Dachau was one of the first concentration
camps built by Nazi Germany and the longest-running one,
opening on 22 March 1933. The camp was initially intended to intern the Nazi
Party's political opponents,
which consisted of communists, social
democrats, and other dissidents. It was located on the grounds
of an abandoned munitions factory northeast of the medieval town of Dachau, about 16 km (10 mi)
northwest of Munich in the Gau Munich-Upper
Bavaria, in southern Germany.
(Hitler became chancellor in January of 1933, and president in August of
1934)
Prisoners lived in
constant fear of brutal treatment and torture including standing cells, floggings, tree or pole hanging, and being forced
to stand at attention for
extremely long periods.
At least 25,613
prisoners are believed to have been murdered in the camp and almost another
10,000 in its subcamps, primarily from disease, malnutrition and suicide.
The Dachau Memorial Site archive has documented 32,000 deaths at the camp, but
thousands more are undocumented. Crematoria were constructed to dispose of
the deceased. Approximately 10,000 of the 30,000 prisoners were sick at the
time of liberation.
In the postwar
years, the Dachau facility served to hold SS soldiers awaiting trial. After
1948, it held ethnic Germans who had been expelled from eastern Europe and were
awaiting resettlement, and also was used for a time as a United States military
base during the occupation.
It was finally closed in 1960.
There are several
religious memorials within the Memorial Site, which
is open to the public.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dachau_concentration_camp
You already know
that we have become the Germany of the 1930’s, but who among us would have imagined
that we would have concentration camps?
Today, they are called ICE facilities.
This week, two right-wing circuit judges signed off on the
Trump administration’s new mass detention policy: the extraordinary assertion
that vast numbers of noncitizens throughout the country can be arrested and
held in detention centers without the right to release until they are deported.
As
Steve Vladeck explained in December in One First, this new
policy dramatically expanded the number of immigrants suddenly subject to
arrest and long-term detention. U.S. judges overwhelmingly rejected the new
policy; Vladeck quoted Politico’s Kyle Cheney, who reported that in more
than 700 cases, at least 225 judges appointed
by all modern presidents—including 23 appointed by Trump—have ruled that the
new policy likely violates both the law and the right to due process.
This
policy has dramatically increased detention of immigrants. Before it,
the U.S. held about 40,000 people on any
given day. Now, according to Laura Strickler and Julia Ainsley of NBC News, the
United States is currently holding more than 70,000
immigrants in 224 facilities across the nation, 104 more facilities
than it had before Trump took office. Those detainees include children.
Private
prison companies under contract with the U.S. government operate these
detention facilities, including the $1.2 billion Camp East Montana located at
Fort Bliss Army base in Texas, where a medical examiner recently ruled the
death of detainee Geraldo Lunas Campos a homicide. The cause of the January
death of Victor Manuel Díaz there remains unclear, although officials claim it
was “presumed suicide.” A third man, Francisco Gaspar Andrés, died in December
after being transported from the camp to an El Paso hospital for treatment for
a serious medical condition.
On
January 20, Judd Legum of Popular Information reported that ICE
stopped paying third-party providers for medical care for detainees on October
3, 2025, and that it would not start even to process claims again until at
least April 30, 2026. It told medical providers to “hold all claims submissions”
until then. A source in the administration told Legum that some medical
providers are now denying detainee’s medical care.
From
2002 to 2023, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) helped to make sure
detainees had medical care if an ICE facility couldn’t provide it, with ICE
paying the VA for the coverage. But in 2023, Alabama Republican senator Tommy
Tuberville lied that President Joe Biden was “robbing veterans to pay off
illegals,” and on September 30, 2025, a small right-wing nonprofit sued to get
documents from the Trump administration about the VA’s role in detainee care. On
October 3, Legum discovered, “the VA ‘abruptly and instantly terminated’ its
agreement with ICE,” leaving it with no way to provide prescribed medication or
access off-site care.
According
to Legum, ICE said it could not provide “dialysis, prenatal care, oncology,
[and] chemotherapy.” ICE officials described the loss of care as an “absolute
emergency” that needed an immediate solution to “prevent any further medical
complications or loss of life.” But it did not get solved.
Douglas
MacMillan, Samuel Oakford, N. Kirkpatrick, and Aaron Schaffer of the Washington
Post reported that according to ICE’s own oversight unit, Camp East
Montana at Fort Bliss, Texas, has violated at least 60 federal standards for
immigrant detention. The contract for the $1.24 billion project was awarded to
a small business that operates out of a residential address and has, as Lyndon
German of VPM News reported, “little to no publicly available record of
managing immigration facilities.”
