Media Must Call ICE Detention Centers What They Are: Camps

The United States is now detaining over 60,000 people in ICE custody — a record — in a rapidly expanding network of facilities that has nearly doubled in size since 2024. The administration's plan calls for converting commercial warehouses into mass detention centers holding up to 1,500 people at a time, for stays of three to seven days, with more than 90,000 new beds in the pipeline. Camp East Montana, the largest facility, is a tent complex on a military base that has logged three deaths, 49 regulatory violations, and allegations of guards betting on which detainee would die next. The private company awarded the $1.3 billion contract to run it had no prior detention experience. ICE detention deaths are on a record pace in 2026. The government calls these places "processing centers." They are camps.

Words matter. When journalists use the administration's preferred euphemisms — "detention centers," "processing facilities," "residential centers" — they do the government's framing work for it, softening the public's understanding of what is actually happening. Mass incarceration of civilians in overcrowded, under-resourced, privately operated facilities where people are dying at record rates has a name. Historians and human rights experts have been consistent: these are camps.

We call on the media to adopt language that matches the reality — and to cover the explosive expansion of ICE detention not as an immigration enforcement story, but as a human rights crisis unfolding on American soil. The public deserves reporting that names what it sees.