American Concentration Camps holding mostly innocent and non-violent people, many of them children, in locations across the country, including in Mesa, Florence, and Eloy, Arizona.
All of Arizona’s Democratic Congressional Delegation has called attention to the plight of the innocent and the horrible conditions they face in these “facilities” because in Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s Whites-Only Land, the cruelty and ethnic cleansing are the goal and point.
For example, Representative Yassamin Ansari and her staff have been telling people about the deteriorating medical condition of leukemia patient Arbella “Yari” Rodriguez Marquez at the Eloy Detention Facility.
At the same facility, Representative Adelita Grijalva called out the “Cruel and inhumane treatment” of elderly detainees. One of them is 79-year-old grandmother Juanita Benitez, a person who has been held for nine months since crossing the border illegally to join family. According to reporting from Public Station AZPM, there has been “a spike” in the detaining of the elderly.
Marquez and Benitez do not seem to be examples of the worst criminal elements the Trump regime told the American People it would target.
Again, for Trump and his White Nationalist-Fascist band, the cruelty and the ethnic cleansing is the point.
Now the Trump Fascist Regime, through its Homeland Insecurity Department, wants to expand and add more American Concentration Camps in the Grand Canyon State at Surprise and Marana.
Arizona’s Congressional Democrats are still asking for answers.
On February 6, they demanded responses from Homeland Insecurity on a measles outbreak at the Florence Detention and Correctional Centers.
On the same day, Arizona’s three House Democrats penned an additional letter to Homeland Insecurity Secretary Kristi Noem and Acting Director of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Todd Lyons, demanding a response on the purchase of a warehouse in Surprise to provide space for another 1500-bed ICE-Gestapo supervised concentration camp without consulting local leaders or providing responses to questions, including those by Republican and Trump supporting Representative Paul Gosar.
In statements accompanying the letter, Arizona Representative Yassamin Ansari, who is sponsoring legislation to drain resources from Trump’s ICE-Gestapo, wrote on the community opppositon to this facility:
“The purchase of a warehouse in Surprise for proposed use by ICE is extremely alarming. I’m doing everything in my power to rein in ICE, including legislation to rescind $75 billion from the reckless Big Ugly Bill that handed ICE a slush fund for warehouse detention facilities like this one. I’ve heard from countless conservatives, libertarians, and independents across our state who don’t want ICE in our communities. My colleagues and I will continue to stand together to make that clear.”
Representative Adelita Grijalva also conveyed:
“Recent deaths at immigration detention centers are deeply disturbing and underscore the grave dangers of the rapid expansion of private, for-profit facilities across the country. Communities are waking up to massive detention centers being dropped into their neighborhoods with no warning, no transparency, and no accountability. These facilities are not about public safety — they are a central pillar of Trump’s cruel and unconstitutional deportation machine, designed to disappear people behind warehouse walls while denying basic standards of care and due process.”
Representative Greg Stanton stated:
“Arizonans don’t want a detention facility across the street from their house or the neighborhood high school. DHS hasn’t done the bare minimum to communicate with local and county officials about how they’ll mitigate the impacts on the West Valley community, and they haven’t communicated to Congress how they’ll make an industrial warehouse fit to hold human beings. Let’s be clear: this is Trump’s disastrous mass deportation machine in action.”
Senators Mark Kelly and Ruben Gallego sent a joint correspondence, expressing many of the same concerns outlined in the Ansari, Grijalva, and Stanton letter about the Surprise Concentration Camp.
On February 19, Ansari, Grijalva, and Stanton sent another request for answers to Noem and Lyons regarding another proposed 500-bed Concentration Camp in Marana, despite opposition from the local county government.
The three house members also conveyed similar statements accompanying their recent letter.
Representative Ansari wrote:
“Arizonans have repeatedly made it clear that they do not want ICE in their neighborhoods. Turning a state prison in Marana into an immigration center would be a stain on our state. This is just one more step in their cruel agenda to dehumanize immigrants. I strongly oppose any expansion of ICE in our state.”
