Secret police and facilities
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 and the NKVD. In Nazi Germany, the secret police were the Gestapo, and the fanatical Hitler loyalists were the SS. A little after a year after Hitler came to power, it was a section of the SS that took over running the Nazi concentration camp system.
In the U.S., 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. Now ICE is expanding rapidly and taking on the more violent and extrajudicial culture of Border Patrol agents as it grows.
Border Patrol Commander Greg Bovino has become the public face of ICE raids as various agencies combine their efforts. He’s aware of this role and relishes it. You often find him on the front lines of confrontation, egging on the most brutal and illegal tactics. He overtly dresses like a Nazi.
Camp vs Klan model
Sometimes people who know U.S. history well talk about the ways in which we don’t need to look to European fascism or its horrors to understand what’s happening in the U.S. today. I think, however that both the international history of camps and domestic U.S. history are critical to understanding what’s going on and where we are in the current process.
In terms of U.S. history, organizations like the Ku Klux Klan have long committed extrajudicial violence against people of color and immigrants in the U.S. Members often held public positions but used a hood to keep their public and private actions nominally separate when violence was involved.
Slave patrols combined a quasi-official role with citizen vigilantism. At the far end of the spectrum, the U.S. government has had an overt and vicious history of harming civilians from its founding, with Native genocide and chattel slavery.
So a government or citizens willing to harm targeted groups is hardly a new phenomenon in the U.S. 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. Those two developments took earlier forms of arbitrary civilian detention and revolutionized the ability of a small guard force to control a lot of people. One way to think of it is to picture prior forms of detention as an atomic bomb, and concentration camps as a hydrogen bomb.