Worst case scenario

I’m not going to sugarcoat it.¹ Here’s the state of play:

On July 4, having cajoled, coerced, and gaslighted the last Republican holdouts in Congress, Donald Trump signed his omnibus legislation, the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” into law. In addition to its topline provisions — a world-historical wealth transfer from the poorest to the richest Americans, partially paid for with crippling cuts to Medicaid, rural hospitals, and higher education — the OBBBA exploded funding for “immigration enforcement” to $170 billion.

This astounding sum includes $45 billion for new detention facilities² , $47 billion for “border wall construction,” a $10 billion Homeland Security anti-immigration slush fund, and a tripling of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s yearly budget to $30 billion. The total is more than any country in the world spends annually on its military other than the U.S. and China. The ICE budget alone would make it the 18th best-funded military in the world, just after the Israel Defense Forces. Its budget will now be bigger than the FBI, Bureau of Prisons, and Drug Enforcement Administration combined.

Trump has promised 10,000 new ICE agents. That would bring the total to 30,000 — approximately one (generally masked) agent for every 11,000 people in this country. The pressure of such a massive hiring spree, combined with ICE’s plummeting reputation among the general public, pretty much guarantees a mix of corruption and the hiring of, to borrow a phrase, the worst of the worst to fill out the expanded force.

At the same time, Trump and his team trumpeted the opening of “Alligator Alcatraz,” a new state-funded but federally protected immigrant detention camp on an abandoned airstrip in the Florida Everglades that is expected to house at least 5,000 detainees at a time. Overseen by Gov. Ron DeSantis (who, like Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, is a former Guantánamo Bay prison guard), it is being billed as a model for a nationwide network, funded by compliant state governments and the new mammoth federal bill.

The first detainees today reported intolerable conditions including overcrowding, a lack of bathing water, maggot-infested food, blinding 24-hour lights, a lack of medicine, and a lack of mosquito control in a virus-rich swamp. “They're not respecting our human rights,” one detainee told CBS News. “We’re like rats in an experiment.”

“I don't know their motive for doing this, if it’s a form of torture. A lot of us have our residency documents and we don't understand why we're here,” he added.

These are of course in addition to the overseas detention centers, such as El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo (CECOT) and wherever the grab bag of nationalities we’ve sent to South Sudan are headed. Yesterday, in another ominous note, the government of Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele told the United Nations that in fact the U.S. — which is to say the Trump administration — has the exclusive “jurisdiction and legal responsibility” for the people it is sending to that country.³

And all of this is under the ambit of a Supreme Court decree that the president — this president, particularly — is “presumptively immune” from prosecution for all official acts, and absolutely immune for any they argue falls under his “core constitutional powers.” Along with the more recent rulings making it effectively impossible for lower federal courts to stop even blatantly unconstitutional practices in their tracks.

So, to summarize: An authoritarian president, accountable to no court and with a cowed legislature in his pocket, now has all the legal and monetary tools he needs to build out both a massive federal secret police force answerable only to him, and an equally massive archipelago of Gitmo-style concentration camps⁴ at home and abroad in which to house and process their captives.

And you may have noticed that I put “immigration enforcement” in scare quotes above. That was intentional. Immigrants are certainly the first line of attack. But the second Trump administration has been signaling since before the election that it plans to use immigration enforcement to go after disfavored people who are here legally and citizens as well. On June 11, the DOJ issued a memo calling for the Civil Division to “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence,” including “any other cases referred to the Civil Division that the Division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue.” Or, as Trump himself put it: “The homegrowns are next.”

To be clear, none of this is set in stone, even as the pieces move into place. People all over the country are waking up — those who have been aware have been protesting and confronting federal harassment and violence. Demonstrators, and to their credit city officials, stood up yesterday against a militarized show of force in downtown Los Angeles which ended with heavily armed and armored border troops leaving, apparently with no one in custody. But our institutions — media, universities, the institutional Democratic Party — are asleep; or worse, actively capitulating to the most reactionary forces in our society. It’s too late to stop this from coming into power, too late now to stop it from being funded, and too late to prevent the harms that have already come to pass. But we still have power, and we still have numbers. Let’s use them, before it’s really too late.

1  Out of character, I know.

2  By contrast, the total spending for the entire Federal Bureau of Prisons in FY24 was just over $8 billion. The U.S. spent just under $13 billion — one-third as much — on affordable housing, total, last year.

3  Hat tip to Chris Geidner for digging up that tidbit in his newsletter.

4  I’ve written at length about the long genealogy of the concentration camp in general and its U.S. history in particular. It dates back not to the World War II era but to Spain’s attempts to crush the Cuban War of Independence in 1896 (with precedents earlier still, including in the “concentration, devastation, and harassment” strategies used by the U.S. Army in its campaigns against the Native Americans).

As Andrea Pitzer puts it in her history of the subject, “a concentration camp exists wherever a government holds groups of civilians outside the normal legal process—sometimes to segregate people considered foreigners or outsiders, sometimes to punish.” Or, if you prefer a dictionary, it’s “a camp where persons are confined, usually without hearings and typically under harsh conditions, often as a result of their membership in a group the government has identified as dangerous or undesirable.”

The U.S. used concentration camps in the Philippines, in the Mississippi Delta in the 1920s, on the homefront during World War II, and more recently at Guantánamo and the southern border during the first Trump administration. This does not erase but rather highlights the unique horrors of the Nazi concentration camps — the most infamous of which weren’t concentration camps at all but extermination centers. As the historian Dan Stone writes in Oxford’s Concentration Camps: A Very Short Introduction, “Focusing only on the Nazi camps, or taking them as exemplary of concentration camps, is to miss important points in their history. Not least, if we accept that concentration camps need not look like Dachau or Belsen, we see that in some ways we have come full circle.”