section_path: Comparisons/Internment camps
section_name: Internment camps
paragraph_text: Internment camps
  
  The Trump administration family separation policy was compared to the use of internment camps by previous fascist regimes. In 2018, Trump instituted a "zero tolerance" policy which mandated the criminal prosecution of all adults who were accused of violating immigration laws by immigration authorities. This policy directly led to the large-scale, forcible separation of children and parents arriving at the United States-Mexico border, including those who were seeking asylum from violence in their home countries. Parents were arrested and put into criminal detention, while their children were taken away, classified as unaccompanied alien minors, to be put into child immigrant detention centers.
  
  Although Trump signed an executive order which ostensibly ended the family separation component of his administration's migrant detentions in June 2018, it continued under alternative justifications into 2019.
  
  By the end of 2018, the number of children being held had swelled to a high of nearly 15,000, which by August 2019 had been reduced to less than 9,000. In 2019, many experts, including Andrea Pitzer, the author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, have acknowledged the designation of the detention centers as "concentration camps" particularly given that the centers, previously cited by Texas officials for more than 150 health violations and reported deaths in custody, reflect a record typical of the history of deliberate substandard healthcare and nutrition in concentration camps. There has been significant disagreement as to whether or not to label these facilities "concentration camps".
  
  In 2023, Current Affairs profiled how Trump in his 2024 campaign likewise pledged to build internment camps, warning that Trump's plan was to "build huge camps and put millions of people in them without any semblance of due process", which might include political opponents and critics.
  
  In 2025, Trump announced plans to use the Guantanamo Bay detention camp to detain immigrants. He also began deporting immigrants, which he claimed to be members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, to a mass prison in El Salvador, in spite of court orders to not do so. He further suggested that he would deport anti- Tesla protestors to the same prison, calling attention to the prison's cruel conditions.