ICE’s plan for Socorro, Texas puts 8,500 beds into 826,780 square feet of warehouse. Ninety-seven square feet per person, gross, in a standard design whose documents list holding areas, gyms, cafeterias and a gun range.

That’s big. Very big.

Now apply that same density to the floor space of the 474 AI data centers on Erin Brockovich’s community map and the buildings hold 8.7 million people. That is 63 percent of everyone living in the United States without status. Count only the floor space running today and the buildings hold 561,000 people, eight and a half times the number ICE had in custody at the last count.

Let’s be honest about history, as I didn’t go to LSE for nothing. If we know anything at all about President Jackson, Trump’s favorite, we should strip the word datacenter from the map and read the buildings as removal camps. Jackson’s genocidal Removal Act of 1830 gave the policy its word, and the stockades of 1838 cruelly held the Cherokee through a summer of disease before the trail of tears killed about a quarter of them, with as many again dead after arrival, by Russell Thornton’s reckoning.

Seen as labor camps the major complaints the towns have been filing suddenly vanish, almost too easily.

The complaint	The camp function
Too much water	Deprivation
Too much energy	Deprivation
Too few jobs	Slave labor

The Map

Map 1. Data center floor space counted as camp capacity. Shading is the unauthorized population by state (MPI, 2023). Teal markers are the 474 facilities on the Brockovich map, sized by estimated floor space. Red and amber markers are ICE’s warehouse purchases.

Two conversions make the map useful and both come from published figures. Stargate Abilene is about 4 million square feet for 1.2 gigawatts and xAI’s Colossus is 785,000 square feet for its first 150 megawatts, so one gigawatt is roughly 4 million square feet of shell at 250 watts per square foot. ICE’s own Socorro plan supplies the second figure, 97 square feet per bed. The Brockovich dataset, built on Compute Atlas and Epoch AI, claims 211 gigawatts across the country, 13.6 of them running. That is 846 million square feet claimed and 54 million built.

State	Beds at ICE density	Unauthorized residents	Coverage
Texas	2,250,000	1,966,000	114%
Utah	957,000	138,000	693%
Pennsylvania	528,000	250,000	211%
New Mexico	383,000	63,000	608%
Ohio	356,000	90,000	396%
Indiana	339,000	137,000	248%
Georgia	329,000	479,000	69%
Arizona	304,000	307,000	99%
Illinois	267,000	588,000	45%
Florida	62,000	1,223,000	5%
California	56,000	2,910,000	2%
New York	47,000	836,000	6%
United States	8,719,000	13,737,000	63%

Beds divide estimated floor space by 97 square feet. Population is the Migration Policy Institute’s 2023 estimate. At 500 watts per square foot, the densest halls now being built, the claimed floor space still holds 4.4 million and the running floor space 281,000.

Texas alone claims 218 million square feet, enough to hold every unauthorized resident of the state with room to spare. Utah’s campuses would hold seven times Utah’s unauthorized population, New Mexico’s six times, Ohio’s four. California, New York, Florida and Illinois hold 40 percent of the people and 5 percent of the floor space.

The Geometry

The German camps sat far from the people they were built for. Berlin alone held a third of the country’s Jews, and the cities held the Communists and Social Democrats. The camps went to a disused munitions works outside Munich, a moor at Esterwegen, the Ettersberg above Weimar, a quarry at Mauthausen. The Reichsbahn moved the population to the site. A gap between where people live and where capacity is built is the signature of a camp system, as seen on the map.

There are two logical steps in sequence for how sites were set, which also are on the map.

The First Logic: Custody Where Labor Is Free

Prussia placed camps in the Emsland moors in 1933, and by 1934 the Justice Ministry ran them as prison labor camps cutting peat. In 1938 the SS founded its own quarrying company, Deutsche Erd- und Steinwerke, and from then placed Flossenbürg, Mauthausen, Gross-Rosen and Natzweiler at granite quarries, Neuengamme at a brickworks. The prisoner was free labor attached to a resource, and the camp went to the resource.

The American jurisdiction for that arrangement is the Thirteenth Amendment exception, used in full in seven states that pay prisoners nothing for regular work: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Texas (ACLU and the University of Chicago Law School Global Human Rights Clinic, Captive Labor, 2022). Texas, Mississippi and Georgia rank in the top twenty states for data center floor space per resident. Texas and Georgia hold 20,000 of the 34,000 warehouse beds ICE has bought.

