From Cherokee Concentration Camps to Alligator Alcatraz: A Call to Conscience
Through their evil scheming, innocent and decent people are being chased down—fellow human beings hunted without their pursuers identifying themselves, arrested without warrants or probable cause...
I once spent time visiting a portion of nearly 300 massacre and broken treaty sites scattered across the old Cherokee homeland in the southeastern United States. A few of us had dedicated several years researching these places of sorrow and evil, documenting the systematic destruction of a people and their way of life.
For generations, Cherokee lands stretched in a long arc across eight southeastern states from Alabama to Virginia. These territories were stolen through fraudulent treaties and broken promises—a pattern that would become America's standard operating procedure with Indigenous peoples. In the fall of 1838, after Appalachian gold was discovered in Cherokee territory, Cherokee families were rounded up at gunpoint and forced into stockades, where many died of disease and exposure before the forced march even began.
This existence degraded a people who had enjoyed freedom, sophisticated governance, and great dignity. After almost a year of imprisonment, the survivors were force-marched to Oklahoma on a long winter trek in what they called their "Trail of Tears." One out of every four died on the march from cold, hunger, or disease, but many more had already perished in the concentration camps that preceded it.
Walking the Road to Misery
As an act of spiritual contemplation, I had decided to walk a mile on Tatum Gap Road—a road now abandoned that was commissioned by the U.S. Government to force-march Cherokee people from holding facilities to a concentration camp at Fort Butler in what is now Andrews, North Carolina. There were two other main concentration camps in what is now Fort Payne, Alabama, and Chattanooga, Tennessee. These roads to misery were built by friends and cronies of President Andrew Jackson through no-bid contracts, constructed in anticipation before the Indian Removal Act was even passed. Thirteen holding pens and three main concentration camps dotted the old Cherokee nation.
At Fort Butler, Cherokee people were kept in an open pen, exposed to rain and elements for months. This exposure made many sick and caused deaths from diseases like pneumonia. They received little medical aid, and to compound their misery, they were sometimes fed raw corn and rotten pork, which caused dysentery and other diseases. Many deaths went unreported—casualties of America's first systematic use of concentration camps.
Some Cherokee women were reduced to prostituting themselves to guards just to get a blanket or decent food for their weak and sick children or parents. Others simply gave up and died.
As I began to walk that dreadful road, my anger immediately started to rise. At first it was subconscious, but it worked its way up fast to conscious feelings. I walked faster, trying to get this thing over with, observing the sheer rock walls to my right and the steep drop-off on my left. My steps felt heavier with each stride.
While walking on that vile road, it was natural to imagine the hopelessness those first Cherokees must have felt only 160 years earlier. Roused from sleep, thinking they were secure in their own homes, whole families were forced at bayonet point to abandon everything and everyone they had known since birth.
As I continued, I thought of how I would feel being made to walk this road under those conditions with my wife and children. If it had been me, I'm sure I would have considered trying to escape. Perhaps a person could have survived throwing themselves down the mountainside, dodging bullets, and successfully escaping. Yet who would ever abandon their family to an unknown fate? I contemplated the resolve it must have taken to keep walking under the watch of those cruel guards, uncertain of what lay ahead, feeling powerless and hopeless.
I began to weep.
My weeping turned into deep sobs as I considered the fate those people would suffer on this all-but-abandoned road. Walking in the very place they had trod, tracing their footsteps. Though I tried to hold them back, my sobs turned into cries of anguish, then into uncontrollable bellows of pain. I felt the full impact of Jackson's regime and the systems of cruelty they created.
The More Things Change
What were the names of the architects of viciousness then? Andrew Jackson. Martin Van Buren. Winfield Scott. What are the names today? Donald Trump. Kristi Noem. Tom Homan. Through their evil scheming, innocent and decent people are being chased down—fellow human beings hunted without their pursuers identifying themselves, arrested without warrants or probable cause, racially profiled without opportunity for defense. The system these presumed rulers have created mirrors the preemptive acts of cruelty against the Cherokee (and other Indigenous nations) in disturbing ways.
"Alligator Alcatraz"—what visitors confirm is an unsanitary and inhumane detention center—is the current version of the Cherokee concentration camps. The new American KGB, also known as ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), was just allocated $45 billion of our tax dollars for building new detention centers and $29.9 billion for enforcement and deportation operations, effectively tripling the agency's annual budget. This funding includes money for hiring new personnel and expanding detention capacity, potentially reaching 116,000 detention beds. America is becoming a fascist state in our very midst.
