In “Deportation Nation,” a new original documentary released today by Atlantic Studios, former Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio stands by the controversial statement he made a decade ago, when he called his infamous Tent City a concentration camp. Arpaio, who President Trump pardoned last summer for defying a court order to stop racial profiling and is now running for U.S. Senate, says in The Atlantic’s documentary that he sees no reason to reconsider the remark: “I’m not going to back down. So what? Maybe it is a concentration camp. I don’t want to make it look nice, like the Hilton Hotel. I want to say it’s a tough place so people don’t want to come there.”
“Deportation Nation” goes behind the gates of America’s immigration detention centers: a hidden constellation of facilities across the country where as many as 50,000 people a day, including families and children, are currently being held for prolonged periods of time. Since 2003, more than 179 people have died in ICE detention centers while awaiting deportation. Jessica Vaughan, an analyst who supports immigration restrictions, says that voters support detention as a signal of toughness on immigration: “If the wall is a symbol of border security and immigration enforcement, they understand that detention is a brick in that wall.”