Map 2. ICE’s Detention Reengineering Initiative against the unauthorized population by state. Sites are sized by planned beds and colored by status.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics’ 2023 imprisonment rates against floor space per resident give a rank correlation of 0.46 across the fifty states, 0.50 with Utah removed. By quartile of floor space per resident, mean imprisonment rates run 356, 381, 318 and 226. The ten states that imprison the fewest people, Massachusetts through Washington, all sit in the bottom twenty for floor space, seven of them in the bottom twelve, four with none at all. States that decline to imprison their own residents decline to host this floor space.

State	ICE beds bought	Imprisonment rate 2023	Floor space, sq ft per resident
Texas	10,000	477	7.1
Georgia	10,000	449	2.9
Pennsylvania	9,000	300	3.9
Arizona	1,500	448	3.9
Maryland	1,500	261	1.5
New Jersey	1,500	125	0.2
Michigan	500	328	1.1

Imprisonment rate is sentenced prisoners per 100,000 residents (BJS, Prisoners in 2023, Table 7). Floor space per resident uses Census 2023 population estimates.

The Second Logic: Industry Where Water and Fuel Are Cheap

IG Farben chose Auschwitz in 1941 for Silesian coal, the water of the Vistula and the Sola, limestone and the rail junction. Its planners reported the camp’s labor as a further advantage, and the SS built Monowitz beside the plant. The campuses that break the prison correlation follow this logic. Creekstone’s 10 gigawatt site at Delta, Utah, the town beside the Intermountain Power Plant, runs on its own gas and solar on state trust land. Homer City in Pennsylvania is a dead coal plant converted to gas. Project Jupiter at Santa Teresa, New Mexico runs on an on-site gas microgrid, the 7 gigawatt Lea County proposal sits on the Permian Basin, and Alaska’s North Slope proposal would run on its own pipeline. Utah imprisons 186 people per 100,000 and has the largest campus in the country under construction, while Salt Lake City stopped the ICE warehouse with a water ordinance. Monowitz siting puts water and fuel first. Custody arrives afterward.

The two logics converged in 1942, when armaments plants pulled roughly a thousand subcamps to the factories and the prisoner followed the machine. This history lens yields a prediction. The next purchases in America will land at power and water in unpaid-labor states, while the transit sites stay at the rail heads and airports. Texas already fits all three.

Water, Energy, Jobs

The city of Social Circle, Georgia locked the water meter on the million-square-foot warehouse ICE bought for a 10,000-person mega-center. From the city’s statement:

Our permit to draw water out of the river is 1 million gallons a day. Our sewer plant can process 660,000 gallons per day and is at capacity. Their BLUF analysis indicates a daily water and sewer need that exceeds these amounts.

ICE’s Detention Reengineering Initiative answers with engineering reviews to make every site run independent of local water, power and wastewater. The town holds the valve today. The plan moves the valve inside the fence, where the operator decides who gets water. That is the kwanliso configuration, a self-contained site where provisioning is at the guard’s discretion and deprivation is the baseline condition of the site.

The Atlantic ran Elias Wachtel’s “The Data-Center Panic Is Overblown” in June and Andy Masley’s “The Data-Center Debate Is Divorced From the Facts” on 19 September, the second written, by the magazine’s own disclosure, on a grant from Coefficient Giving, the renamed Open Philanthropy, whose principal funder Dustin Moskovitz is an investor in Anthropic. Both essays argue at the national average, where water per query is trivial and grid strain is manageable. Social Circle measures its own river. The 1941 method chose sites by local water and local coal, and a town that reads its permit against the project’s demand is reading the project the way its builders do.

The jobs claim resolves the same way. ICE told Salt Lake City a warehouse for up to 10,000 people would bring almost 10,000 jobs. Detainees already do the cooking and cleaning in ICE facilities under the $1 a day “voluntary work program,” and GEO Group lost about $23 million in Tacoma in 2021 over it. In the German system the SS rented prisoners to firms at three to six Reichsmarks a day, so the prisoner was revenue. Here ICE pays GEO and CoreCivic per bed-day, so the bed is the product and the body is a cost, which is why this system builds capacity first and finds people second.

