Locked Down, Rounded Up, Warehoused: The Rise of America’s Concentration Camps

In 2021, amid a global pandemic, warnings that the federal government might repurpose warehouses into detention facilities on American soil were dismissed as speculative, alarmist, even conspiratorial.

Five years later, what was speculation is a blueprint for locking up whomever the government chooses to target.

According to investigative reports, the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement are actively purchasing warehouses, factories and industrial buildings across the country for use as detention centers—often with little public notice, minimal oversight, and virtually no accountability.

This is no longer a warning.

It is a five-alarm fire.

With the Trump administration moving forward with plans to rapidly acquire warehouses for what could become a nationwide mass detention network, it’s no longer a question of whether the government will expand mass detention to lock up Americans for defying its mandates but when.

This is how it begins.

The government already has the means, the muscle and the motivation. It has spent decades building a vast archipelago of prisons, detention centers, and emergency facilities capable of imprisoning large numbers of people.

While the Trump administration insists that it is only targeting the “worst of the worst”—murderers, rapists, gang members, pedophiles and terrorists—most of those being rounded up have no criminal record. Being undocumented is a civil violation, not a crime.

This is where we have to tread cautiously, because authoritarian regimes love to play Orwellian word games, and the current administration is no exception.

Case in point: DHS Secretary Kristi Noem claims that every single individual arrested or detained has committed a crime, but being charged with or even suspected of a crime is very different from being convicted of a crime.

When the Secretary of Homeland Security equates an arrest with a crime, she isn’t just playing word games—she is effectively nullifying the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments’ guarantee of due process and the presumption of innocence.

If the bar for being arrested is merely committing a crime, we’d all be locked up.

It may come to that eventually.

When you have a government in the business of rounding people up in order to fill warehouses and play to the optics of being tough on crime, it won’t just be undocumented immigrants getting rounded up.

History has a name for what happens when governments abandon due process and begin locking people up for who they are rather than what they have done.

The next step is always logistical. Once the decision is made to detain people en masse, the state must find places to hold them—out of sight, out of reach, and outside the law.

That is where the warehouses come in.

Make no mistake: these are concentration camps in their earliest form, rebranded and revived for a new age.

This is what happens when any government claims the power to decide who belongs, who poses a threat, and who can be disappeared for the sake of order.

The legal framework already exists.

Under the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the President and the military are authorized to detain individuals—including U.S. citizens—without access to family, legal counsel, or the courts if the government labels them terrorists.

That label can now be applied so interchangeably with the terms anti-government and extremist that it doesn’t take much to be considered a terrorist anymore.

This is what happens when you put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, courts, and police, but also give those agencies sweeping authority to detain individuals and lock them up for perceived wrongs without due process.

It is a system begging to be abused. And it has happened here before.

The groundwork has been laid.

Now if you’re going to have internment camps on American soil, someone has to build them— or repurpose existing structures to serve that function—and then staff them—and eventually fill them.

Today, DHS and ICE are buying up and converting warehouses, factories, and industrial spaces across the country into detention facilities. These buildings—designed for storage and logistics, not human beings—are being outfitted with fencing, surveillance systems, holding areas, and makeshift sleeping quarters. Many operate outside the standards that apply to traditional correctional facilities, with fewer inspections, limited oversight, and little public visibility.

The government insists these warehouse detention sites are necessary to handle prisoner overflow, respond to emergencies, and maintain flexibility.

History tells a different story.

What begins as temporary becomes permanent. What is justified as exceptional becomes routine. And what is done to non-citizens has an uncanny way of expanding—especially when dissent, protest, or noncompliance are rebranded as threats to national security.

Once again, the language of emergency is being used to normalize extraordinary abuses of power.

Now, detention camps require not only buildings but lists of potential detainees, and here, too, the government is prepared.

For decades, the government has acquired and maintained, without warrant or court order,  databases of individuals considered threats to national security.

In 2026, the static lists of the past have been replaced by “living” databases.

Fueled by agentic AI and mass data-scraping, the government’s surveillance architecture no longer relies on manual updates. These AI systems autonomously crawl social media, financial records, and geolocation data in real-time, creating high-accuracy “threat profiles” that are virtually impossible to escape.

Once you are flagged by an algorithm that operates without human oversight, you aren’t just a name on a list—you are a permanent node in a digital dragnet that follows you from your keyboard to the warehouse door.

The technology has simply caught up to the government’s decades-old desire to categorize dissent as a national security threat.

Anyone seen as opposing the government—whether they’re Left, Right or somewhere in between—is a target.

Which brings us to the inevitable conclusion: when the government claims the authority to broadly define who is a threat, uses taxpayer funds to erect a network of concentration camps across the country, and methodically builds databases identifying anyone seen as opposing the government as an extremist, the question is not if that power will be abused—but when and how often.

As I make clear in Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, this is the slippery slope.

If the price for fighting illegal immigration is the complete abdication of our constitutional republic, that price is too high.

The means do not justify the ends.

The police state’s solutions to our so-called problems pose the greatest threat to our freedoms.

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