Trump’s incendiary language echoes dangerous historical precedents. He has called his political opponents “vermin,” referred to immigrants as depraved “animals” and “rapists,” and described the U.S.–Mexico border as an “open wound.” Examples abound of similar rhetoric in Nazi propaganda about Jews.
Less well known is the fact that before World War II, the Nazis framed German Jews as aliens who needed to be forced into emigration or expelled. This was the original logic for stripping Jews of citizenship: to officially render them foreigners. (It should be noted that Trump aims to end birthright citizenship in the U.S.)
Prejudice has always been a part of concentration camps. At the dawn of the 20th century, mortality surged in British camps in southern Africa during the South African War, with children’s deaths blamed on “uncivilized” Boer mothers. Embracing pseudoscientific biology, camp administrators spent about half the money per day for food for a Black African civilian as was spent on white detainees (who themselves received insufficient rations). Bureaucracy and unforeseen crises added immeasurably to the harm. In poorly sited and badly run camps, tens of thousands of noncombatants died.
Other early camp systems included massive networks established on an emergency basis to detain immigrants or expel targeted minority groups. During the Spanish Civil War, when 475,000 refugees poured across France’s southern border in less than three weeks, many were forced into unlivable conditions in remote areas to isolate them from French society. Illness and disease followed on a massive scale.
After the start of World War II, the French government used those same camps to intern foreign Jews who had escaped Hitler’s Germany, detaining them as enemy aliens. And after France fell to the Nazis, French policemen went door-to-door in Paris in May 1941 in the service of the Vichy government to round up foreign Jews who remained at liberty. Some deported Jews were sent to barracks still holding Spanish detainees and “enemy aliens.” Camps often begin as one thing and become something else.
The relocation and detention involved in the deportation project that Trump is proposing are at least an order of magnitude greater than these debacles. The argument that a second Trump administration wouldn’t be able to launch such an operation because of a lack of personnel or legal authority should be understood as largely irrelevant because it presupposes the intention of running a precise, legal project at all.
A professional effort on this scale would be impossible. The mass deportations planned to begin in January 2025 if Trump is reelected are meant to unleash deliberate and collateral mayhem. And if history is any guide, a system of camps built to punish millions represents a threat to every American.