FOLLOW THE CAMPS: WHERE THE WITCH HUNT LEADS
By Janet Kira Lessin, with Minerva
It always starts with a whisper, then a rally cry, a purge, and a prison. History doesn’t repeat itself exactly, but it echoes, and if you listen closely, you can hear it again, even now.
The so-called “Trump witch hunt” was never about persecution. It was always projection. Every accusation he hurled—“enemy of the people,” “rigged system,” “invasion”—was a confession in disguise. Trump, the master of misdirection, told us from the beginning who he was. What we mistook for self-defense was his tell.
Now, the hunt has reversed course.
Across the country, the sweeps have already begun. Immigration raids intensify—not for actual threats, but for the optics. Brown-skinned people are dragged from homes, children separated from families, and refugees criminalized simply for existing. It’s presented as law and order, but we’ve seen this film before. We’ve seen the roundups, the boxcars, the silence.
First, they came for the immigrants.
But there aren’t that many immigrants. Not enough to fill the growing number of detention facilities quietly rising on the outskirts of cities and in the shadows of rural highways. Not enough to justify the billions flowing into private prison contracts. So who’s next?
The machinery is already in place. Once the cages are built, they need bodies. Once the laws are bent, they need targets. Once fear becomes fuel, the flames spread fast.
The plan is as old as fascism: target the outsider, then the dissenter, then the dreamer, the artist, the journalist, the teacher, the protestor, the progressive. Sweep them up with a phrase—”domestic terrorist,” “unpatriotic,” “threat to order”—and disappear them behind the barbed wire of bureaucratic euphemism.
Follow the money. Who is profiting from this? GEO Group. CoreCivic. Halliburton’s old contracts reborn under new names. Private equity is flowing into detention real estate. Entire local economies now depend on the bodies of the incarcerated, foreign and domestic. These are not correctional facilities. They are investment portfolios.
Ask yourself: How many new facilities are being built? Which countries are collaborating on these detentions? Which nations are shipping refugees away while cashing in on border militarization and surveillance tech?
And more importantly, what happens when the so-called “illegals” run out?
The door opens to the naturalized citizen. Then, to the outspoken critic. Then to the wrong voter. What starts as a crackdown becomes a purge.
And what legal mechanisms exist to stop it?
Could these camps be made illegal under international law? The Geneva Conventions prohibit arbitrary detention, especially of civilians. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court defines mass imprisonment and persecution as crimes against humanity. But America has always walked a fine line with international law—signing some treaties, ignoring others, and often refusing jurisdiction altogether.
So, who stops it when America builds its gulags?
The United Nations? It’s a hope. But without enforcement, a hope is a whisper. The truth is, the only force capable of stopping this is us—those who still remember what freedom tastes like, what justice sounds like, and what solidarity feels like in the streets.
And let’s press this irony until it breaks: If naturalized citizens can be deported, where does that end?
Can Melania be deported? She came here on an Einstein visa meant for geniuses. Is being a nude model now a national asset? What about Trump’s children by Ivana—born to a foreign mother? Can they be reversed out of America like corrupted files?
No, of course not. Because the rules don’t apply equally, this isn’t about fairness. It’s about who controls the narrative. Citizenship, like truth, becomes conditional in a regime built on loyalty tests and manufactured enemies.
Where does it stop?
The answer is: it doesn’t—unless we stop it.
This isn’t just about Trump. It’s about Trumpism: the ideology that power is its justification, that morality is malleable, and that the law can be twisted to serve authoritarian ends.
This is America in the mirror. And in that mirror, we see not just the past—the internment camps of Japanese Americans, the red-baiting McCarthy trials, the mass sterilizations of Indigenous women—but the future. A future we can still change.
But only if we name it now.
The camps are being built. The lists are being drawn. The silence is growing louder.
So we must speak.
Now.
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