President Donald Trump offered conciliatory noises after Republicans were routed in the midterm elections. Then came Friday’s announcement that Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration’s brutal mass deportations, will become White House chief of staff.

The appointment points toward confrontation rather than restraint. Miller has driven Trump’s immigration agenda for a decade, and his elevation signals that the administration intends to intensify its cruel and lawless detention policies.

Miller already appeared comfortable in his new role while speaking Friday at Mar-a-Lago. Despite the Republican Party’s election losses, he declared that Trump had made the party “stronger, more popular, and more resilient than ever before.”

The boast suggests a White House increasingly detached from the political reality around it. Although the promotion may add only nominally to Miller’s longstanding authority, it gives fresh emphasis to the administration’s commitment to mass detention.

That commitment leaves Congress with a stark responsibility. Rather than seeking cosmetic changes, lawmakers should dismantle the Department of Homeland Security and the sprawling detention machinery it operates.

Calling Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention apparatus a concentration camp system may shock people unfamiliar with that history. Yet the current structure follows the model of mass civilian detention without due process based on identity.

DHS personnel have beaten and shot citizens, noncitizens, men, women and teenagers, frequently without accountability. Some lawmakers have proposed reforms, but better training for guards is not an adequate response to a system built around arbitrary confinement.

Camp bureaucracies do not simply shrink or disappear. When allowed to remain, they can become more lethal over time, as history has shown in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Gulag and North Korea.

The United States has already experienced the consequences of mass detention. During World War II, the government confined more than 120,000 Japanese Americans, most of them citizens, in a chapter now recognized as deeply shameful.

Even after the war, civilian confinement without trial was not entirely rejected. Congress passed the McCarran Internal Security Act in 1950, empowering the president to declare a national emergency and imprison anyone considered a threat.

People involved in imposing the Japanese American camp system helped write that legislation and proposed what they viewed as safeguards. Instead of using race as the explicit basis, the new system targeted people according to their perceived loyalties.

President Harry Truman vetoed the measure and warned, “The course proposed by this bill would make a mockery of the Bill of Rights and of our claims to stand for freedom in the world.” Congress nevertheless overrode his veto amid Red Scare paranoia.

Two years later, Congress funded six camps in Arizona, California, Florida, Oklahoma and Pennsylvania for suspected dissidents, according to David Cole of the Georgetown University Law Center. The FBI also maintained a “Security Index” listing tens of thousands of people who could be detained at presidential discretion, eventually including Martin Luther King Jr.

Those camps were never used, due partly to persistent public demands for expanded civil rights. After lobbying by Japanese Americans, Congress passed the Non-Detention Act in 1971, invalidating presidential authority to arbitrarily fill concentration camps.

Trump and Miller have returned the country to that dangerous territory through another route, with racial and ethnic criteria again shaping detention. Unlike the latent system of the 1950s and 1960s, today’s DHS network is vast, expanding, heavily funded and already filled with detainees.

Congress has allocated $240 billion to ICE and Border Patrol since Trump returned to office. That money has transformed an already dangerous agency into an instrument of mass terror while Miller gains greater authority inside the White House.

Miller claimed Friday that Trump had “saved the Republican party from the ash heap of history.” Yet while Trump focuses on gold leaf, ballrooms and his arch, Miller is building a darker legacy centered on concentration camps, denied due process and an expanding American gulag.

Democrats now face a defining choice after Tuesday’s elections and Miller’s ascent. They can prepare to dismantle DHS in defense of democracy and human rights, or settle for reforms that further entrench an inhumane system under a vindictive chief of staff with enormous resources.

If Democrats choose the second path, the machinery of detention could become exponentially worse during the next two years. The corrupt and lethal system could continue damaging the country long after Trump and Miller have left power.