The density is already documented. The DHS Inspector General’s report of 14 September 2026 on the Everglades camp found 79 detainees confined in metal enclosures of about 18 square feet, for periods up to two hours, and housing that gave detainees less than half the living space federal standards require.

The posted policy on the enclosures:

safe and secure place in general population for detainees to reflect on their behavior choices, manage their emotions, reduce stress, and practice self-directed behavior

Square feet per body
42U server rack, plus aisle	8, about 25
Birkenau horse-stable barrack, 400 assigned	10
Everglades “calming area” enclosure	18
ACA standard for multiple-occupancy housing, unencumbered	25
ICE Socorro plan, gross	97

Processing Becomes Terminus

Trump set the number himself. In his interviews with Time on 12 and 27 April 2024 he put the population at “probably 15 million and maybe as many as 20 million by the time Biden’s out,” and answered the question of camps with “I would not rule out anything,” adding that there would be little need for them because the people would be taken out of the country quickly. In December 2024 he told the same magazine, “I want them out, and the countries have got to take them back.” Stephen Miller had already described to the New York Times, in November 2023, vast holding facilities to be built by the military on open land near the Texas border. Twenty million is ten times the entire American prison and jail population and beyond any camp system ever operated; the Gulag peaked near 2.5 million and the German system near 700,000 held at once in early 1945. The plan’s premise is an open exit, and the countries taking people back is the condition that fails first.

Population equals flow times dwell. ICE holds about 65,765 people, has removed 356,389 in this fiscal year through mid-July, and reports an average stay of 52 days, up from 42 in 2022. Sixty-five thousand divided by 52 days times 365 is 462,000 a year, which is the removal pace. The pipe is balanced. Add the plan’s 92,600 beds and the system holds 158,000, which at 52 to 60 days is a pipe for one million a year, the administration’s stated target. The size is transit-sized. The design fails at the exit, because intake is the only variable the operator controls. Removal depends on flights, receiving countries and 570 immigration judges facing a 3.3 million case backlog with waits near 900 days. The release valve is gone: since July 2025 ICE reads section 1225 to deny bond to anyone who entered without inspection, and the Board of Immigration Appeals agreed in Matter of Yajure Hurtado. Any reservoir whose outlet is smaller than its inlet fills. Terminus arrives by arithmetic.

That is the German sequence, read correctly. Heydrich’s Schnellbrief of 21 September 1939 (Nuremberg document PS-3363) separated the immediate concentration of Jews in cities from the goal it served:

Es ist zu unterscheiden zwischen 1. dem Endziel (welches längere Fristen beansprucht) und 2. den Abschnitten der Erfüllung des Endziels (welche kurzfristig durchgeführt werden).

Hitler had set that final goal in his letter to Adolf Gemlich of 16 September 1919, fourteen years before he took power: “die Entfernung der Juden überhaupt.” The exit was removal. Emigration first, then the Nisko reservation in October 1939, then Madagascar in 1940. Each closed. Emigration was banned outright on 23 October 1941, and the holding pens turned terminal by attrition, about 43,000 dead in the Warsaw ghetto in 1941, then by decision. The Wannsee protocol of 20 January 1942 (NG-2586) records the substitution in one sentence:

An Stelle der Auswanderung ist nunmehr als weitere Lösungsmöglichkeit nach entsprechender vorheriger Genehmigung durch den Führer die Evakuierung der Juden nach dem Osten getreten.

Emigration out, evacuation to the East in. The verb stayed the same and the destination changed. Slavery was a 1942 addition when the war economy needed hands, and Vernichtung durch Arbeit came with the Thierack-Himmler agreement of 18 September 1942 (PS-654). “Removal” is the same destination-agnostic verb.

The American exit is already being redefined the same way. When a country declines to take someone back, the answer since the Supreme Court’s June 2025 order in DHS v. D.V.D. is a third country, and CECOT was the proof of concept: 238 Venezuelans flown to a foreign prison on 15 March 2025 and held there uncharged for four months. That is a terminus, built offshore. Zadvydas v. Davis caps post-order detention at a presumptive six months; third-country removal is the workaround. Deaths in ICE custody reached 25 in fiscal 2025, the most since 2004, and fiscal 2026 passed that total by the end of March with 26.

