Originally Posted by
Annahlee
I'm sorry that you were triggered infinitely by someone here a few decades ago, but no, sorry, you've got the wrong gal.
With that out of the way, Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps considers concentration camps to have one major similar feature among all of them in recorded history: mass detention of civilians without trial. Can we agree that this is occuring in ICE detention facilities?
Waitman Wade Beorn, a Holocaust and genocide studies historian and a lecturer at the University of Virginia expands on this basic definition: "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."
Concentration camps aren't death camps from the start. Very rarely have concentration camps killed the people that they round up at the start. The first deaths in concentration camps are due to a lack of supplies, insufficient resources, and deteriorating conditions.
To date, 24 adults have died in ICE custody since Trump took the reigns. 6 children have died under the "care" of other agencies. 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.
Meanwhile, the 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.
But most prominently, Trump's Department of Homeland Security has used "metering" at the border, where migrants are forced to wait for days or weeks on the Mexican side—often sleeping in makeshift shelters or fully exposed to the elements—until they are allowed across border checkpoints to make their asylum claims and be processed.
There are no guarantees on how long migrants will have to wait, and so they've increasingly turned to crossing illegally between checkpoints—which constitutes "illegal entry," a misdemeanor—in order to present themselves for asylum. This criminalizes them, and the Trump administration tried to make illegal entry a disqualifier for asylum claims. The overall effort appears to be to make it as difficult as possible to get a hearing to adjudicate those claims, raising the specter that people can be detained longer or indefinitely.
All this has been achieved through two mechanisms: militarization and dehumanization. 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.
Jonathan Hyslop, author of "The Invention of the Concentration Camp: Cuba, Southern Africa and the Philippines, 1896–1907," says "That all four of the early instances—Americans in the Philippines, Spanish in Cuba, and British in South Africa, and Germans in Southwest Africa—they're all essentially overriding any sense of rights of the civilian population. And the idea is that you're able to suspend normal law because it's a war situation."
This pairs well with the rhetoric that Trump deploys to justify the system and his unconstitutional power grabs, like the phony "national emergency": he describes the influx of asylum-seekers and other migrants as an "invasion," language his allies are mirroring with increasing extremism. If you're defending yourself from an invasion, anything is defensible.
That goes hand-in-hand with the strategy of dehumanization. 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."
So, while you may believe that you are more knowledgeable than the three PHDs' that I just sourced on the topic of concentration camps, you're dangerously ignorant and wrong.
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