading for every Democratic consultant currently A/B testing “border security” talking points.

The Trump administration, she argues, is running a classic authoritarian playbook: foment a counterrevolution against a revolution that never was—tell people you’re protecting them from a threat that your own regime manufactures and amplifies, so they don’t notice it’s actually the billionaires picking their pockets.

ICE isn’t law enforcement. It’s a narrative delivery system for MAGA from the gnarled mind of Stephen Miller. The violence is the point.

That’s why body cameras and other checkboxes won’t fix this. “You cannot reform an agency whose mission is to actually harm and destroy,” as Shenker-Osorio said.

And yet that’s precisely what Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries are offering — a list of procedural reforms that, if history is any guide, will do for the camp system what the Military Commissions Act did for Guantanamo: launder it just enough to survive the next administration and the one after that. A kidnapping-industrial complex with better paperwork is still a kidnapping-industrial complex.

The High Ground Democrats Keep Surrendering

Here’s the deeper trap Shenker-Osorio identifies: Democrats keep playing defense on immigration, constantly trying to prove they’re tough enough, credible enough, serious enough—and in doing so, they surrender the entire moral terrain before the argument even starts.

Unless and until there is a different prevailing narrative about who immigrants are and what they represent, she argues, we will always be on the back foot—morally and electorally.

Immigrants need to be understood not as villains, not as victims, not as labor units performing jobs Americans allegedly won’t do, but as a representation of this dream and this courage that we’re supposed to admire. That’s not a soft talking point. That’s the precondition for building the political will required to actually shut this apparatus down.

What Minneapolis showed — and what this administration clearly found alarming enough to declare victory and retreat — is what that looks like in practice: moral clarity of people standing with and for each other across races, across origins, across accents, across faiths. It drove the MAGA base nutty precisely because it demolished their foundational story about who the good guys are. And it’s why Karoline Leavitt had to go on Fox News and call a bloodbath a resounding success.

The Guantanamo Roadmap

This week’s episode is about why we’re at an inflection point and it brings us to where Andrea opens her global history of concentration camps. She explains why the halfway measures on offer risk doing what every previous round of tinkering with American detention has done.

The history of how Guantanamo went from post-9/11 emergency measure to permanent institution, eventually blessed by all three branches of government, is not just a cautionary tale. It’s a cookbook. It shows what can happen when people who should know better decide that limiting the damage is the same thing as stopping it.

Democratic leadership is in danger of writing their own Sandra Day O’Connor warning (you’ll get it when you watch the whole episode or read the print version) — recording for posterity that they knew this was wrong and deeply concerning, while doing just enough to let it continue. O’Connor’s note about indefinite detention outlived her. She died in 2024. Guantanamo is still open. Trump keeps trying to send people there despite the insane costs and impracticalities.

Temporary Is How Forever Starts

Camps are generally designed to go up fast and cheap. The Navy is running a $55 billion expeditionary contract — the same rapid-deployment model used to build Gitmo’s courtroom — to scatter military-style detention facilities across the American interior. The Gitmo Archipelago.

They won’t come down on their own. History is unambiguous on that.

So the ask isn’t reform. It’s dismantling. Someone has to say it. And if not us, who?

Listen to this week’s episode of Next Comes What by Andrea Pitzer. Then send it to someone who needs to hear it. And become a paid subscriber to support the work.