The Historical Through-Line
The three main Cherokee prison camps became the model used by the military during the Civil War, where countless thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers suffered and died at places like Andersonville, Georgia. Prussian military advisors during the Civil War took these same ideas back to Europe, where they eventually influenced the associates of Adolf Hitler. We know the rest of that story.
Coincidence? I don't think so. Quite a coup for evil in just about a hundred years!
The question before us is: How far will we allow this to go? We know from history where it's headed. How will we stop it?
We are not bound by time and geography. We cannot say "we do not know." It is time that churches, denominations, synagogues, mosques, and all other people of human decency organize and nonviolently resist the current direction.
Where Was the Church?
Where was the Church during these Indian atrocities? To be sure, there was public outcry against the treatment of the Cherokees by individual missionaries and others, but all the denominations involved in mission work to the Cherokees condoned their removal. (The Baptists later reversed their decision at the urging of their missionary Evan Jones and condemned the removal.) God's "official" Church, in other words, abdicated her mandate for righteousness, thereby contributing to the greater atrocities that would be committed later.
Our first reaction is usually to say that the Church had nothing to do with this or that injustice—for example, the genocide of Jews in World War II—but I wonder how God, who is not bound by time and geography, views it?
The Haunting Parallels: Then and Now
The similarities between the Cherokee concentration camps, Nazi ghettos, and today's detention centers are more than disturbing—they reveal a systematic playbook of dehumanization that spans centuries and continents.
The Setup: In spring 1940 the Nazis established ghettos in the larger towns and cities across Poland. The establishment of ghettos was a provisional measure to control and segregate Jews while the Nazi leadership in Berlin deliberated upon options to realize their goal of removing the Jewish population form Germany. Sound familiar? Cherokee families were similarly rounded up and held in stockades before their forced march, while today's immigrants are detained in facilities while officials deliberate their fate.
The Deception: The Germans attempted to disguise their intentions, referring to deportations as "resettlement to the east." The victims were told they were to be taken to labor camps, just as Cherokee people were told they were being relocated for their own protection. Today, officials speak of "detention centers" and "processing facilities"—sanitized language that masks the reality of human caging.
The Conditions: Jews received little food and the ghettos were overcrowded. Diseases such as typhus and tuberculosis were rife. Conditions worsened when Jews from small towns and other countries were squeezed in. It is estimated that 500,000 Jews died in the ghettos of disease and starvation. Cherokee people faced similar conditions in their stockades and concentration camps—raw corn, rotten pork, exposure to elements, disease, and death from neglect.
The Separation of Families: Families of people who were detained by ICE in immigration raids say they haven't been able to make contact with their loved ones or even find out where many of them are being held. Just as Cherokee families were torn apart on Tatum Gap Road, and Jewish families were separated on train platforms across Europe, today's families face the same agonizing uncertainty.
Today's Trail of Tears
Let me tell you about Giovanni Duran. Giovanni Duran, 42, came to California from El Salvador without federal authorization when he was 2 years old, brought by his family. He worked as a busser in a sushi restaurant in Los Angeles... Duran is now being held in the Adelanto detention facility, run by a private company under contract to ICE, awaiting deportation to a country he doesn't know.
His wife Loreal describes the moment their family was shattered: "I haven't talked to him in almost two days," said Loreal last week. She's had to get counseling for her 7-year-old son after he saw his dad taken away by officers. "He was telling his classmates, 'Oh, daddy got arrested for not wearing his seatbelt,'" Duran recounted. Later, the second grader asked his mom, "Did daddy get arrested because he's Brown?"
That seven-year-old's question echoes the confusion of Cherokee children forced to walk that road of tears, and Jewish children watching their parents disappear into cattle cars. The trauma reverberates across generations, across centuries.
A community organizer shared the story of a five-year-old who, after finding out her mother had been taken, cried so hard that she gave herself a hernia and needed medical attention. Another parent described her panic when her daughters arrived at the house: the eldest, a 15-year-old who suffers from a chronic upper respiratory condition, ran out of the car with blood and tears streaming down her face and shirt, due to a nose-bleed caused by the strain of her sobbing after seeing her father taken away.
