For Your Information

Vast Network of Immigration Detention Prisons and Concentration Camps

Action outside venue for World Cup,  Arlington, TX, June 14, 2026

Detention Watch Network (DWN) informs that the United States government maintains the world's largest detention system, currently largely used for immigrants and refugees but given continued expansion is also meant for all those who resist. In Fiscal Year 2025, DWN states that the U.S. government "detained more than 310,000 people in a sprawling system of over 200 detention centres, jails and prisons across the country." As of June, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is estimated to hold at least 60,000 people on a day-to-day basis. This is down from a record high of 73,000 people in mid-January. Now that ICE is again striving to make 10,000 arrests weekly, this number is likely to rise again.

These unjust and illegal mass detention camps are rightly being called concentration camps with all the historical weight that the term carries, whether those created by the Nazis or those created by the U.S. and Canada to intern Japanese, Ukrainians, communists and many others baselessly accused of being "enemy aliens," during WWII. The Japanese American National Museum points out that "a 'concentration camp' is defined broadly as a place where people are imprisoned not because they are guilty of any crimes, but simply because of who they are." For its part, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum states, "What distinguishes a concentration camp from a prison (in the modern sense) is that it functions outside of a judicial system. The prisoners are not indicted or convicted of any crime by judicial process."

Given the rulers are increasingly resorting to violence and repression in conditions where they have no solutions, peoples everywhere from coast to coast are rising against ICE and demanding that all the camps be closed and no expansion take place.

Detention Watch Network states: "Immigrants in detention can be undocumented or documented immigrants, including people whose immigration status is not current, is expired or is under review. The U.S. locks up survivors of torture, people seeking asylum, visa holders, people who have been granted the permanent right to live in the U.S., people who have lived here for decades and may have American citizen spouses and children, individuals with mental health and medical conditions and other vulnerable groups. The government also jails parents with their children, including babies, in cruel family detention."

The website Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) informs that "42,722 out of 60,311 people or 70.8 per cent held in ICE detention have no criminal conviction according to data current as of April 4, 2026. Many of those convicted committed only minor offences, including traffic violations." It further points out that ICE classifies an individual as a convicted criminal if they have been convicted of what ICE terms criminal violations, even though they are often civil violations. Violations can range from serious felonies all the way down to a purely civil immigration violation (such as illegal entry which is a petty offence under the U.S. Code), or a violation which results only in a fine such as not keeping a dog on a leash, fishing without a permit, driving a vehicle with a taillight out, etc.

Protest in Los Angeles calling for closure of ICE detention camps, June 13, 2026

(With files from Detention Watch Network, TRAC, Japanese American National Museum, U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum)

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This article was published in

Volume 56 Number 5 - July 4, 2026

Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/TML2026/Articles/TS56059.HTM

Website:  www.cpcml.ca   Email:  editor@cpcml.ca