The March 4, 2026, edition of the Arizona Daily Star put the facts succinctly: “A Haitian asylum seeker held for four months at Florence Correctional Center died Monday at a Scottsdale hospital due to complications from an infected tooth.” It seems the infection spread from his tooth to his lungs, and he developed the pneumonia that killed him.

In other words, U.S.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) allowed a prisoner to die of a toothache.

His name was Emmanuel Damas.

He was 56 years old and the father of two.

And we can only expect medical treatment at ICE centers to deteriorate further.

As Judd Legum at Popular Information reported in January 2026: “ICE… has not paid any third-party providers for medical care for detainees since October 3, 2025.

Last week, ICE posted a notice on an obscure government website announcing it will not begin processing such claims until at least April 30, 2026.

Until then, medical providers are instructed ‘to hold all claims submissions.’” Emmanuel Damas’s unnecessary death would be outrageous enough, were it the only one of its kind.

In fact, 32 people died in ICE custody during 2025, the most in two decades.

Another six died in January 2026 alone, among them Geraldo Lunas Campos, a Cuban father aged 55, at Camp East Montana detention center in El Paso, Texas.

Although ICE initially claimed Lunas Campos had attempted suicide, the American Immigration Council reports that “the El Paso County Medical Examiner ruled his death was a homicide arising from asphyxia due to neck and torso compression.” Of course, it’s pretty hard to strangle yourself to death.

Witnesses, however, described his murder this way: “Mr.

Lunas Campos was handcuffed, while at least five guards held him down and one guard squeezed his neck until he was unconscious.” At least one other man has died at the Camp East Montana detention center, where tuberculosis and measles are also spreading.

Damas and Lunas Campos were among the roughly 73,000 people whom ICE currently holds in a tangle of detention camps sprawled across the country.

And more centers are under construction.

Many of them are former warehouses designed to function, as ICE acting director Todd Lyons put it last year, “like Amazon Prime for human beings.” (Like many Trump appointees, Lyons has not received Senate confirmation.

His actual title, according to ICE, is “Senior Official Performing the Duties of the Director of U.S.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”) What Is a Concentration Camp? Taken together, this network of prisons or, more accurately, concentration camps, constitutes an American gulag.

“Gulag” is not so much a word as a Russian initialism that came to stand for the Soviet Union’s concentration camp program, originally developed under Joseph Stalin.

The term stands for “Main Directorate of Correctional Labor Camps” and originally referred to the officials running the camps.

Later, “gulag” came to indicate the camps themselves, which were a central instrument of Soviet political repression.

Most Americans first learned about those camps through Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1973 internationally bestselling memoir, The Gulag Archipelago.

As Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, has written, such institutions are a relatively recent phenomenon.

While human beings have long contrived ways to isolate groups they identify as enemies — for example, in the enclosed Jewish ghettos of medieval Europe — the modern concentration camp evolved thanks to two key inventions: barbed wire and the machine gun.

That pair of technological advances made it possible for a small number of guards to control and contain a large number of people in one place.

Concentration camps have a number of defining features: Concentration camps exist outside regular legal structures.

The people they hold are not prisoners, but detainees.

So, we find people of all ages, from infants to ancients, in concentration camps.

In most cases, they have not been tried or convicted of any crime.

Rather, they are held because of their status, for example, as non-citizens, or in the case of Japanese-American citizens imprisoned during World War II, because of their ethnicity or national origin.

This is true for the people held in ICE detention today.

Their alleged offenses are against U.S.

civil, not criminal law, and their detention exists outside of any court system, including the immigration courts run by the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review.

Immigration judges, who are really administrative employees, can’t order anyone detained.

That’s up to ICE and its umbrella agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Concentration camp inmates are civilians, not soldiers, which places them conveniently outside the strictures of the Geneva Conventions.

That’s why the U.S.

has never recognized the men it has held and, in the case of 15 prisoners, continues to hold as prisoners of war in the U.S.

prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

In the 1990s, almost a decade before the naval station at Guantánamo was first used to house detainees in the “global war on terror,” the U.S.

held immigrants there, including as many as 50,000 Haitians and Cubans.

Trump’s January 29, 2025, executive order entitled “Expanding Migrant Operations Center At Naval Station Guantánamo Bay To Full Capacity” directed the Defense and Homeland Security departments to prepare to hold as many as 30,000 migrant detainees there.

As of July 2025, the camp held detainees from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Caribbean.

Concentration camps are associated with authoritarian regimes.

They function both as a direct form of repression and, no less importantly, as a warning to the rest of the population about what could happen to those who resist the regime.

In this sense, concentration camps are very much like another tool of repression, institutionalized state torture, about which I wrote in my book Mainstreaming Torture.

Like state torture, concentration camps perform a kind of national security theater, made all the more entrancing by its quasi-secret nature.

In the case of ICE detention camps, the DHS has made a show of not permitting local officials or members of Congress to enter those facilities.

But such detention centers can’t fulfill their full repressive function if people don’t know anything about what goes on in them.

So, we have the spectacle of a hearing in which a congresswoman asked then-DHS secretary Kristi Noem about a double amputee who “has to crawl through mold and feces and bodily fluids just to take a shower.” Knowing that this is happening to people who have almost no recourse is intended to have a chilling effect on political action.

Concentration camps are not death camps, but people do die there.

Many Americans tend to think that all German concentration camps were sites of direct extermination.

In fact, the Nazis constructed six camps specifically designed for the industrialized murder of....