The New American Gulag

Over the last couple of weeks, the U.S. administration has augured a sea change in global geopolitics and with it, in its approach to our shared humanity.

In the wake of this change, four events stand out.

The first: A few weeks ago, ICE deported supposedly undocumented immigrants in shackles and then posted the video, captioning it “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight."

This is not a deportation but an abduction.

The MAGA/far right uses the term “deportation” to associate abduction with "illegal immigration” so it sounds more palatable to their base and to all those concerned about immigration excess. The term is a cover for something far more sinister, and I think we should call it as it is.

According to data obtained by NBC News, 41% of the people detained by ICE in the first two weeks of February had no previous criminal conviction or had a pending criminal charge.

The second event: the U.S. administration’s threat to abduct (deport) 240,000 Ukrainians with temporary legal status who live in the United States. This follows Trump and Vance’s bullying of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, bid for ownership of Ukrainian rare earth minerals, and realignment of their cabinet—and thus, the U.S.—with Russia.

The third event is the illegal abduction, arrest, and detainment by ICE, without charges, of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate, permanent U.S. resident, and husband of a U.S. resident.

The U.S. detained Khalil in the LaSalle Detention Center, a for-profit detention center in Jena, Louisiana. The center is run by the publicly traded GEO Group, a company that designs, finances, and manages correctional facilities (prisons and jails), as well as immigration processing centers, and community reentry centers. They do this not only in the U.S. but also internationally, including in the U.K., Australia, and South Africa.

To date, GEO's operations include 100 secure facilities, processing centers, and community reentry centers encompassing approximately 79,000 beds, including idle beds in inventory and projects under development.

The facility is known for its human rights abuses. According to a 2024 ACLU report, GEO Group operated the facility as a juvenile correctional center in the 1990s. The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the facility which included charges for the beating, teargassing, and pepper-spraying of children.

The GEO Group reopened the facility in 2008 to jail immigrants on behalf of ICE; new allegations of abuse rapidly followed, including inadequate medical care which lead to the deaths of several immigrants.

The fourth event we can add to the list is Trump’s promise to end birthright citizenship.

Birthright citizenship is a legal principle under which citizenship is automatically granted to individuals upon birth. It takes two forms: ancestry-based citizenship and birthplace-based citizenship. Birthplace-based citizenship grants citizenship based on place of birth. It is formally referred to as jus soli, a Latin term meaning "right of the soil."

The Fourteenth Amendment codified a rule of citizenship that already prevailed in American law. It was intended to restore a rule, in force before the Dredd Scott decision, that gave citizenship to the children of virtually every free person born on U.S. soil, including all immigrants.

The U.S. administration has no authority to change birthright citizenship.

I’d like to outline how all these issues are connected, and why they matter to all of us, through the lens of history.

Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, and Trump’s America

Over the last few weeks, Trump has illegally suspended aid to Ukraine, stopped sharing military intelligence with the Ukrainians, forbade Britain to share their intelligence, called Zelenskyy a “dictator,” demanded that Ukraine hold elections (which would, as even a five-year-old child can see, endanger its citizens), and had several top officials meet with opposition leaders in Ukraine to find someone willing to "unseat" Zelenskyy. (How very Putin of Trump; to their credit, the Ukrainian officials refused.)

He has also threatened to annex Canada, Greenland, and Mexico.

This week, Trump said that the European Union was formed to “screw the United States,” a statement that often presages a new declaration of impending annexation of a sovereign nation.

Trump isn't just bullying and coercing Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian people, or these other countries and their citizens.

He is performing punishment and carcerality for the benefit of his own citizens and the citizens of other countries worldwide. (Carcerality is a system of social, emotional, and economic control that uses punishment and incarceration to wage war on the agency and sovereignty of others- and uses the threat of such to obtain compliance from those who should be Allying.)

Trump doesn't just want an autocracy. He wants an oligarchy that serves a monarch, just as Putin has in Russia.

An oligarchy, or as some are calling it, a kakistocracy—a government by the least suitable or competent citizens of a state—is the "best" vehicle for the enrichment of Trump and his supporters.

Trump will stop at nothing to remake the U.S. in that image.

And punishment is his primary weapon in the degradation of this country and its people.

With each successive incident, just as Hitler did in Nazi Germany, Stalin did in Soviet Russia, and Putin does in today's Russia, Trump is letting us know what will happen to us, too, if we speak out.

He is showing his base that his alliance with Russia is linked to what they all desire: fascism, colonialism, white supremacy, the erasure of cultural identity and memory, the devaluation of bodies and embodiment.

Since the 17th century, Russia has violated 16 major non-aggression pacts in order to invade and illegally annex other countries, either in whole or in part.

One of those violations impacted my family directly.

