Camps

American concentration camps are in full swing, with death totals climbing every ten days—the only hope for the imprisoned is the U.S. midterm elections

People in the United States are dying in American concentration camps.

Since Donald J. Trump took office in January 2025, at least 49 people have died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to death reports and news releases published by ICE itself. The pace has reached one death every ten days, ABC News reports. By comparison, in 2024, under the Biden administration, 11 people died in ICE custody across the entire year. In 2025, 33 people died—the most in a single year since the Department of Homeland Security began operating in 2003, the New York Times reports. In the first three and a half months of 2026, the count has already reached 17 dead and climbing.

Those deaths include Emmanuel Damas, a 56-year-old Haitian man who developed a tooth infection in an Arizona detention center run by the private prison company CoreCivic under the ICE network. Fellow detainees told his family he was given only ibuprofen for a week. By the time his relatives were allowed to visit—nine days after he was hospitalized—Damas was on life support, unable to move or speak, shackled to his hospital bed.

The dead include Maksym Chernyak, a 44-year-old Ukrainian war refugee, who, the San Francisco Chronicle reports, died of a stroke after detention staff at an ICE-network facility in Florida waited more than an hour to call 911 following his evidently massive seizure.

Add to the dead: Serawit Gezahegn Dejene, a 45-year-old Ethiopian man, who died from complications of AIDS after going months without being tested or treated for HIV in an ICE network center.

The dead also include Geraldo Lunas Campos, a 55-year-old Cuban man who died at Camp East Montana in El Paso, Texas—the largest facility in the ICE system. The U.S. agency classified his death as an attempted suicide. The El Paso County medical examiner ruled it a homicide, however. Campos apparently died not by his own hand but due to asphyxia from neck and torso compression. Eyewitnesses say guards choked him. The FBI is supposedly investigating.

The Chronicle‘s investigation, which sent patient records to independent physicians, concluded that at least 17 detainees died after medical staff delayed or failed to provide care that might have saved their lives.

The New York Times similarly reports that pregnant women at these facilities have been shackled, denied prenatal care for months, and in one case, a woman had a miscarriage at nearly six months after reporting contractions a full month earlier, with no indication in the records that she received medical attention in between. Senator Jon Ossoff’s (D-Georgia) recent investigation into these atrocities has identified more than 1,000 credible reports of human rights abuses in immigration detention since January 2025, including 206 reports of medical neglect, according to findings published by his team.

The causes of these deaths tell a consistent story: missed diagnoses, delayed treatment, repeated failures to call for emergency medical responders. ICE, for its part, ends every death announcement with identical boilerplate: Comprehensive medical care is provided from the moment individuals arrive; at no time during detention, the agency assures Americans, is a detained person denied emergency care. And in a flourish of irony so thick it could stop a bullet in Minneapolis, the agency’s response to questions about the death rate has been to suggest detainees should self-deport to avoid the concentration camps the U.S. has constructed.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines a concentration camp as “a camp where persons are confined, usually without hearings and typically under harsh conditions, often as a result of their membership in a group which the government has identified as dangerous or undesirable.” The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum defines it as a detention site for civilians “independent of any judicial sentence or even indictment, and not subject to judicial review.” Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps—who has studied the camps of the Boer War, the Soviet Gulag, Pinochet’s Chile, and the Nazi system (before it became an extermination apparatus)—defines them as “the mass detention of civilians without trial, usually on the basis of race, religion, national origin, citizenship, or political party, rather than anything a given individual has done.” Pitzer told LAist in March that ICE’s current detention facilities meet this definition.

These facilities in which people are dying are concentration camps. Not because they are Auschwitz. They are not extermination camps. But places like Auschwitz are not where concentration camps began; they’re how concentration camps evolved under a particular regime, and the term does not belong exclusively to the Holocaust. “Concentration camp” also belongs to the Philippines, the Japanese-American internment, and the instances just mentioned above. It belongs to any system in which a government locks up large numbers of civilians without trial on the basis of identity, under conditions in which people predictably suffer and die. That is what is happening now in the United States, in facilities funded by American taxpayers and operated by corporations posting record profits.

On that point, it’s worth noting that while ICE is the impetus and financial artery for the brutal, lethal conditions of America’s concentration camps, the facilities in question are not, by and large, run by the federal government. They are run by for-profit prison corporations—chiefly CoreCivic and the GEO Group, both of which posted milestone revenue and new business in 2025, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

In another example, Camp East Montana, the El Paso tent facility where Campos died, was built under a $1.2 billion contract awarded to Acquisition Logistics, a Virginia-based company, according to the New York Times. An internal ICE inspection in February found 49 deficiencies at the camp, including 22 involving undocumented uses of force. In addition to the deaths tracked there, measles and tuberculosis have broken out among its inhabitants. The contractor has since been replaced. DHS, meanwhile, has purchased warehouses in Socorro, Texas, with the intent to build a facility for 8,500 more detainees, per the Times.