	Germany 1933 to 1945	United States 2025 to 2026
Building	Munitions works, brewery, mill, moor barracks; from 1942 a standard horse-stable type	Logistics warehouses, 250,000 to 1,000,000 sq ft; “standardized design”
Site	Away from the cities; at quarries, brickworks, rail junctions; Auschwitz for coal and water	Away from California, New York, Florida; Socorro, Social Circle, Tremont; campuses at power plants and gas fields
Water and power	SS-controlled; Birkenau without washing barracks until 1943; DPRK huts without electricity	Sites engineered independent of local water, power, wastewater; towns locking meters
Dwell	Transit camps: Westerbork about 10,000 held, 100,000 through; Drancy 5,000 to 7,000, 65,000 through	Processing sites 3 to 7 days; mega-centers 60 days; 52-day average today
Labor	Prisoner rented to industry at 3 to 6 RM a day; the body was revenue	Bed-day paid to operator; $1 a day work program; the body is a cost
The word	Aussiedlung, Evakuierung, Endziel	Removal, remigration, self-deportation
Exit	Emigration until 1941; then “the East”; DPRK kwanliso: none	Removal flights; third countries since June 2025; CECOT
Jurisdiction	Schutzhaft, custody outside the courts	Civil detention; bond denied under section 1225 since July 2025; federal ownership to bypass state law

Who Is Building It

The people choosing this were raised inside what it produces. Elon Musk’s grandfather Joshua Haldeman led Technocracy Incorporated in Canada, was arrested in 1940 when Canada banned the movement as a national security risk, chaired Social Credit in 1946 while its members read the Protocols into Hansard, and told Die Transvaler in 1951 that Canada’s attitude had encouraged him to settle in apartheid South Africa. Peter Thiel’s father left Germany as the 1968 anti-Nazi movement rose and placed his son in the German school at Swakopmund, where the New York Times found “Heil Hitler” in use as the everyday greeting in 1976, while he managed construction of the Rössing uranium mine for the apartheid nuclear supply chain. Stephen Miller writes “remigration,” the Identitarian term, and the State Department proposed an Office of Remigration. Musk told an AfD rally in Halle to stop dwelling on past guilt.

People who reach for the vocabulary of 1941 and site their buildings by its method have read the manual, or were raised by people who relayed it to them.

The precedent that fits best is Monowitz, where private capital chose a site for coal and water and bought custody from the Nazi SS as an input. The data center is a private plant and ICE is the supplier. That is the Nazi arrangement that ended worst of all, and it is the one being built.

English | Deutsch

Als Fortsetzung meines Beitrags darüber, dass der Bundeskanzler “Remigration” als ethnische Säuberung bezeichnet hat, hier ein Blick auf denselben Mann, der am Donnerstag auf einer Berliner Wahlkampfveranstaltung sagte, der Hass auf Juden bedeute… Ausländer.

Die perfideste Form der Ausländerfeindlichkeit ist Antisemitismus.

Richtig gelesen: Der Regierungschef Deutschlands sagt im Wahlkampf, dass Juden keine Deutschen sein können.

Ein Ausrutscher? Es ist tief verwurzelt in den konservativen politischen Programmen Deutschlands, die Juden bis heute als ferne, unvertraute Andere darstellen, die man duldet. Das Jüdische Museum Berlin ist eine Ausstellung nicht über Juden, wie sie sind, wie das Leben heute läuft, sondern über die Menschen, die remigriert wurden. Es ist, als ginge man in ein Dinosauriermuseum über das Leben vor dem Meteoriteneinschlag.

Ausländerfeindlichkeit richtet sich, das Wort sagt es, gegen Ausländer.

Friedrich Merz hat das Wort auf Juden angewandt, die in Deutschland leben, von der Bühne seiner eigenen Parteizentrale aus, als Schutzversprechen für diese Ausländer.

Dinah Riese hat es in der taz beim Namen genannt. Der Satz zieht eine Grenze zwischen einem kollektiven “Wir” und sortiert alle Juden in die Kategorie der “Anderen”.

Der Bericht der Jüdischen Allgemeinen zeigt den Rahmen in jeder Passage, die er zitiert.

Kein Ausrutscher.

