Inside Team Trump’s Plans For Mass Deportation Camps

Five years ago, Kris Kobach, Kansas’ former secretary of state, announced on Fox Business Network that, in order to quickly deport undocumented immigrants seeking asylum in the United States, the Trump administration would need “camps.”

Or, as he also put it, “processing towns.”

The U.S. government owns “thousands of empty mobile home trailers,” Kobach told host Lou Dobbs, and it should “deploy them to border cities and create processing towns that are confined.” People who cross the border seeking refuge in the United States, he said, should be detained there until their claims are rejected, then promptly expelled from the country.

Kobach, then the general counsel of a private border wall-building effort — two former leaders of which later went to prison for defrauding donors – was a lonely voice at the time. But in the years since, the Trump wing of the Republican Party has come around to his point of view.

Key allies and advisers aren’t mincing their words: In order to carry out Trump’s mass deportation agenda, the United States will need enormous prison camps for immigrant families, part of an effort to deport millions of people at a record pace.

The mass deportation operation will be a “bloody story,” Trump said last weekend. And key advisers have promised a historic infrastructure project to churn people out of the country.

The camps will be built “on open land in Texas near the border” and should have the capacity to house as many as 70,000 people, which would double the United States’ current immigrant detention capacity, Stephen Miller, the main point man on immigration in Trump’s White House, said lastyear. In multipleinterviews, Miller has gleefully described daily flights out of the camps to all corners