Meanwhile, more than 60,000 people are already in ICE facilities, as of April 2026, nearly double the pre-Trump number, according to NBC News. The vast majority have not been convicted of crimes; the American Immigration Council found a 2,450 percent increase in the number of people with no criminal record held in ICE detention on any given day. These people are confined not because of what they have done but because of who they are, and what the regime wants America to be: White, Christian, closed to others, and focused on funneling taxpayers’ money to the oligarchs and autocrats that have taken over.

Regarding these tens of thousands of people imprisoned, the agency tasked with their care admitted that it has no policy to prevent their deaths. America learned this from ICE testimony, given under oath on April 16, 2026, when Representative Lauren Underwood (D-Illinois) asked acting ICE director Todd Lyons whether the agency had any internal goals to reduce in-custody fatalities. He said no. Underwood replied by affirming what Americans already know is true: “Hope is not a policy” of the Trump regime.

Lyons announced his resignation hours after telling Congress he had no policy to prevent more deaths in the camps. Markwayne Mullin, newly appointed to run ICE’s parent agency DHS in the wake of Trump’s firing of the monstrous Kristi Noem, promised a supposedly softer tone at his confirmation hearing. He is inheriting a system that has posted 49 dead bodies in 15 months.

The administration is, of course, engineering silence on the matter of concentration camps and the deaths occurring in them. As NBC News reported, ICE gutted its own reporting on such incidents in mid-December 2025, cutting its customary three-page documents for each fatality to four-paragraph summaries. The agency’s death-investigation website has not been updated since mid-February 2026. DHS blames an alleged freezing of “non-essential reporting functions” affected by the shutdown—a characterization that Lyons himself conceded under oath has no legal basis. Put simply, and delivered free of the mental gymnastics of regime bridge trolls such as Karoline Leavitt, the U.S. government is making it harder to report on the deaths in its concentration camps, even as the death totals accelerate and climb. Cut the data. Shape the narrative as Stephen Miller sees fit. Repeat.

Meanwhile, the Mexican consulate in Los Angeles has turned its attention to the 14 Mexican nationals known to have died in ICE custody since Trump took office. Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, has condemned those fatalities, announcing that her administration will file a brief supporting a federal lawsuit over detention conditions and raise the matter with the Organization of American States. To reiterate: The government of Mexico is petitioning international human rights bodies over the treatment of its citizens in American custody.

On the horizon, the scenario appears structurally locked, barring a change at the highest levels of the U.S. government. The partial DHS shutdown—now in its third month, triggered in large part by the Minneapolis killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti—has not slowed the ICE machine. As analysts said it would not, even when proponents of the shutdown ginned up the impression that it would. No, as NPR reports, ICE continues to operate on the tens of billions already allocated under the One Big Beautiful Bill. Indeed, TSA agents go unpaid, and airport lines stretch for hours, but the concentration camps stay open, and the arrests continue.

Meanwhile, Senate Republicans introduced a reconciliation package this week intended to fund ICE and CBP for three more years—through to the end of Trump’s term—at a cost of roughly $70 billion, bypassing a filibuster with a simple majority vote. Democrats are fighting the move, but the administration’s leverage runs in one direction: The camps exist, the money is already flowing, and the Laken Riley Act—named after a Georgia nursing student killed by a Venezuelan immigrant in 2024—mandates detention for additional categories of immigrants regardless of what Congress does next.

And so, at least 49 people are dead. America’s concentration camps stretch from the Texas desert to the Mojave scrubland, from correctional facilities in Indiana and Louisiana to processing centers in Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Florida. This is a national system created by a deranged, magic-using, fascist regime bent on persecuting people and “cleansing” American cities and towns in the pursuit of a reactionary White utopia.

The United States has built similar systems before—for Japanese Americans during the Second World War, at Guantánamo for Haitian refugees fleeing a military coup in the early 1990s. And every time, in the past, American concentration camps closed only when the politics changed. The Japanese-American internment camps closed after a Supreme Court ruling (and the end of the war). The Haitian refugee camps at Guantánamo closed only after years of litigation and a shift in Haiti’s government. Trump’s own family-separation policy in 2018 ended only when the political cost became unbearable. In every case, the camps did not close because someone rescued the people inside them. They closed because of politics.

That is what the 2026 midterms are for. That is what November can effect, if Americans can defend their electoral norms just one more time. Between now and then, the injustice will continue. People will continue to die. The administration will continue to make it harder to count the bodies. For the United States, the only hope for the incarcerated and dying is this autumn’s ballot. The midterms must prevail.