The fear is systemic and intentional. I've heard from people who no longer feel safe shopping at their regular grocery stores or even being in predominantly Latinx neighborhoods, out of fear that those areas may be targeted. Sound familiar? It should. All Jewish inhabitants of the ghettos were forced to wear a Star of David, making them instantly recognizable to the Nazi authorities. Today brown skin serves the same function—instant identification for targeting.
In Omaha, after ICE raids at a meatpacking plant, "They've just been staying home for fear of anything happening to them and being torn apart from their families," said Ally, a 21-year-old citizen who's afraid to use her last name because she's worried for undocumented family members. She said she's been picking up groceries for her remaining family members who worry that if they go to their local Mexican grocery store, they won't come back.
This is the textbook definition of state terror: when people cannot go to the grocery store, take their children to school, or live their daily lives without fear of being hunted down by agents of the state.
The Numbers Game: More than 75% of people booked into ICE custody in fiscal year 2025 had no criminal conviction other than an immigration or traffic-related offense, according to ICE records from October through the end of May. And less than 10% were convicted of serious crimes like murder, assault, robbery or rape. This mirrors exactly what happened to Cherokee families—the vast majority were peaceful people guilty of nothing except existing where others wanted their land. The same was true for European Jews—most were ordinary families, shopkeepers, teachers, children.
The playbook never changes: Create a crisis, scapegoat a vulnerable population, use dehumanizing language, separate families, concentrate people in camps, claim it's for their own good or national security, and rely on the silence of good people. Once a people group are dehumanized, you can do whatever you want to them with impunity.
As scholar Michael Zank notes: The Holocaust did not begin with extermination camps. It began with the German state consolidating all power and sources of influence under the control of a single party organization, with the elimination of freedom of the press, and with the establishment of concentration camps for political opponents... The Holocaust was possible because people didn't care about the fate of the Jews, because they were taught to see them as enemies, and because most people never witnessed the actual killings. As Elie Wiesel pointed out, worse than hatred is indifference.
Indifference is the issue. Then and now.
Practical Steps for People of Faith and Good Conscience
The time for hand-wringing and comfortable distance is over. History is calling us to account. Here are concrete steps we can take:
Immediate Actions:
Contact your representatives weekly about detention conditions and immigration policies
Donate to legal aid organizations helping detained immigrants
Join or form rapid response networks in your community
Participate in nonviolent direct action and civil disobedience
Support sanctuary cities and sanctuary church movements
Sustained Advocacy:
Learn the true history of American concentration camps and teach others
Build interfaith coalitions specifically focused on detention center oversight
Pressure religious institutions to divest from private prison companies
Protest and create populist oriented divesture campaigns against those companies supporting private prisons.
Support Indigenous-led organizations working on these issues
Advocate for truth and reconciliation processes at local and national levels
Spiritual Disciplines:
Fast and pray regularly for those in detention
Practice hospitality toward immigrants and refugees in your community
Study liberation theology and Indigenous perspectives on justice
Examine your own complicity in systems of oppression
Commit to speaking truth even when it's uncomfortable
Community Building:
Create "accompaniment" programs for immigrant families
Establish legal observer training in your congregation
Build relationships with Indigenous communities in your area
Support immigrant-owned businesses and refugee resettlement programs
Organize educational forums on the history of American detention camps
Long-term Commitment:
Work for the abolition of for-profit detention centers
Support comprehensive immigration reform that honors human dignity
Advocate for reparations for both Indigenous peoples and immigrant communities
Push for international oversight of American detention facilities
Build movements that center the voices of those most affected
The road from Cherokee concentration camps to Alligator Alcatraz is paved with the silence of good people. We have the power to choose a different path. The question is whether we will walk it before it's too late.
The spirits of those who walked the Trail of Tears are watching. The children in cages today are crying out. God and our fellow human beings are waiting for our response. What will it be?
Randy Woodley is co-author of "Journey to Eloheh: How Indigenous Values Bring Harmony & Wellbeing" and Director of Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice. He writes from Eloheh Indigenous Center for Earth Justice and Eloheh Farm in Oregon, where he and his wife Edith practice regenerative agriculture and traditional seed keeping.
Your writing is so morally clear and so needed in this moment. I'm glad I found you on here. Thank you from Maryland 💛
Thank you for this!