The word “concentration camp” is freighted with darkish ancient that means. The general public listen it and instinctively recall to mind focus camps utilized by the Nazis to exterminate Jews and different minority populations right through the Holocaust.
However the use and title of focus camps originated some distance previous. Within the past due 1800s, Spanish army officers used focus camps – reconcentrados – right through their 1896–97 Cuban marketing campaign to isolate civilians from rebels, leading to well-liked demise and illness.
We’re students whose analysis into world members of the family and struggle contains finding out ancient and fashionable makes use of of those techniques of camps as a type of repression.
In contemporary peer-reviewed analysis, we known 4 traits that outline what qualifies as a focus camp machine: concentrated on teams of civilians for imprisonment; enclosed areas the place the state controls who enters and exits; departure from usual detention practices; and abuse and forget. We then created a dataset detailing 150 techniques of camps used globally since 1896 that have compatibility this standards. This contains the U.S. internment of greater than 125,000 Eastern immigrants and Eastern Americans right through Global Battle II, the Argentine army junta’s use of camps of their mid-Nineteen Seventies marketing campaign to reorganize society, and Vladimir Putin’s use of so-called filtration camps in Russia’s warfare in opposition to Ukraine.
Our use of the time period “concentration camp” isn’t intended to sensationalize or diminish its ancient that means, in particular because it pertains to the Holocaust.
Moderately, figuring out such techniques early is how the concept that of “never again” – the promise to stop mass atrocities, equivalent to genocide, and battle extremism – will also be translated into significant coverage motion from the general public and policymakers.
In line with our standards, we imagine the community of detention amenities maintained through U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement suits into this broader definition of a machine of focus camps.
The evolution of focus camps
After using focus camps through the Spanish in Cuba, British officers followed the observe in southern Africa right through their counterinsurgency marketing campaign in opposition to the Boer inhabitants – descendants of Dutch, French and German Protestant settlers – on the flip of the twentieth century. The British detained 110,000 Boers and 37,000 indigenous Blacks of their community of 120 camps. No less than 27,000 Boers and 14,000 Blacks died on account of rampant illness and inadequate meals provides.
By the point main German army operations in Japanese Europe started in 1939, states around the globe had erected greater than 30 techniques of focus camps, in step with our analysis.
But the time period quickly took on a good darker that means. Focus camps have been hired maximum infamously as a part of the Nazi regime’s brutal genocide within the Nineteen Thirties and ’40s. In its 12 years in energy, the Nazi executive opened greater than 1,000 focus camps wherein it detained thousands and thousands of people. Along with facilitating the Nazi Holocaust and different group-targeted violence in opposition to minoritized and non-German populations, Nazi safety forces used the camps to repress political opposition and supply hard work to the German civilian and army economies.
Even though few camp techniques have reached the severity or scale of the ones used right through the Holocaust, fashionable camps regularly pursue equivalent objectives of ethnic cleaning and compelled displacement, practices equivalent to torture and a scarcity of due procedure.
In our learn about, we discovered 93 examples of techniques of focus camps used because the conclusion of Global Battle II. This contains greater than 1,200 camps erected through Chinese language government in Xinjiang province as a part of an expansive coverage of discrimination in opposition to the Uyghur inhabitants there. The Chinese language executive has detained greater than 1 million Muslim Uyghurs since no less than 2017, stripping them in their traditions, cultures and languages.
Our 4 standards additional defined
Our analysis confirms that the phrase “concentration” is important to describing those camps. Two key standards of the camps are the focus of huge numbers of focused civilians into areas, that are then secured through small numbers of captors who regulate who enters and exits the camps.
A 3rd standards we tested identifies focus camps as “irregular” insofar as they perform out of doors of criminal frameworks that keep watch over prisons, refugee camps and immigration detention facilities. Focus camps are run through separate government that deny detainees due procedure, equivalent to formal legal fees, criminal illustration or an excellent trial.