Representative Grijalva relayed:
“Across the country, we are seeing detention centers rapidly spring up with little community input or oversight as part of the Trump administration’s cruel mass-deportation agenda — even as serious concerns persist about deaths in custody and inhumane conditions. To meet its arbitrary deportation quotas, the Trump administration is sweeping vulnerable people into detention who should never be there – including Julia Benitez, a 79-year-old abuela who suffers from dementia. Local residents are being left in the dark and do not have basic information about the scope, timeline, or operational impact of this proposed facility. That lack of transparency is unacceptable and dangerous.”
Representative Stanton stated:
“The federal government has a responsibility to work with the communities it operates in — not around them. The planned detention facility in Surprise and the potential conversion of the Marana facility into a private detention center have generated real and legitimate concern from residents and local leaders across the political spectrum. Unfortunately, this is exactly what we’ve come to expect from Trump’s DHS. They’re perfectly willing to throw neighborhoods into chaos to carry out their mass deportation agenda. My Democratic colleagues and I will keep standing up for Arizonans and demanding answers.”
Ansari and Stanton also paid an inspection visit to the Mesa holding center at Mesa Gateway Airport, where AZ Mirror reported that detainees were being held longer than 12 hours.
Speaking to the press after the inspection, Representative Ansari called the conditions at the Mesa Holding Center “Deeply disturbing and sickening.”
Ansari went on to say:
“…This is a so-called temporary holding facility that has no beds, no showers, and no on-site food or medical staff. Yet, today, we confirmed through our conversations and interviews with the staff working at the holding facility that people are often held in this holding facility for longer than 12 hours. Until today, this ICE facility has operated without any oversight, and we were inside the facility for approximately 90 minutes. During that time, we observed conditions that raise serious concerns about safety, dignity, and compliance with basic standards, and I want to share just a couple of my observations today.”
“First of all, the conditions. We walked inside and sat in a conference room, where we were able to ask a variety of questions about the conditions inside this ICE holding facility. Then we got to go see it firsthand. You walk into an area on the way to the tarmac, where you’ll see people’s belongings and bags, one bag each per person. It was unclear whether people are informed that they can go access their things, but sometimes human beings and the people there can go and ask for their belongings. One bag per person. Then you walk inside the holding facility area. It looks like a prison. You have rooms that have, you know, a bench along the wall, and each of the occupancy limitations can go up to 20 to 25 individuals per cell. Again, people are often held there for more than 12 hours. There’s no real beds. They’re given just blankets, no pillows. There’s a lot of people in each room at one time, one toilet per cell. I specifically asked whether there’s any privacy when it comes to using the restroom. The answer was no and not real clarity around Medical, you know, access. There’s no doctors on site, necessarily. They did say that people, and you know, hospitals would be called, and doctors would be called. If there is an incident, but the fact that people are held there so often, and there’s been really extensive reporting by the Arizona Mirror about this as well, more than 12 hours with no real reporting on that as well.”
“Both Congressman Stanton and I asked, very specifically, do you, you know, keep track of how often this happens? Is this reported anywhere? The answer was no, and also not a policy for what the condition should be, or what additional steps should be taken by ICE. In other words, the US government when somebody is held for more than 12 hours. To me, that is a huge problem and very similar to some of the problems that we see inside the Detention centers, like the one in Eloy.”
This is the United States of America in 2026.
We should not be imitating Fascist-Nazi style actions or returning to the mindset that saw non-violent people imprisoned or deported for expressing their First Amendment beliefs like Eugene Debbs and Emma Goldman during the World War One Period or for Japanese Concentration Camps to be built following the attack on Pearl Harbor, where thousands of innocent people, including children, under the rationale of combatting war time subversion, were incarcerated.
For Donald Trump and his White Nationalist band of apostates, this is like going back to the good old days.
For the sane portion of the American Populace, this move to create Concentration Camps like we are living in the real life world of “The Man in the High Castle” should be pushed back and opposed at every level of government and the people who say nothing or actually support this tragic move to Fascism should be defeated at the ballot box.
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