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American Concentration Camps - Read by Eunice Wong
This article is read by Eunice Wong, a Juilliard-trained actor, featured on Audible's list of Best Women Narrators. Her work is on the annual Best Audiobooks lists of the New York Times, Audible, AudioFile, & Library Journal. www.eunicewong.actor
Text originally published May 26, 2025
Full text:
Our offshore concentration camps, for now, are in El Salvador and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But don’t expect them to remain there. Once they are normalized, not only for U.S.-deported immigrants and residents, but U.S. citizens, they will migrate to the homeland. It is a very short leap from our prisons, already rife with abuse and mistreatment, to concentration camps, where those held are cut off from the outside world — “disappeared” — denied legal representation and crammed into fetid, overcrowded cells.
Prisoners in the camps in El Salvador are forced to sleep on the floor or in solitary confinement in the dark. Many suffer from tuberculosis, fungal infections, scabies, severe malnutrition and chronic digestive illnesses. The inmates, including over 3,000 children, are fed rancid food. They endure beatings. They are tortured, including by water-boarding or being forced naked into barrels of ice-cold water, according to Human Rights Watch. In 2023, the State Department described imprisonment as “life-threatening,” and that was before the Salvadoran government declared a “state of exception” in March 2022. The situation has been greatly “exacerbated,” the State Department notes, by the “addition of 72,000 detainees under the state of exception.” Some 375 people have died in the camps since the state of exception was established, part of El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s “war on gangs,” according to the local human rights group Socorro Jurídico Humanitario.
These camps — the “Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo” (Center for Terrorism Confinement) known as CECOT, to which U.S. deportees are being sent, holds some 40,000 people — are the model, the harbinger of what awaits us.
Metal worker and union member Kilmar Ábrego García, who was Published on 3 months ago