The Original Soviet Gulag

In 1939, when my mother was 7 (and her sisters 5 and 10), Hitler invaded Poland from the West to begin WWII, The Soviets violated a non-aggression pact they’d made with Poland several years prior, and invaded Poland from the East (where my family lived). The Soviets said there was "no such thing as a Polish person," the same dehumanizing rhetoric Russia uses today with Ukrainians.

In February of 1940, the Soviet army abducted our family and countless others. These abductions were called “deportations,” but as you can see from the way Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the U.S. is treating its citizens, it’s a forced abduction and incarceration.

The Soviets put my family and thousands of other Poles on cattle cars that had slatted openings on the sides so the cattle could breathe. (You can see how even the tiniest of details is designed to emphasize the dehumanization, as it was with the recent U.S. deportations that places human beings in shackles and then joked about it on social media.)

They placed as many as 90 people to a car, and took them on a 6-week journey to Siberia. Countless died along the way; the train stopped once a day to throw the bodies of the dead onto the snowy tundra below, with no care for ceremony. One of the songs my people sang on the cattle cars was "Nie Rzucim Ziemi," which translates to, "We won't forsake our land."

Tens of thousands died on that journey. Mum spent 2 years in a prison camp in Siberia; she and her sisters received a piece of bread per day, and nearly starved. They were then refugees in Tehran, then India, Kazakhstan, Persia, and then the Koja settlement in Uganda, where she lived for 8 years and attended high school, only to be forced again to relocate, this time to Britain.

In a treaty to end the war, a chunk of Poland the size of Czechoslovakia was given to the Soviets—our invaders—and is now part of Belarus. (This is one of the many reasons I oppose the insistence of this administration that Ukraine cede land to Russia.)

We had no land to go back to, no family records of family.

It has taken our beloved cousins decades to piece together, with the help of documents, interviews, and translation of now-Russian documents, who and where our family is or was. Scores have died: I look at their names and photos on Ancestry, trying to put a story behind each face, wondering about a virtual army of family members I’ll never meet. A cousin, Meyer Leshgold, had a barbershop just 20 minutes away from where I live today. Meyer died in 2020 without ever having known us, or we him.

Last year, I drove to the address of the barbershop, only to find that not only the shop but the address itself, did not exist. It had vanished into the air, erased from the map by a church and rectory and large parking lot whose pebbles crunched under my feet.

I walked in circles, my throat a fist of grief for a man I never had the chance to know.

We've been working our entire lives to unpack and transform our legacies of trauma. To feel a sense of belonging. To answer an endless series of exiles with something that feels like home.

An interactive map of the Soviet Gulag at the height of its operation.

Who Does Illegal Abduction Target?

Most people know that the Nazis, with the help of the Soviet Army, targeted Jews.

But Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia systematically persecuted a long list of other groups.

They targeted Black, Brown, Roma, Sinti, disabled, LGBTQ+ people, Jehovah's witnesses, and Freemasons.

The Soviets also targeted those they called "asocial," a group that included sex workers, people with substance abuse issues, and unhoused persons.

They persecuted their political opponents, including trade unionists. (This should ring a bell, as most of us know how oligarchs feel about trade unions).

They persecuted pacifists, and those who didn’t conform to their social norms.

Think of what Trump said about the BLM protests in 2020, and the pro-Palestinian protests now, his plans to leverage the military to stop them.

And think of this hateful rhetoric toward LGBTQ+ folks, and the bizarre mix-up of "transgenic" mice that helps us study disease with "transgender" mice (which, contrary to what he says, are not real).

Who among us isn’t a member of one of the groups above?

The Soviet Gulag was a system of forced labor camps established in the 1920’s. Deportation was its instrument of oppression.

The Gulag network reached a "peak" during Stalin’s reign as dictator of the Soviet Union; it included hundreds of labor camps across Siberia, each comprised of 2,000 to 10,000 people.

Many prisoners were worked to death in the extreme cold; countless were summarily executed. Women and children were raped. Others died of starvation, disease, or exhaustion.

Besides the Poles, Soviets also persecuted, arrested, persecuted, and imprisoned many other ethnic or religious groups, among them: Ukrainians, Byelorussians, Finnish people, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Germans, Karachays (a Turkish-speaking people from the North Caucasus), Kalmyks (a Buddhist people living in Southern Russia, killing 93,000 people in three days), The Chechens and Ingush, two Muslim peoples of the North Caucasus, Balkars (a small Turkish people living near the Elbruz Mountain in Northern Caucasus), Crimean Tatars (the aforementioned Muslim Turkish-speaking people originating from the peninsula of Crimea located on the borders of Black Sea, killing close to 200,000 in two days), Greeks, Armenians, and Georgians.

In the primary years of its operation, millions of Soviet citizens (take note—these were Stalin’s own people!) were also sent to the Gulag.

According to estimates, the Gulag network incarcerated a staggering 18 million people. Nearly 4.5 million never returned, and 6 million more were exiled.

