Yes, Virginia, they're concentration camps

"What's required is a little bit of demystification of it," says Waitman Wade Beorn, a Holocaust and genocide studies historian and a lecturer at the University of Virginia. "Things can be concentration camps without being Dachau or Auschwitz. Concentration camps in general have always been designed—at the most basic level—to separate one group of people from another group. Usually, because the majority group, or the creators of the camp, deem the people they're putting in it to be dangerous or undesirable in some way."

[...]

Not every concentration camp is a death camp—in fact, their primary purpose is rarely extermination, and never in the beginning. Often, much of the death and suffering is a result of insufficient resources, overcrowding, and deteriorating conditions. So far, 24 people have died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the Trump administration, while six children have died in the care of other agencies since September. Systems like these have emerged across the world for well over 100 years, and they've been established by putative liberal democracies—as with Britain's camps in South Africa during the Boer War—as well as authoritarian states like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union.

[...]

History is banging down the door this week with the news the Trump administration will use Fort Sill, an Oklahoma military base that was used to detain Japanese-Americans during World War II, to house 1,400 unaccompanied migrant children captured at the border. Japanese internment certainly constituted a concentration-camp system, and the echoes of the past are growing louder. Of course, the Obama administration temporarily housed migrants at military bases, including Fort Sill, for four months in 2014, built many of the newer facilities to house migrants, and pioneered some of the tactics the Trump administration is now using to try to manage the situation at the border.

The government of the United States would never call the sprawling network of facilities now in use across many states "concentration camps," of course. They’re referred to as "federal migrant shelters" or "temporary shelters for unaccompanied minors" or "detainment facilities" or the like. [...] But by Pitzer's measure, the system at the southern border first set up by the Bill Clinton administration, built on by Barack Obama's government, and brought into extreme and perilous new territory by Donald Trump and his allies does qualify.

[...]

Camps set up with one aim can be repurposed by new regimes, often with devastating consequences.

[...]

[T]he Trump administration continually seeks new ways to stop people from applying for asylum, and to discourage others from attempting to. The current regime has sought to restrict the asylum criteria to exclude the exact issues, like gang or domestic violence, that these desperate people often cite for why they fled their homes. The administration has sought to introduce application fees and work-permit restraints. They have tried to prohibit migrants from seeking asylum "if they have resided in a country other than their own before coming to the U.S.," which would essentially eliminate anyone who traveled to the border through Mexico. Much of this has been struck down in federal court.

[...]

>Many of the people housed in these facilities are not "illegal" immigrants. If you present yourself at the border seeking asylum, you have a legal right to a hearing under domestic and international law. They are, in another formulation, refugees—civilian non-combatants who have not committed a crime, and who say they are fleeing violence and persecution. Yet these human beings, who mostly hail from Central America's Northern Triangle of Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador—a region ravaged by gang violence and poverty and corruption and what increasingly appears to be some of the first forced migrations due to climate change—are being detained on what increasingly seems to be an indefinite basis.

[...]

All this has been achieved through two mechanisms: militarization and dehumanization. In her book, Pitzer describes camps as “a deliberate choice to inject the framework of war into society itself." These kinds of detention camps are a military endeavor: they are defensible in wartime, when enemy combatants must be detained, often for long periods without trial. They were a hallmark of World War I Europe. But inserting them into civil society, and using them to house civilians, is a materially different proposition. You are revoking the human and civil rights of non-combatants without legal justification.

[...]

For decades, the right has referred to undocumented immigrants as "illegals," stripping them of any identity beyond an immigration status. Trump kicked off his formal political career by characterizing Hispanic immigrants as "rapists" and "drug-dealers" and "criminals," never once sharing, say, the story of a woman who came here with her son fleeing a gang's threats. It is always MS-13 and strong, scary young men. There's talk of "animals" and monsters, and suddenly anything is justifiable. In fact, it must be done. Trump's supporters have noticed. At a recent rally, someone in the crowd screamed out that people arriving at the border should be shot. In response, the president cracked a "joke."

[...]

[A]ccording to a report from Trump's own government—specifically, the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security—the situation has deteriorated significantly even since then. The facilities are overcrowded, underfunded, and perhaps at a perilous inflection point. It found adult detainees are "being held in 'standing-room-only conditions' for days or weeks at a border patrol facility in Texas," Reuters reports. But it gets worse.

Single adults were held in cells designed for one-fifth as many detainees as were housed there and were wearing soiled clothing for days or weeks with limited access to showers, the report said.

[...]

Pictures published with the report show women packed tightly together in a holding cell. “We also observed detainees standing on toilets in the cells to make room and gain breathing space, thus limiting access to toilets,” the watchdog wrote.

This was at Paso del Norte, a facility near El Paso, which has a stated capacity of 125 detainees. But when DHS inspectors visited, it was holding 900.

[...]

Again: these are inhuman conditions, and crystalize the dehumanization. So, too, does the Trump administration's decision, reported by The Washington Post, to cancel classes, recreational programs, and even legal aid for the children held at facilities for unaccompanied minors. Why should these kids get to play soccer or learn English? Why should they get legal assistance? They're detainees.

[...]

In-custody deaths have not reached their peak of a reported 32 people in 2004, but the current situation seems to be deteriorating. In just the last two weeks, three adults have died. And the Trump administration has not readily reported fatalities to the public. There could be more.

[...]

And for a variety of reasons, these facilities are incredibly hard to close. "Unless there's some really decisive turn away, we're going to be looking at having these camps for a long time," Pitzer says. It's particularly hard to engineer a decisive turn because these facilities are often remote, and hard to protest. They are not top-of-mind for most citizens, with plenty of other issues on the table.

[...]

"The more authoritarian the regime is, and the more people allow governments to get away with doing this sort of thing politically, the worse the conditions are likely to get," Hyslop says.

[...]

"It's more of a political question, really. Are people prepared to tolerate the deteriorating conditions? And if public opinion isn't effective in a liberal democratic situation, things can still get pretty bad."

[...]

The longer they stay open, the more reasons a government finds to put people in [the camps]. That's particularly true if a new regime takes control of an existing system, as the Trump administration did with ours. The mass detention of asylum-seekers—who, again, have legal rights—on this scale is an expansion of the criteria from "illegal" immigrants, who were the main class of detainee in the '90s and early 2000s.

[...]

"We have border patrol agents that are sometimes arresting U.S. citizens," Pitzer says. "That's still very much a fringe activity. That doesn't seem to be a dedicated priority right now, but it's happening often enough. And they're held, sometimes, for three or four days. Even when there are clear reasons that people should be let go, that they have proof of their identity, you're seeing these detentions. "

[...]

In most cases, these camps are not closed by the executive or the judiciary or even the legislature. It usually requires external intervention. (See: D-Day) That obviously will not be an option when it comes to the most powerful country in the history of the world, a country which, while it would never call them that, and would be loathe to admit it, is now running a system at the southern border that is rapidly coming to resemble the concentration camps that have sprung up all over the world in the last century. Every system is different. They don't always end in death machines. But they never end well.

  Esquire