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America’s True Fascist Architectural Legacy

It’s not the kitschy White House ballroom—it’s logistics warehouses converted to ICE detention centers.

When Congress voted to expand the budget of Immigration and Customs Enforcement by $170 billion last July, it was inevitable that some of that money would be spent reshaping the built environment toward new and more sinister ends. Sure enough, by the end of 2025, ICE released plans to convert seven massive logistics warehouses scattered across the United States into detention centers to hold more than 80,000 detainees. Another 16 will be used as immigrant-processing sites. Turning warehouses for storing goods into warehouses for storing people is already harrowing. The historical precedents for repurposing industrial infrastructure to forcibly transport humans at scale make it even more so.

Perhaps more than any other type of structure, including Donald Trump’s various flights of fancy in Washington, DC, these warehouses are shaping up to be the clearest expression of fascist architecture in our time. They tick all the boxes, offering surveillance, confinement, and monumentality. One of the fascists’ chief innovations was using industrial techniques to execute their program of mass displacement and murder. So too must our government’s most violent elements use the structures and flows already available to them to achieve the disenfranchisement and total social control they seek. “We need to get better at treating this like a business,” said Todd M. Lyons, ICE’s acting director, at a border-control conference earlier last year. The administration’s goal, in Lyons’s words, is to deport immigrants as efficiently as Amazon moves packages: “Like Prime, but with human beings.”

As the factories of old rot along railroad corridors (as any frequent Amtrak passenger can tell you), their successors dot the peripheries of airports or haunt stretches of........

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