Despite reforms and a reduction in prison population, today Russia both informally and formally continues many practices endemic to the Gulag system, including forced labor, inmates policing inmates, and prisoner intimidation. (This is where Alexei Navalny, Putin's most popular opponent, died under "mysterious" circumstances in February of 2024.)

Importantly, the Gulag system helped accelerate Soviet industrialization. It exploited the natural resources of the country's barely inhabitable far northern regions, including where my mother and her family were imprisoned in the Ural Mountains. (They were involved in agriculture, foresting, mineral production, building factories, railroads, and other facilities.)

Does this system of ethnic capitalism sound familiar? It’s the same system of abduction, enslavement, Jim Crow, and racial capitalism that the United States levied to get enslaved people to build the country, while simultaneously stealing land and levying oppression on the indigenous populations here before us.

The term "American Gulag" has been used multiple times to describe America's mass incarceration complex and the U.S. system of immigration detention, both of which disproportionately target First Nations, Black, and Brown people.

Trump wants to create The New American Gulag.

The MAGA right is salivating at the prospect. And those who allied with them, who voted for Trump in the hopes that they'd escape this neo-carceral system, are in danger, too.

Trump adores Putin and Netanyahu both because of their bottomless imperial hunger and because they, too, erase and rewrite history.

The atrocities committed by Putin’s Russia are mentally and emotionally devastating. They are also crimes against embodiment and cultural memory.

Russia's crimes against humanity include the targeting of civilians, torture and summary executions of civilians and military prisoners alike, systematic rape of women, children, and men, and the looting of cultural heritage sites and priceless cultural artifacts.

But the worst of these atrocities may be the abduction, since 2022, of between 20,000 and 50,000 Ukrainian children, who are forcibly issued Russian passports and "reeducated" via Russian propaganda and forced recitation of Russian "history."

This is reminiscent of the abduction and forced "reeducation" and cultural and religious persecution of First Nations children in the United States and Canada as well as the incarceration, family separation, and forced deportation to countries NOT of their origin of migrant children in the U.S. in Trump's last term.

Last week, the Institute for the Study of War reported that Russia is forcing Ukrainian children over the age of 13 into military conscription, where they must fight against their own Ukrainian people or die.

Cultural Memoricide Enables Fascism

Why is history significant?

Russia likes to rewrite- consume, even- its history and ours.

At the close of 2021, Putin shuttered Memorial, a leading Russian human rights organization which has worked ceaselessly to document and honor victims of the Great Terror and Soviet oppression. He is working to erase the epigenetic record and bodily archive of past, present, and likely future atrocities.

Nearly half of young Russians do not know that Stalin’s regime killed between 3.5 and 5 million Ukrainians, or of the Great Purge, in which he killed 750,000 of his own people.

Such is Putin’s assault on cultural memory that a 2019 Levada Center poll, reported by the Moscow Times, found that 70% of Russians actually approve of Stalin’s role in history.

In 2019, when buying a car, I heard from the Russian finance guy that "we liberated you" in the war. He had not realized that without the Soviets, Hitler would not have been able to invade Poland to begin the war.

And Hitler drew from the U.S. colonial project, which included the genocide of First Nations and the enslavement of Africans and others, for his ideas for the Holocaust, where many of our Jewish family who lived in Western Poland died.

Recently, Trump's government removed from the U.S. government website a copy of the Budapest Memorandum signed by the U.S., Ukraine, and Russia in 1994 as security guarantees for Ukraine in exchange for their nuclear disarmament.

And as we know, the MAGA movement and its allies have targeted abortion rights, which is to say our body sovereignty.

They've banned books. They've forbidden CRT from being taught in schools, a ludicrous concept because as its creators, Dr. Kimberle Crenshaw, Derrick Bell, and other legal scholars, have pointed out, it is a framework of analysis not taught until college or graduate school.

They're erasing and rewriting history, and instituting a system of punishment for those who publicly testify to the past.

Many of my white students wish I'd stop "mixing" yoga and embodiment with "politics" or "social justice," as though the body and the mind-body connection could exist without a social body. (I've written about this on Substack; see the "Should We All Just Stick to Yoga?" piece.) They want to talk about their own individual healing, and how they can be better healers to their students.

But this is all part of the colonial process that separates us from our history, from our ancestors, and from our ancestral wisdom. To wish to separate the body from its social and political roots is to testify to our massive social privilege, and our refusal to contend with it.

It also testifies that we have no history, and that our lineage has been excised along with our cultural memory.

Trump and his followers are eaters of history, whose aim it is to devour the flesh of our ancestors and through them, their bodily archives of historical memory.

