Known Horrors
Felipe De La Hoz
March 26, 2026
The conspiracy theories are not helping
The Department of Homeland Security is on a shopping spree. Documents released last month indicate officials plan to spend an estimated $38 billion acquiring warehouses across the country and retrofitting them into mega detention centers, multiplying ICE’s capacity to detain people as the agency strives to fill arrest quotas as part of President Trump’s mass deportation scheme. Some floor plans have drawn comparisons to slave ships, and there is a case to be made they should be called concentration camps.
This is—no question—a moral atrocity. Yet one of the side-effects of such aggressive moves is that they trigger conspiracy theories and fears on the left that the administration has plans that would somehow be even worse. On Bluesky, American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick recently spent an afternoon parrying some of the dozens of overheated comments that suggested that the warehouses would be used primarily as work camps or even extermination centers à la the Third Reich, with Trump’s promises of mass deportation acting as cover. One Arizona legislator called a facility planned in their state “a death camp.” Reichlin-Melnick didn’t deny the possibility of such a dystopian future, but cautioned “that we are so far away from it that to fixate on that remote possibility when the imminent horrors of mass deportation are staring us in the face is to take our eyes off of the ball.”
Let’s be clear: people will die in these facilities. Last year was the deadliest for ICE detainees in decades, and this year could be worse, given the marked uptick in arrests. Earlier this month, for instance, a Haitian man died of what appeared to be a treatable tooth infection at a privately run facility in Arizona. There is not, however, any evidence that the horrors the administration has plainly laid out are hiding some hypothetical other, worse atrocities—and the wild speculation only sparks confusion and paralysis.
The conspiracist impulse reminds me of the media’s fixation on “kids in cages” and forced hysterectomies during Trump’s first term, abominations in their own right that were magnified into funhouse-mirror versions of themselves to the detriment of the very real terrors that surrounded them—as I wrote at the time. The fear-driven theories of secret malevolent forces are, of course, a feature of the modern age and are perhaps more rampant on the right than on the left. You see a lot of these tendencies in the response to the Jeffrey Epstein scandals, where the shock of a massive and relatively well-known sex trafficking ring protected and patronized by the upper echelons of our government, academic, cultural, and corporate institutions seems to already be wearing off, and people are clamoring for more, speculating that the financier’s cabal were practicing cannibals or perhaps that Epstein orchestrated the Covid-19 pandemic.
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