We Must Not Build The Camps

Dear Gavin Newsom, Scott Wiener, and Daniel Lurie,

In the near future, the US government is going to give us an offer that you will be tempted to accept. Your advisors will tell you that it solves one of your greatest political weaknesses, that we would be fools not to take the money.

When the day comes that there is a new Trump administration program to address homelessness, they will be called “rehabilitation centers” or some innocuous sounding name. The program will give us a chance to build new infrastructure, outside of our major cities like SF and LA, where our persistently homeless people can be sent away for “supportive treatment”, so we can “clean up our streets”. You must refuse. We must not build the death camps for them.

We must not build the camps for them.

These camps will have the appearance of doing what was promised. There will be less visible homelessness in our cities. The budget will improve, and your popularity will rise. This is not prophecy, this is history. This is my family’s history.

If you build these concentration camps, they will mysteriously have room for more people at some point. It will be difficult for independent media to access the facilities, and we will stop hearing from anyone inside. ICE will take control of the facilities after an executive order. Suddenly, these facilities, safely outside the jurisdiction of our sanctuary cities, will become staging areas for the mass deportation of immigrants in California.

We must not build the camps for them.

If this goes on for long enough, the scope will increase. It will be “BLM/Palestine Protestors”. It will be “Undesireables”. It will be “Terrorists” or “Dissidents”. In reality, it will be any minority due to ethnicity, LGBTQIA+ identity, and will particularly target members of those communities with disabilities. For a while you’ll think you still have control and can prevent it, but you won’t be able to.

We must not build the camps. It is one thing to call Trump a Nazi. If we want to draw that comparison, we have to take the threat seriously and literally. He has already proposed these camps. Do you understand what I’m saying? He has already out loud, called for the construction of concentration camps. They’re necessary for his mass deportation plans.

We must not build the camps for them.

It’s not sufficient to use rhetoric or lawsuits at this stage. We must prevent the infrastructure of genocide from being built inside our territory. In particular, we must not build it ourselves. We have to address homelessness the hard way. The logic of sweeps is the same as the logic of camps. Our answer to Trump’s Naziism must be to show that democratic supportive services are enough to take care of our communities. We need to expand food banks, subsidized mental health services, and to care for our own people without violence. We have to show America that there’s another way.