Following the Republican Party’s defenestration in the midterm elections, President Donald Trump initially made conciliatory noises. But on Friday, Americans learned that Stephen Miller — the architect of the administration’s brutal mass deportations — will become White House chief of staff. Summoning Miller shifts the administration into an even more antagonistic stance.

Given Miller’s demagoguery about everything from vaccinations to “invasion” by foreigners, he appears to feel very much at home in that position. The choice also suggests that the White House is growing even more detached from reality. On Friday at Mar-a-Lago, Miller said that Trump has made the Republican Party “stronger, more popular, and more resilient than ever before.”Driving Trump’s immigration agenda for a decade now, Miller has done staggering damage to democracy. While his new position may add only nominally to the authority he’s long exercised, it nonetheless emphasizes the administration’s willingness to double down on cruel and lawless detention. That’s why now, more than ever, Congress must dismantle the Department of Homeland Security.

Labeling Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention apparatus a concentration camp system might surprise those who don’t know the history involved. But as I’ve written before for MS NOW, our current system fits cleanly in the model I documented in my book on the global history of concentration camps: mass detention of civilians without due process on the basis of their identity. DHS personnel have beaten and shot citizens, noncitizens, men, women and even teens — often without accountability — on our streets.

Some sitting legislators have espoused simple reforms as their goal. But the answer to Dachau was not better training for the guards.

DHS cannot be reformed. Camp bureaucracies don’t shrink or vanish on their own. Ones left to fester frequently grow more lethal over time — seen most horrifically in the death camps of Nazi Germany, but also in other settings, from the Soviet Gulag to North Korea.

American history itself reveals the trap set if DHS isn’t actively dismembered. During World War II, the U.S. concentration camp system held more than 120,000 Japanese Americans — the vast majority of them citizens. That period of detention is now rightfully recognized as one of the most-discussed shameful moments in the country’s history. Yet few know what happened afterward.

Locking up civilians without trial was not entirely repudiated at the end of the war. Instead, Congress passed the McCarran Internal Security Act in 1950, giving the president the power to declare a national emergency and confine anyone deemed a threat.

Some of those involved with imposing the Japanese American camp system during the war had a hand in writing the act, recommending what they imagined as safeguards. Instead of targeting based on race, they designed a system to detain people based on their perceived loyalties.

Not everyone was blind to the constitutional issues. President Harry Truman, hardly a radical, vetoed the legislation. “The course proposed by this bill,” he said, “would make a mockery of the Bill of Rights and of our claims to stand for freedom in the world.”Yet Congress, bowing to Red Scare paranoia, passed the act over Truman’s veto.

Two years later, according to David Cole of the Georgetown University Law Center, Congress funded six camps to hold suspected dissidents in Arizona, California, Florida, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania. The FBI used the legislation as an excuse to spy more extensively, maintaining a “Security Index” of tens of thousands of people to be rounded up and held at the president’s discretion, eventually including Martin Luther King Jr. on it.

Due in part to relentless public demand for expanded civil rights, the camps were never used. In 1971, after significant lobbying by Japanese Americans, Congress passed the Non-Detention Act, invalidating presidential authority to arbitrarily fill concentration camps.

Trump and Miller have brought us back to the same place via another path — and we’ve returned to racial and ethnic criteria as the primary determinants of detention. Today’s DHS camp system is no longer the latent one of the 1950s and 60s. It is a vast and growing network with nearly unlimited funding, filled with detainees, run by a rabid ideologue in Miller, and seemingly shot through with rampant corruption.

The $240 billion allocated for ICE and Border Patrol since Trump’s return to office has transformed a dangerous agency into a tool of mass terror. Whatever wisp of logic might once have been part of immigration policy, there is no longer any rational theory behind what DHS has become or the mission it’s carrying out.

Historical legacies seem to be a preoccupation at the White House these days. Miller said Friday that Trump had “saved the Republican party from the ash heap of history.”But while Trump fixates on gold leaf, ballrooms and his arch, Miller is working on a more consequential legacy: a network of concentration camps, denial of due process and the expansion of his American gulag.

With Tuesday’s elections and Miller’s ascent, we sit at a crossroads. The Democrats can take up the responsibilities of democracy and human rights and lay the groundwork to dismantle DHS. Or they can push for a few reforms, further entrenching the agency in the hands of a vindictive chief of staff with the authority and resources to make it exponentially worse in the next two years. Should they take the latter course, Democrats run the risk that this corrupt, lethal and inhumane system will continue to rot the nation’s soul long after Trump and Miller are gone.