American Gulag

The White House’s executive order on immigration has a little-noticed provision that envisions jails for 2 million people.

- Jeff Stein

IMAGINE MILES upon miles of new concrete jails stretching across the scrub brush of America’s southern border, with millions of people in orange jumpsuits awaiting deportation.

Such is the fevered vision mapped out in a little-noticed segment of President Donald Trump’s executive order on border security and immigration enforcement security. Section 5 of the order calls for the secretary of homeland security to “allocate all legally available resources to immediately construct, operate” and staff facilities to “detain aliens at or near the land border with Mexico” and process them for deportation. But another, much-overlooked order signed the same day spells out, in ominous terms, who will go.

During the presidential campaign, Trump repeatedly promised he would expel or imprison some 2 million or 3 million undocumented immigrants with criminal convictions—a number that exists mainly in his imagination. (Only about 820,000 undocumented immigrants in the U.S. have criminal records, including traffic infractions and other misdemeanors, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank.)

Still, the specter of new jails housing hundreds of thousands of people is as powerful a fright dream for liberals as it is a triumph for the president’s “America first” Svengali, Steve Bannon, erstwhile editor of Breitbart News. But with so many fiscal and legal hurdles it also looks suspiciously like just another act of ideological showboating from the rumpled White House strategy chief. “I’m a Leninist,” Bannon proudly proclaimed to the writer Ronald Radosh at a party at his Capitol Hill townhouse in November 2013. “Lenin,” he said of the Russian revolutionary, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment.”