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WWII style internment camps could come next [1]
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Date: 2025-06-16
With WWII underway, FDR made the one stain on his legacy which was his executive order to take Japanese Americans from the West Coast and put them in internment camps. It never actually specified Japanese American citizens, but everyone knew what it meant. German ancestry citizens didn't have the same problem.
Credit: Bill Manbo - Japanese Boy Scouts and their band instruments in a camp.
I predict we might see them again for the immigrants Trump is determined to deport. There will be too many to hold in jails, so they will need larger facilities. There are several from WWII preserved and shown by the National Park Service as a historical reminder. Like Auschwitz in Germany.
Tom Homan was quoted saying that once ICE has people, "Let's contract everything else out."
April 24, 1942.
Note the column headline on the right: Construction On Japanese Relocation Quarters Will Stimulate Local Business.
There were 10 big ones like this.
Trump will farm the work of the new immigrant camps out to private companies. They have to be built, so that's the first step. Trump is planning on building military installations on the border, and these could be some of them. They don't all have to be for housing military personnel that he's planning to use to stop all traffic of immigrants across the border.
Heart Mountain camp in Wyoming
Camps have to have security to keep people from escaping, but where they will be located will make it less desirable to try. There will still have to be watch towers.
We've also got much things worse than just plain old barbed wire today. Now we've got razor wire and worse.
There will be private company contracts for everything, just like Homan said. Transportation, surveillance, processing, tracking, drones for border patrol and camp monitoring, operators of same, and private prisons for the worst.
I started writing this on April 12th, just that I was predicting it. I didn't have an ending. I do now. Today, I'm almost proven right with a story about a private prison firm called CoreCivic that wants to re-open Leavenworth for ICE detention.
Leavenworth, the city, filed a lawsuit against CoreCivic because they tried to reopen the 1,033 bed facility without city approval. That's just the start.
The Trump administration is using no-bid contracts for additional facilities and modifying existing contracts to get what they want.
The grift is just getting started. One company providing "immigration enforcement support teams" to coordinate removals, handling complaints and snitching on individuals to ICE, got a $73 million no-bid contract.
Geo Group suddenly got a changed contract to open a 1,868 bed prison in Georgia getting another $66 million in revenue.
That Big Ugly Bill has $45 billion for over the next four years for ICE detention. A tripling of the current budget.
When Trump started his second term, CoreCivic and Geo Group had 20 empty prisons and detention centers. Trump wants to increase available space to 100,000, and if you believe these private companies. to 150,000 and more. Currently, there are 41,000 spaces available.
Trump's declaration of a border emergency allowed ICE to make nine five year contracts, no bid, for 10,312 beds. Only three of the facilities were listed. Leavenworth, a CoreCivic in California City, CA., and a Geo Group prison in Baldwin, Michigan.
Leavenworth is Trump country, but city officials weren't about to let CoreCivic avoid the permitting process. Leavenworth sued and a state court judge issued a ruling requiring it.
President Biden told the Dept. of Justice to reduce the use of private prisons because of their terrible reputations on inmate treatment. CoreCivic's Leavenworth saw the ACLU detail stabbings and suicides before it was closed.
Some counties have passed ordinances that bar ICE from leasing space. ICE has used existing contracts and modified them to reopen places like the 1,000 bed Delaney Hall Facility in Newark, New Jersey, where Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested trying to get in to inspect the facility.
All the financial information on the online copies of the ICE contracts are redacted as are all the ones since Trump took office. Since that re-election, CoreCivic's stock has risen 56%, and Geo Group's by 73%.
Geo Group's lobbyist was Pam Bondi. Is it any wonder that these companies are expecting and getting windfall profits? CoreCivic is going to get $4.2 million a month for Leavenworth.
It's just going to get better. 90% of ICE detainees are held in private run facilities. CoreCivic and Geo Group also get paid for transport, keeping track of those legally in the country and those waiting for asylum rulings. They've also got contracts with the U.S. Marshals service.
It's a gold mine for the private prison and ICE contract industry. Everyone knows that treatment in private facilities is worse for detainees than in federal prisons. That's why ICE and Noem want more of them. Cruelty is the point.
With the private prison industry doing so well, and ICE not hitting anywhere the desired deportation quota of detainees, there isn't a need for the size of internment camps, yet. They would have to be built much differently from the WWII camps. Escaping would be much easier. Prisons rarely see that. There's all the other services sub-contracts to pay for. Food, laundry and the like.
Homan said, "We need to get better at treating this like a business." He wants to see the deportation process run like "Amazon [Prime], but with human beings." Homan said to contract everything out.
It sure looks like it's going that way.
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