Laut der Jüdischen Allgemeinen zählte er als Ziele der jüngsten Angriffe deutsche Staatsbürger, Juden und israelische Staatsbürger auf. Liest man das als drei Gruppen, bekommen Juden ihren sorgfältigen Platz zwischen deutschen Staatsbürgern und Israelis. Liest man es als zwei, mit Juden als den gemeinten Staatsbürgern, bleiben sie die Staatsbürger, denen ein zweites Etikett angeheftet werden muss. So oder so: ein Identitäts-Niemandsland.

Dann stellte er “Ausländerkriminalität” und “Judenhass” als die zwei Dinge nebeneinander, die Berlin nicht länger dulden dürfe, und betonte, demselben Bericht zufolge, Deutschland bleibe ein Einwanderungsland. Jede Erwähnung von Juden saß in seiner Passage über Einwanderung. Juden, die seit Jahrhunderten in Deutschland leben? Merz erklärt der Welt, dass sie nicht als Deutsche zählen.

Das ist seine gefestigte, öffentliche Haltung.

Im Juni 2025 sagte er Fox News, Deutschland leide unter “imported antisemitism”, importiertem Antisemitismus, womit er den deutschen Hass auslagern wollte. Ein Jahr später sind die Juden selbst zum Import geworden. Am besten erklärt das Esra Özyürek in ihrem Buch “Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany” von 2023.

Juden in Deutschland besitzen die deutsche Staatsangehörigkeit durch Geburt, durch Einbürgerung und durch Wiedereinbürgerung nach Artikel 116 des Grundgesetzes, dem Artikel, der für die Menschen geschrieben wurde, denen der NS-Staat zwischen 1933 und 1945 die Staatsangehörigkeit entzog. Der Entzug kam in Stufen. Das Reichsbürgergesetz vom 15. September 1935 (RGBl. I S. 1146) definierte den Reichsbürger als Staatsangehörigen deutschen oder artverwandten Blutes, womit deutsche Juden in eine mindere Kategorie der Zugehörigkeit rückten, während ihre Pässe in ihren Händen blieben. Die Elfte Verordnung zu diesem Gesetz vom 25. November 1941 (RGBl. I S. 722) erklärte, dass jeder Jude mit gewöhnlichem Aufenthalt im Ausland, Deportierte eingeschlossen, die deutsche Staatsangehörigkeit verliert, und zog das Vermögen gleich mit ein.

Der Satz des Kanzlers vollzieht dieselbe Sortierung wie Hitler, mit einem modernen Augenzwinkern.

Er ist offen antisemitisch. Auf einer großen Bühne in Berlin, um Stimmen zu gewinnen.

Riese liefert das Detail, das zeigt, was die Merz-Rhetorik im Alltag anrichtet. Der Angreifer, der diesen Monat in Berlin mit einer abgebrochenen Flasche auf eine Frau mit Davidstern-Kette losging, reagierte auf die Kette. Ihre deutsche Staatsangehörigkeit war für ihn völlig unsichtbar. Sechs Tage später stand der Kanzler auf einer Bühne und sagte, für ihn sei sie es auch.

Ich habe es erlebt. Auf einer S-Bahn-Fahrt vom Wannsee, dessen Bahnhof noch immer seine gebrochene Reichsbahnschrift von 1935 trägt, eine kurze Busfahrt von der Villa entfernt, in der die Endlösung organisiert wurde, setzte sich eine Frau neben mich und tobte. Sie schrie, ich sei ein Ausländer, ich würde totgeschlagen und meine Kinder würden von starken, reinen Deutschen gestohlen und vergewaltigt, wenn ich nicht fliehe. Ich begriff erst gar nicht, dass sie mich meinte, so ungeheuerlich war es, bis jemand flüsterte: “Sie meint Sie.” Die S-Bahn war voll. Um sie herum saßen alle schweigend und sahen weg, während sie weiter und weiter redete, bis ich den Wagen verließ.

Antisemitismus beginnt mit dem Satz, dass Juden per Definition fremd sind. Der Kanzler hat ihn gesagt, im Wahlkampf, als der Mann, dem man als Beschützer der “Deutschen” vertrauen soll.

