With permission from the authors, this article is republished from Zócalo Public Square under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
June 4, 2026
Luis was arrested during an ICE raid in Arkansas. He was working as a roofer, had no criminal record, and was charged with no crime. Agents confiscated his wallet, ID, and phone, then sent him from a squalid local jail to a Texas prison. A few weeks later ICE transferred him to the Torrance County Detention Facility (TCDF) in New Mexico, where he has remained for the past year.
The two of us encounter Luis (whose name we’ve changed to protect his privacy and safety) at TCDF, while working as legal service volunteers. Luis is not living as a normal prison inmate. Held without criminal charges, with limited legal help and no idea if or when he might be released or deported, he is a prisoner in a concentration camp, with little or no access to the usual constitutional protections afforded to incarcerated people.
We visit TCDF to assist an attorney from the nonprofit Innovation Law Lab, who has come to provide legal advice and gather information about conditions at the facility. But we—sociologists who study immigration and gender—are also there to witness, and to express solidarity with these men. Most are eager to speak with us. It is more than a year into Trump’s immigration enforcement push, and tens of thousands of people are imprisoned with no rights. This is what their lives are like.
Located on the outskirts of Estancia, New Mexico, a sleepy town of 1,300 an hour’s drive from Albuquerque, TCDF is run by CoreCivic, a giant private prison operator that reported record-high profits in 2025. About 80% of the people incarcerated at TCDF are ICE detainees, housed in cordoned-off pods of 40 men each.
We walk through barbed wire fences and security gates to enter a large room with two New Mexico-themed murals flanking a scatter of tables and chairs. Groups of men—most of them brown and Black—enter. Several carry folders of papers. They all want time with the lawyer, who will do her best to offer each of them a few minutes of consultation: help with habeus corpus challenges, connections to colleagues.
The room feels like a warm space, filling up with camaraderie and solidarity. Many of these men speak at least a bit of English, but we hear a cacophony: Spanish, French, Portuguese, Farsi, Uzbek, Bengali, Urdu, Dari, Pashto, Creole, Mandarin Chinese, Zapoteco, Arabic. Some detainees act as jailhouse lawyers, helping others fill out forms. A French- and English-speaking African man helps a Bangladeshi man who has trouble writing.
Three men tell us ICE detained them when they showed up for required immigration court hearings. Many others say they were arrested at work. All lost access to their wallets and phones. One man, an Uber driver, was pulled out of his car. A young guy with an expired student visa was arrested while washing his face in his apartment bathroom; ICE agents had been looking for his roommate when he became a “collateral arrest.”
“The guards call us criminals,” one man tells us. But most proudly note they have no previous criminal record, and those who do often have minor infractions. One man’s wife filed domestic violence charges against him and later dropped them. Another had been convicted of marijuana possession 15 years ago, in a U.S. state that has since legalized weed. ICE data shows that of the 327 men detained by ICE at TCDF in February 2026, 302 comprised a “non-criminal population.” This reflects national data, which shows that nearly three quarters of people arrested by ICE had no criminal convictions; those with records find themselves facing the double jeopardy of a “carceral carousel” of criminal punishment followed by immigration detention.
A typical detainment begins with several days or weeks in a squalid, cramped local jail before being moved to a major detention center. Several men we talked with in New Mexico had first been held in the giant tent at Camp East Montana (the Fort Bliss, Texas ICE facility that has come under scrutiny for beatings and sexual abuse of prisoners). In 2025, 32 people died in ICE detention centers, which are frequently criticized for unhealthy, unsanitary conditions and their escalating use of solitary confinement. Thirteen people died in ICE detention during the first three months of 2026.
Moving between facilities several times severed many men’s already tenuous connections with support systems in their hometowns, including family networks, legal representation, and labor unions. Detainees frequently lose access to what sociologist Raquel Delerme calls “carceral care,” the visits, emotional support, and spending money prison inmates often receive from mothers and other family members. Several men weep when we ask them about being separated from their wives and children.
Daily life is a boring grind. A 20-year-old who was arrested in Massachusetts nearly a year ago says that he sleeps a lot, gets up at 11 a.m., has lunch, does some reading. “It’s just so boring.” He has learned to play chess, with prison-improvised pieces. Men tell us about their jobs in the facility—cooking, cleaning up, painting the walls. A theme that continually surfaces is the maddening nature of bureaucratic limbo. Waiting… and waiting, with nearly absolute uncertainty of how, when, or if their detainment will end.
Each man has committed to memory the date he was arrested, the dates he was moved from one site to another, and exactly how long he has been imprisoned at TCDF. Some men we meet have been here for 14 months. Relative newcomers have been arrested in the massive wintertime crackdown in Minnesota. All bemoan the infinite wait to be deported, released, or reunited with their loved ones. Many fear they will be tortured or killed if they are returned to their countries of origin.
This uncertainty is part of what we see as unlawful, immoral cruelty. People detained by ICE at TCDF and around the nation are not conventional prisoners. In the U.S., prison inmates are arrested for cause, read their rights, allowed legal representation, and given a trial in front of a judge and jury. If found guilty, they receive a sentence that spans a determined period of time, and the right to a legal appeal.
Centers that house ICE detainees aren’t typical prisons. They are more accurately recognized as concentration camps, places that “[hold] those who, most often, had no real trial at all,” the journalist Andrea Pitzer observes in her influential book One Long Night. “Concentration camps house civilians…because of their racial, cultural, religious, or political identity, not because of any prosecutable offense,” she writes. That’s true of the German death camps of the Holocaust, and of the U.S. camps that incarcerated Japanese Americans for the duration of World War II.
In 2026, New Mexico passed the Immigrant Safety Act, making it unlawful for a local government to contract with ICE prisons, yet three detention centers continue operating in the state. Face-to-face interventions can provide help and bear witness to the inhumane treatment of some of these men. But American concentration camps’ metastatic growth will only come to an end when enough people garner the will to stop the ascent of racist nationalism, and to abolish inhumane treatment of immigrants.
Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Southern California.
Michael A. Messner is professor emeritus of sociology and gender studies at the University of Southern California.
Zócalo editors: Primary editor: Eryn Brown | Secondary editor: Sarah Rothbard
With permission from the authors, this article is republished from Zócalo Public Square under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.