OPINION: Shout-outs to Shapiro and Fetterman for Pushing Back on Concentration Camps

The Trump/Project 2025 regime, which has always disrespected its critics, is now showing its contempt for supporters as it proceeds to foist a 7,500-bed ICE concentration camp in our red part of Pennsylvania.

This abomination is just one part of the Department of Homeland Security agency’s scheme to buy up vacant warehouses for storing immigrants its Gestapo-like officers snatch up to meet arbitrary quotas that the regime frames as a solution to a mostly fabricated problem.

In the 2024 election, Donald Trump won 70% of the vote in Schuylkill County and  a whopping 81% in rural Tremont Township, where the DHS intends to plant the “detention megacenter” (its preferred term).

Now residents across the political spectrum are rightfully angry. And pushing back, the only way to handle bullies, is also the only appropriate response to the havoc the megacenter would wreak.

But while GOP lawmakers from our own Congressman Dan Meuser on down are expressing concern, they’re also casting this prison and a much smaller 1,500-bed one 26 miles away in Upper Bern Township, Berks County, as faits accompli.

The challenges instead are coming from two high-ranking Democrats.

In separate letters to Homeland “Security” Secretary Kristi “Ice Barbie” Noem, Gov. Josh Shapiro and U.S. Sen. John Fetterman outlined the same issues everyone else has: woefully inadequate water, sewer, emergency response and health care systems to accommodate the influx of people in Tremont, which has about 300 residents, and Upper Bern, which has about 1,600. And the townships, their school districts and counties stand to lose substantial revenue because the federal government doesn’t pay taxes.

“Your Department, however, has failed to engage state or local leaders about any of these very real concerns, disregarding how your plans will harm the people who live near them,” Shapiro wrote.

Fetterman said he fears that DHS and ICE performed no due diligence, squandering more than $200 million of taxpayers’ money for warehouses that can’t be properly converted.

He asked Noem to have DHS communicate with the public, commit to using federal funds to upgrade infrastructure, and disclose the impact on the communities as well as the criteria (if any) in choosing the properties.

Shapiro went much further.  “Should you choose to go forward, you would be violating the rights of Pennsylvanians, increasing utility costs, harming our economy, and making us less safe,” he wrote.  “If you press ahead, my Administration will aggressively pursue every option to prevent these facilities from opening and needlessly harming the good people of Pennsylvania.”

He included a letter from Cabinet officials who listed the various laws the warehouse conversions would probably violate.

Moreover, he addressed the humanitarian crisis DHS and ICE have unleased nationwide with their indiscriminate roundups and excessive use of force. “Your Department ’s record is reason enough to oppose your plan to use warehouses in Schuylkill and Berks Counties as detention centers,” he observed.  

Really, does anyone want their community’s claim to fame to be a notoriously inhumane concentration camp like the ones ICE already owns and a for-profit prison company operates?

Because DHS has doled out even less information than Trump does facts, Schuylkill County commissioners are looking to Congressman Meuser, who they’ve said also knew nothing about ICE’s plan until after the deeds for the warehouses were filed.

Because he revels in his self-appointed role of Trump/Project 2025 head cheerleader, it would be too much to ask for him to fight the feds or even give them what-for about leaving him and his constituents out of the loop.

Instead, he rolled over and told Spotlight PA and NOTUS that we all should do the same. 

He did promise greater transparency and a meeting he’s setting up with Schuylkill, Berks and DHS officials. And he said he’ll make sure the concentration camps won’t be “overly intrusive.”  (As opposed to just “intrusive”? one Facebook commenter wondered.)

While residents have called for some kind of action against the prisons, GOP commissioners in both counties and state Sen. Dave Argall have stopped short of opposing them, despite all the reasons to.

 “Our state legislative delegation and our county commissioners have discussed (the loss of tax revenue) at length with Congressman Meuser and his colleagues in the hope that this loss will NOT occur,” Argall said. But he added that Meuser and Pennsylvania’s U.S. senators have primary oversight.

Maybe the GOP politicians expect compliance to lead to concessions, but there’s a reason famed historian Timothy Snyder started off his book “On Tyranny” with a chapter called “Do Not Obey in Advance.”

Obedience just teaches the powerful what they can do, he noted.

 And Chapter 6 provides people trying to preserve democracy with another reason to resist the concentration camps: “Beware of Paramilitaries.” 

Canary note: Opinions expressed in any Op-Ed column appearing on this site are the views of the writer and are not necessarily the opinions of Coal Region Canary.

Want to be a columnist with Coal Region Canary? Contact us at newscanary@gmail.com.

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