Last
April, at the Border Security Expo in Phoenix, Arizona, acting director of ICE
Todd Lyons told attendees: “We need to get better at treating this like a
business.” He called for a deportation process “like [Amazon] Prime, but with
human beings.” In the Republicans’ July 2025 budget reconciliation bill—which
they call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act—they put $45 billion into additional
funding for ICE detention.
In
November and December, NBC News and Bloomberg reported that the Trump
administration was considering “mega centers” for detaining people. Fola
Akinnibi, Sophie Alexander, Alicia A. Caldwell, and Rachel Adams-Heard of
Bloomberg reported that in November, ICE issued a $29.9 million contract—just
below the threshold of $30 million that would require open bidding—to
KpbServices LLC for “due diligence services and concept design for processing
centers and mega centers throughout the United States.”
In
December, Douglas MacMillan and Jonathan O’Connell of the Washington Post reported
that the administration was working to put in place a national detention
system that would book newly arrested detainees into processing sites before
sending them to one of seven warehouses that would hold 5,000 to 10,000 people
each. MacMillan and O’Connell reported that “sixteen smaller warehouses would
hold up to 1,500 people each.” From there, people would be deported.
“These
will not be warehouses—they will be very well-structured detention facilities
meeting our regular detention standards,” a DHS spokesperson wrote to Angela
Kocherga and Dianne Solis of KERA News in Texas. “It should not come as news
that ICE will be making arrests in states across the U.S. and is actively
working to expand detention space.”
Strickler
and Ainsley reported Thursday that the Department of Homeland Security has
already secured at least three facilities. It paid $87.4 million for one
outside Philadelphia and $37 million for another outside San Antonio, a
warehouse of nearly 640,000 square feet. ICE bought a building the size of
seven football fields in Surprise, Arizona, outside Phoenix, for $70 million.
But there is increasing criticism of the
new warehouses as Americans mobilize against the violence and abuse of ICE and
Border Patrol.
Even
Republicans like Paul Gosar have questions about the Surprise facility.
He
sent a letter to Kristi Noem on February 4, and asked her 15 detailed questions
about the propose site.
Officials
from Surprise answered concerns about the federal facility with a statement
saying: “The City was not aware that there were efforts underway to purchase
the building, was not notified of the transaction by any of the parties
involved and has not been contacted by DHS or any federal agency about the
intended use of the building. It’s
important to note, Federal projects are not subject to local regulations, such
as zoning.”
On
Tuesday, February 3, more than a thousand people turned out for the Surprise
City Council meeting to oppose the establishment of the federal detention
center. One of the speakers reminded the council of Ohrdruf, the first Nazi
camp liberated by U.S. troops, on April 4, 1945. He said:
“The
U.S. Army brought the leading citizens of Ohrdruf to tour the facility, which
turned out to be part of the Buchenwald network of concentration camps. A U.S. Army colonel told the
German civilians who viewed the scenes without muttering a word that they were
to blame. One of the Germans replied that what happened in the camp was ‘done
by a few people,’ and ‘you cannot blame us all.’ And the American, who could
have been any one of our grandfathers, said: ‘This was done by those that the
German people chose to lead them, and all are responsible.’
“The morning after the tour, the
mayor of Ohrdruf killed himself. And maybe he did not know the full
extent of the outrages that were committed in his community, but he knew
enough. And we don’t know exactly how ICE will use this warehouse. But we know
enough. I ask you to consider what the mayor of Ohrdruf might have thought
before he died. Maybe he felt like a victim. He might have thought, ‘How is
this my fault? I had no jurisdiction over this.’ Maybe he would have said,
‘This site was not subject to local zoning, what could I do?’ But I think, when
he reflected on the suffering that occurred at this camp, just outside of town,
that those words would have sounded hollow even to him. Because in his heart he
knew, as we do, that we are all responsible for what happens in our community.”
There
is a reason that the public is critical of ICE>
ICE’s latest recruitment ads are
built around music and language drawn straight from far-right neo-Nazi memes,
and they are aimed at extremists who are most fervent about guns, tactical
gear, and vigilantism. Meanwhile, two companies you probably use all the time
are making a profit from running these ads: YouTube and
Google.
One ICE recruitment post on the official DHS Instagram account,
less than two days after an ICE agent shot and killed Renee Good in
Minneapolis, included the song, “We’ll Have Our Home Again” by
Pine Tree Riots. This song, popularized in neo-Nazi spaces, uses phrases
associated with white nationalist calls for race war,
their “glimpse at kingdom come:”
“On the other side of misery,
there′s
a world we long to see
The
strife we share, will take us there
Oh by God we'll have our home again
By
God, we'll have our home
By
blood or sweat, we′ll get there yet
By God
we′ll have our home”
Finally,
even ICE agents have had enough:
Read the full breakdown before it disappears. Mass ICE
walkout. 
Unless ICE implements
proper controls, the answer to more funding should be NEIN!
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