Newsweek

Steve Bannon's Fever Dream of an American Gulag

The White House wants to build dozens of new jails for up to 2 million people along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Multiple layers of steel walls, fences, razor wire and other barricades are viewed from the United States side of the of the U.S.-Mexico border on January 26, in San Ysidro, California. President Donald Trump has ordered work to begin on building a wall along the Mexican border, angering his southern neighbor.
Mexico border wall

UPDATED | Imagine: Miles upon miles of new concrete jails stretching across the scrub-brush horizons of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and California, with millions of people incarcerated in orange jumpsuits and awaiting deportation.

Such is the fevered vision of a little-noticed segment of President Donald Trump’s sulfurous executive order on border security and immigration enforcement security. Section 5 of the January 25 order calls for the “immediate” construction of detention facilities and allocation of personnel and legal resources “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.

Related: Twitter users plead: 'Stop President Bannon'

Trump a week after the November elections that 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 currently have a criminal record, according to the Migration Policy

You’re reading a preview, subscribe to read more.

More from Newsweek

Newsweek1 min readPolitical Ideologies
Polls Panic
A soldier guards electoral kits on April 10 ahead of Ecuador’s referendum. Voters go to the polls on April 21 in a bid to reform the constitution and tackle security issues as the country struggles to control organized crime. Mexico has called for Ec
Newsweek4 min read
Penn & Kim Holderness
Newsweek _ What made you want to write this book? Penn Holderness _ You write the book you need. I knew that I needed to write this book when I saw that raising a family added a new level of difficulty to my brain being able to handle multiple tasks
Newsweek1 min read
The Archives
“Fewer than 14 percent of AIDS victims have survived more than three years after being diagnosed, and no victim has recovered fully,” Newsweek reported during the epidemic. AIDS, caused by severe HIV, has no official cure. However, today’s treatment

Related Books & Audiobooks