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Rebecca Gordon, The American Gulag 2026

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Here’s a question for you: How did U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, more commonly known as ICE (though its actions are hot as hell), get the right to swarm over this country, arresting, even killing people, while creating — yes, TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon has it right! — concentration camps across the United States? I must admit that, if I were able to return to my childhood in the 1950s and tell my parents that, in the distant future, there would be a masked national police force (acting as customs agents) with nothing short of its own national system of detention centers (significantly created from shuttered and abandoned old “zombie” prisons), they would have thought their son had gone over the edge.

And yet, here we are in 2026 in a distinctly ICY world. Worse yet, ICE, as the ACLU reports, is now drawing “state and local police away from the needs of communities, and into a national deportation force that acts as though it answers only to the president.” And that, sadly enough, is just the beginning. As the Washington Post recently reported, the Trump administration is now also launching “a $38 billion plan to convert industrial warehouses into a new breed of large-scale holding centers.” (What could possibly go wrong?)

In the meantime, ICE agents, armed with guns, are striking out at Americans who are anything but immigrants, including using tear gas (or “projectile munitions”) against those protesting their actions. As a judge in Portland, Oregon, who issued a preliminary injunction against such acts, wrote: “Plaintiffs provided numerous videos, which were received in evidence and unambiguously show DHS [Department of Homeland Security] officers spraying OC Spray directly into the faces of peaceful and nonviolent protesters engaged in, at most, passive resistance and discharging tear gas and firing pepper-ball munitions into crowds of peaceful and nonviolent protestors.”

In truth, ICE should undoubtedly be renamed HOT, and DHS should be relabeled the Department of Homeland (In)Security. And with that in mind, let Gordon explore an America in which concentration camps are indeed becoming part of the scenery. Tom

People Die While Companies Profit

As Concentration Camps Metastasize Across the U.S.

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The March 4, 2026, edition of the Arizona Daily Star put the facts succinctly: “A Haitian asylum seeker held for four months at Florence Correctional Center died Monday at a Scottsdale hospital due to complications from an infected tooth.” It seems the infection spread from his tooth to his lungs, and he developed the pneumonia that killed him.

In other words, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) allowed a prisoner to die of a toothache. His name was Emmanuel Damas. He was 56 years old and the father of two.

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Patrick Strickland, And Then the Slaughter Began

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I began TomDispatch in November 2001 in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on my city, New York, and on Washington, D.C., and soon after, the Bush administration decided to essentially invade Afghanistan. And it should seem strange indeed that, in the wake (an all too appropriate word!) of that war, which finally ended in disaster 20 years later and the no less disastrous war in Iraq, this country — and especially the “peace president” who once swore that regime change was “a proven, absolute failure” — should have the urge to fight on (ever more unsuccessfully, of course), this time in Iran, by launching Operation Epic Fury. As Julian Borger and Andrew Roth of the Guardian grimly reported, President Trump “amassed the biggest military force in the Middle East since [George W.] Bush led the invasion of Iraq 23 years earlier” and (with the help of Benjamin Netanyahu) “became the first U.S. leader since Bush to lead a regime change war against a major adversary.”

Worse yet, count on this: having used the U.S. military to steal (and yes, that’s certainly the right word for it) the president of Venezuela and his wife, and having now launched Operation Epic Fury against Iran, President Trump already seems to be preparing to follow up by taking out Cuba in some fashion. As he put it recently, “As we achieve a historic transformation in Venezuela, we’re also looking forward to the great change that will soon be coming to Cuba. Cuba’s at the end of the line, they’re very much at the end of the line. They have no money. They have no oil. They have a bad philosophy; they have a bad regime that’s been bad for a long time.” All I can think is: uh-oh.

And lest you imagine that that’s it for the “peace president,” don’t forget that there’s always Greenland! Now, with all of that in mind and the nightmare in Gaza still underway, let TomDispatch regular Patrick Strickland explore just how Donald Trump, with a helping hand from Benjamin Netanyahu, has “relaunched the long, lethal American tradition of military intervention abroad.” Sigh… Tom

Why Donald Trump Just Can’t Stop Going to War

When Imperial America Offers Help, It Just Might Get You Killed

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After protests across Iran turned deadly in January, President Donald Trump promised Iranians that “help is on the way.” On February 28th, the U.S. and Israel launched what immediately became a devastating war on Iran. American and Israeli warplanes began dropping bombs on a country of some 93 million people. Trump soon put out a video address, telling Iranians that “the hour of your freedom is at hand.” Around the time that video appeared, Iranians in the city of Minab were sorting through the corpses of more than 165 people killed in an airstrike on an elementary school for girls. 

That same day, an airstrike killed Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, an 86-year-old who was supposedly already in poor health. Throughout the ensuing days, American and Israeli attacks struck hospitals, historic sites, and more schools. In response, Iran aimed its drones and missiles at American military bases and allies across the Gulf region.

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Joshua Frank, The Nuclear Disaster You Weren’t Thinking About

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Consider it something of a human miracle that, 80 years after the United States atomically obliterated the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II, with eight other countries now possessing such weaponry (and my country and Israel at war with a nation they fear might become the ninth), nuclear weapons have never again been used in wartime (though they have repeatedly been tested out in peacetime).

As it happens, however, another kind of nuclear weaponry (though never thought of that way) has indeed spread globally and could go off at any moment, day or night. I’m thinking, of course, about nuclear power plants, of which there are about 440 operating in 31 countries. As we (should have) found out 15 years ago, when a nuclear power plant in Fukushima, Japan, went haywire, as is so vividly described today by TomDispatch regular Joshua Frank, author of the forthcoming book Bad Energy: The AI Hucksters, Rogue Lithium Extractors, and Wind Industrialists Who Are Selling Off Our Future, the nuclear dangers on this planet are now only multiplying. And that’s even more the case because, on an ever more rapidly overheating planet faced with accelerating climate change, nuclear power has become a distinct alternative to coal, oil, and natural gas, which release such devastating levels of fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere in what might be considered a slow-motion alternative to nuclear war.

Consider it strange as well, as you read Frank’s piece, that, from 1945 to today, nuclear disasters have largely been localized (if such a word can even be used, given the subject) to Japan. And with that in mind, consider our increasingly nuclearized world and its dangers. Tom

Searching for Solace in a Nuclearized World

The Nightmare of Fukushima 15 Years Later

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Nine countries now possess nuclear weapons and we have just seen the start of a new war in the Middle East over one more nation supposedly trying to acquire them. While we consider the dangers of such weapons and their capacity to cause massive destruction, we often overlook the risks associated with what still passes for "peaceful" nuclear power. With that in mind, let me revisit a moment when that reality should have become far clearer.

I had crawled into bed on March 10, 2011, opened my phone, and scrolled through my Instagram feed. The app was still fairly new then, and I was only following a dozen or so accounts, several from Japan. One amateur photographer there had posted photos minutes earlier of a fractured sidewalk and a toppled bookshelf. A massive earthquake had just rattled Tokyo.

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