The remaining standards we used as we evaluated camps used to be the presence of squalor and regimen violence. Particularly, we regarded for proof that detainees frequently skilled no less than two varieties of abuse, together with however now not restricted to torture, beatings, mass killing, sexual violence, mental abuse, loss of meals, loss of water, loss of refuge, loss of healthcare, overcrowding and unfold of illness.
ICE detention facilities
As of April 2026, there are greater than 240 energetic ICE detention amenities around the U.S.
Migrants held in those camps don’t seem to be loose to go away, regardless that some are given a decision: self-deport − agreeing to go away the rustic right away − or stay in custody. Because the starting of Trump’s 2nd time period, migrants have filed greater than 34,000 habeas corpus petitions difficult their confinement with out trial, exercising a constitutional proper.
In line with the standards we advanced, ICE detention camps have compatibility within the spectrum of a machine of focus camps.
Households and their kids stroll alongside the halls of the T. Don Hutto Residential Heart in Taylor, Texas, an ICE detention facility for households.
Robert Daemmrich Pictures Inc/Corbis by way of Getty Pictures
Beginning with the primary standards, teams of civilians are being focused through ICE, regularly according to their perceived ethnicity.
Even though ICE’s said undertaking is to detain the ones with out documented criminal standing, many arrests had been according to bodily look and placement moderately than proof of illegal presence in the USA.
Greater than 272,000 other people arrested through ICE within the first six months of Trump’s 2nd time period have been booked into ICE detention amenities. Whilst deportations are expanding at a fast fee, no less than 60,000 other people stay in detention amenities as of April 2026 – neither launched nor deported. Those numbers simply exceed counts of people held in immigrant detention facilities in previous years.
Loads of U.S. voters had been detained, with out justification and in opposition to their will, through ICE. The selection of people arrested in properties and communities, regularly with out an arrest warrant signed through a pass judgement on, reached greater than 400 other people in keeping with day in October 2025.
Relating to the second one a part of our definition, those persons are being concentrated in areas the place the Trump management controls who, when and beneath what prerequisites other people might input or go out those amenities. Get right of entry to has been limited for attorneys, members of the family of migrants, newshounds and individuals of Congress.
As for the 0.33 standards, the ICE detention facilities additionally perform one after the other from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons. ICE detention is controlled through the Administrative center of Enforcement and Removing Operations beneath the Division of Place of origin Safety, in collaboration with personal jail corporations.
As of April 2026, greater than 70% of migrants had no legal conviction, whilst lots of the the rest have been held for minor offenses, equivalent to site visitors violations. Failure to supply trials for migrants, in particular those that don’t pose those dangers, is a departure from established norms.
Our framework’s ultimate criterion is practical abuse or forget. This contains the observe of causing direct bodily hurt or the failure to supply fundamental must haves – meals, water, refuge, healthcare.
A trip bus transports detainees out of doors the personal jail corporate GEO Staff’s ICE detention facility in Adelanto, Calif., on July 11, 2025.
Patrick T. Fallon/AFP by way of Getty Pictures
A lot of reviews have highlighted cutoffs in bills to third-party scientific suppliers who gave care to detainees and a 36% decline in mandated detention facility inspections through ICE’s interior Administrative center of Detention Oversight. Those movements have led to unsanitary prerequisites and scientific forget in those amenities. Twenty-three deaths have been reported between October 2025 and March 2026, striking the present fiscal 12 months on tempo to be the deadliest in over two decades.
As students, we argue that ICE detention facilities meet the standards for focus camps. We accomplish that to not be provocative however to supply exact language, moderately than euphemisms, so other people can heed the warnings of atrocities dedicated up to now.
As journalist Andrea Pitzer argues in her writing about focus camps, the longer camps exist, the extra they shift from a brief emergency measure to an enduring pillar of state serve as.
Malia Hirasa and Sydney Horton, undergraduate scholars on the College of Arizona, contributed to this tale.