English | Deutsch

As a followup to my post about the German Chancellor saying that “remigration” means ethnic cleansing, here’s a look at the same man at a Berlin political rally on Thursday saying that the hatred of Jews means… foreigners.

Die perfideste Form der Ausländerfeindlichkeit ist Antisemitismus.

The most insidious form of xenophobia is anti-Semitism.

That’s right, the leader of Germany is saying on a campaign trail that Jews can’t be Germans.

Is it a slip? It is deeply rooted in the conservative political German platforms who frame Jews to this day as a distant, unfamiliar, others who they tolerate. The Jewish museum in Berlin is an exhibition not about Jews as they are, how life goes today, instead about the people who were remigrated. It is like going to a dinosaur museum about life before the meteor strike.

Ausländerfeindlichkeit means hostility toward foreigners.

Friedrich Merz applied the word to Jews living in Germany, from the stage of his own party headquarters, as a promise of protection of those foreigners.

Dinah Riese at the taz named it for what it is. The sentence draws a line between a collective “we” and puts all the Jews in the “other” category.

The Jüdische Allgemeine report shows the frame in every passage it quotes.

Not a slip.

The Jüdische Allgemeine’s account has him listing the targets of recent attacks as German citizens, Jews, and Israeli citizens. Read as three groups, Jews get careful placement between German citizens and Israelis. Read as two, with Jews as the citizens in question, they remain the citizens who need a second label attached. Either way, an identity wasteland.

He then paired “Ausländerkriminalität” with “Judenhass” as the two things Berlin must stop tolerating, and, per the same report, insisted Germany remains an Einwanderungsland. Every mention of Jews sat inside his passage on immigration. Jews living in Germany for centuries? Merz tells the world they don’t count as Germans.

This is his settled, public view.

In June 2025 he told Fox News that Germany suffers from “imported antisemitism”, by which he meant to outsource German hate. A year later the import has become the Jews themselves. This is explained best in a book called “Subcontractors of Guilt: Holocaust Memory and Muslim Belonging in Postwar Germany” by Esra Özyürek in 2023.

Jews in Germany hold German citizenship by birth, by naturalization, and by restoration under Article 116 of the Basic Law, the clause written for people the Nazi state stripped of citizenship between 1933 and 1945. The stripping came in stages. The Reich Citizenship Law of 15 September 1935 (RGBl. I S. 1146) defined a Reichsbürger as a Staatsangehöriger of German or related blood, which moved German Jews into a lesser category of belonging while leaving their passports in their hands. The Eleventh Ordinance to that law, 25 November 1941 (RGBl. I S. 722), declared any Jew living abroad, deportees included, to have lost German nationality, and took their property with it.

The Chancellor’s sentence performs Hitler’s same sorting with a modern wink and nod.

He’s being openly antisemitic. On a main stage in Berlin, to win votes.

Riese adds the detail that shows what the Merz rhetoric does in daily life. The attacker who swung a broken bottle at a woman wearing a Star of David necklace in Berlin this month acted on the necklace. Her German citizenship was totally invisible to him. Six days later the Chancellor stood on a stage and said it is totally invisible to him too.

I have experienced it. On a S-Bahn ride from Wannsee, whose station still wears its 1935 Reichsbahn blackletter a short bus ride from the villa where the final solution was organized, a woman sat next to me and ranted and raved. She yelled that I am a foreigner, that I will be beat to death and have my children stolen and raped by strong and pure Germans if I do not flee. I didn’t fully realize she meant me, it was so atrocious, until someone whispered “she’s talking about you.” The S-Bahn was full of passengers. All around her they sat in silence and looked away as she went on and on, until I left the car.

Antisemitism begins with the sentence that says Jews are foreign by definition. The Chancellor said it while campaigning as the man who wants to be trusted as a protector of “Germans”.

Prosecutors are focused on the man operating the weapon, using a Tesla for domestic terrorism, whether or not he was following Elon Musk’s orders.

The driver, Zachary Steven Chernicky, 31, of San Jose, “turned his car into a literal bomb” when he drove between 100-142 mph on Highway 87 and plowed into heavy traffic on December 2, 2025, prosecutors wrote in court documents.
Following the fiery fatal wreck, Chernicky got a new Tesla and showed off how fast it could go in a series of videos posted on Instagram, court records state.

He roamed free, threatening the public.