U.S. Concentration Camps?
The Free Radical Report Friday Quick Strike
The Camel’s Nose
ICE has been running detention facilities for years. Not something that should ever exist in a just society. That, however, is the camel’s nose under the tent. But now? Now we’re going industrial-scale.
While we’ve been screaming at each other about immigration, the government just allocated $45 billion to massively expand detention facilities. That’s a 265% budget increase in one year—to build more camps. Bigger camps.
And yeah, I’m paying for it. You’re paying for it. We all are, unless you’re one of those rich assholes that live off borrowed money, stuffing it up your ass to hide until your stocks come tumbling down and you can file “bankruptcy”. (If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look up the “Buy, Borrow, Die” strategy.)
What They’re Actually Building
This isn’t abstract. Let’s talk about what our tax dollars are funding right now:
A $1.2 billion tent camp at Fort Bliss, Texas. Five thousand people. In tents. In the Texas desert. They’re calling it “Camp East Montana.” Oh, and Fort Bliss? It used to be a Japanese internment camp. Yeah. That Fort Bliss.
Converting warehouses to hold 80,000 detainees at a time. Industrial buildings. Retrofitted to cage human beings. At scale.
ICE is using 104 MORE detention facilities than they were at the start of 2025. That’s a 91% increase in one year. They didn’t just expand—they nearly doubled capacity.
And the conditions? Physical and sexual abuse. Medical neglect. People dying in tent structures in extreme El Paso heat.
In fact, more people died in ICE detention in 2025 than in the previous four years combined.
Follow The Money
Private contractors are making a killing. Literally.
GEO Group and CoreCivic—the private prison corporations—got over $1 billion to lock people up for profit. Because nothing says “justice” like handing taxpayer billions to companies that make money by filling cells and tents.
Fisher Sand & Gravel—a politically connected gravel company—pulled in $6 billion. Some of that’s for border walls. Some of it? Building the infrastructure for this detention machine.
Palantir—a Silicon Valley tech firm—grabbed $81 million to build AI software that tells ICE which American neighborhoods to raid so they can fill these camps.
The total? $22 billion in private contracts in the past year alone. And Border Patrol spending on contractors increased sevenfold in just six months.
Twenty-two billion dollars in private contracts. If you value a human life at $40k a year, that’s 550,000 years of human effort. We didn't build a bridge. We didn't cure a disease. We spent five hundred millennia of human existence to build a bigger warehouse for misery
This Is What Tyranny Looks Like
Let’s be precise about what we’re building: mass detention facilities. Industrial scale. Run for profit. With conditions so brutal that more people died in ICE detention in 2025 than in the previous four years combined.
Call them what you want—detention centers, holding facilities, whatever helps you sleep at night. But by the textbook definition, these are concentration camps: mass detention of civilians without trial in confined, brutal conditions.
I’m not predicting death camps. I’m not saying we’re Nazi Germany. But I am saying this: history shows us that the infrastructure gets built first. Conditions deteriorate. Death tolls rise. And then, if nobody stops it, the purpose shifts.
The warning signs aren’t subtle:
265% budget increase in one year
Deaths quadrupling
Building on a former internment camp site
Run by private corporations profiting off human suffering
80,000-person capacity warehouses
You want to know when to start paying attention to camps? Before the trajectory becomes irreversible. That’s the whole point of remembering history—to recognize the pattern while there’s still time to change course.
John Adams said government exists to provide “ease, comfort, and security” for the greatest number of people. Building camps that kill people isn’t security—it’s tyranny, regardless of the citizenship of the prisoners.
Thomas Paine warned that when private interests capture public functions, wealth flows upward while the public foots the bill and suffers the consequences. He was describing exactly this: private corporations profiting from human suffering at taxpayer expense.
Jefferson saw political corruption and cronyism as incompatible with a republic. He’d look at billion-dollar contracts going to political allies to build concentration camps and call it exactly what it is: the death of the Republic.
Wake The Hell Up
They manufactured a crisis. Got us fighting about who deserves to be here and who doesn’t. And while we argued, they built the infrastructure of a police state and handed the contracts to their friends.
$45 billion. For camps. While roads crumble. While schools beg for funding. While Social Security is “running out.”
More people died in ICE detention in one year than in the previous four combined. They’re housing human beings in tents in the desert on a former internment camp site. They’re converting warehouses to hold 80,000 people at once.
And we’re paying for all of it.
The militia folks who warned about camps were right. They just thought the camps would be for them, not built by the people they voted for and cheered on.
Turns out authoritarianism doesn’t care what flag you’re waving. It just needs you distracted long enough to build the cages.
Stop fighting each other and look at what they’re building with our money.
Before you end up inside it.
The Free Radical Report publishes M/W/F quick strikes and Saturday deep dives. All free. Welcome to the fight.