The banning of books, the forbidding of teaching our true history, the termination of DEI, the plundering of African (and Ukrainian) art, and more are not tools of the MAGA right, but also Russian tools of mental and embodied conquest. If you rewrite history and deny the past, you need not ever contemplate the need for reparations (I'm thinking here of Native land theft, genocide, and the abduction of children, as well as the enslavement of African and Caribbean people. For example, Putin recently had the gall to demand reparations from Poland; and you can imagine what Trump will do to.. well, trump that.)

To my embodied being, this is the unspoken message, the thread of connective tissue that links Trump and Putin's actions and makes them not only interpersonal but collective and transgenerational.

It feels to me that Trump and Vance and those who echo them are not only embodying dominance; they are signaling the world that culture, memory, movement, the sanctity of bodies, alliances, a messy working toward something better do not matter (and ARE not matter), that they will sell their own bodies, and ours, and all that is sacred within them, to the highest bidder.

They would be, and have us be, disembodied beings without a history, without a cultural archive of memory, and therefore without ancestral connection or collective purpose.

It breaks my heart to see so many people, both public figures and those on my social media timelines (many of them yogis), consenting to this and opening the door to so much more.

We shouldn't have to tell people that they "could be next," it should be intuitive, an affirmation of our shared humanity.

If we don’t rise up as one to affirm all of humanity, we have already lost our own.

Here’s a link where you can joining me in taking action and contact your legislators to demand the release of Mahmoud Khalil.

Poland has a long way to go in their path toward inclusivity and equity, particularly in their unequal treatment of BIPOC LGBTQ+ folks and women. And it has mostly had right-leaning leadership. (Although you'll always see Poland supporting Ukraine, for obvious reasons.)

Much of this is due to Russia's influence: It took Poland 55 years, from the end of WWII in 1945 to 1989, to overthrow communism rule.

It took two more years after that for Poland to institute a democracy.

How many decades will it take the United States to do the same?

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Sources:

A few weeks ago, ICE deported supposedly undocumented immigrants: https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/trump-white-house-mocks-immigrants-deported-asmr-x-elon-musk-rcna192820 See also: https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1891922058415603980

According to data obtained by NBC News, people detained by ICE: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/new-ice-data-shows-administration-isnt-just-arresting-criminals-rcna192656

The second event is this administration’s threat to deport 240,000 Ukrainians: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-ukrainians-tps-immigration-deportation-uncertainty-rcna193464

The third event is the illegal detainment and arrest by ICE, without charges, of Mahmoud Khalil: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/mahmoud-khalil-arrest-illegal-fascism/

The U.S. has detained Khalil in the LaSalle Detention Center, a for-profit detention camp: https://www.thenation.com/article/society/mahmoud-khalil-arrest-illegal-fascism/

To date, GEO's operations include 100 secure facilities, processing centers, and: https://www.geogroup.com/locations#international-services

According to a 2024 ACLU report, GEO Group operated the facility as a: https://www.laaclu.org/sites/default/files/inside_the_black_hole_systemic_human_rights_abuses_against_immigrants_detained_disappeared_in_louisiana.pdf

Birthright citizenship is a legal principle under which citizenship is automatically granted to individuals upon birth: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/topics/birthright-citizenship

The Fourteenth Amendment codified a rule of citizenship that already prevailed in American law: https://hls.harvard.edu/today/can-birthright-citizenship-be-changed/

Besides the Poles, Soviets also persecuted, arrested, persecuted, and imprisoned many other ethnic or religious groups, among them: The Soviet Massive Deportations—A Chronology | Sciences Po Violence de masse et Résistance—Réseau de recherche. (2019, April 18). https://www.sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/fr/document/soviet-massive-deportations-chronology.html. See also: Bacon, E. (1992). Glasnost’ and the Gulag: New Information on Soviet Forced Labour around World War II. Soviet Studies, 44(6), 1069-1086.

Importantly, the Gulag system helped accelerate Soviet industrialization: Interactive GULAG Map. (n.d.). Digital History Network. Retrieved March 11, 2025, from https://about-history.info/en/projects/24-interactive-gulag-map/

https://gulag.online/articles/historie-gulagu?locale=en

The Russian penal system, despite reforms and a reduction in prison population: Conquest, R. (1997). Victims of Stalinism: A Comment. Europe-Asia Studies, 49(7), 1317–1319.

At the close of 2021, Putin shuttered Memorial, a leading Russian human rights organization: In Closing Memorial, Russia Heralds a New, Grimmer Era of Repression. (2021, December 30). Human Rights Watch. https://www.hrw.org/news/2021/12/30/closing-memorial-russia-heralds-new-grimmer-era-repression

In fact, a 2019 poll found that 70% of Russians actually approve of Stalin’s role: Times, T. M. (2019, April 16). Stalin’s Approval Rating Among Russians Hits Record High – Poll. The Moscow Times. https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2019/04/16/stalins-approval-rating-among-russians-hits-record-high-poll-a65245