Trump’s brutal ICE detention facilitieshave been blasted as “concentration camps.”

This is a freighted term
— summoning more than a century of deplorable history.

But experts in the field have no hesitation in using these words to describe the network of facilities that the federal government is using to literally warehouse tens of thousands of immigrants
— men, women, and even children
— snatched out of their communities by masked federal agents.

The activist group 50501 recently hosted a video call on this topic.

It featured Andrea Pizer, the author of "One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps",
as well as journalist Frank Abe,
co-editor of "The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration"
and a longtime activist in pursuing redress for the abuses of America’s World War II camps.

In his introductory remarks, Abe insisted that Trump’s new ICE warehouses
“are nothing but 21st Century American concentration camps.”

He added that the subject was personal to him:
“I’m a third-generation Japanese American,
and I know a concentration camp when I see one.”

The words “concentration camp,” for many, evoke the horrors of Hitler and of facilities like Auschwitz,
where more than 1 million people were murdered by the Nazis.

But Pitzer drew a firm distinction (as do other experts) between
“extermination centers”
and concentration camps.

The latter are not synonymous with “death camps” — although people held in concentration camps often die by disease, deprivation, or indifference.

Concentration camps have been around since the 1890s and documented on six continents.

Pitzer, who has traced that history, offered the audience her own general definition:
“A concentration camp is a mass detention of civilians on the basis of identity
— something you are, rather than what you’ve done,” she said.

“It is generally used without due process. And it is done to entrench and expand political power for an authoritarian-style government"

⚠️ A key indicator that Trump’s ICE camps fit the definition, for Pitzer, is the lawless way the administration is filling them.

“You have masked secret police that don’t identify themselves on the streets,
kidnapping people,”
she described,
“and taking them quickly from a local detention to a transit camp
— so attorneys can’t find them to give them legal rights.”

And then there is the “dismal” reality of ICE camps themselves
— where detention conditions are a threat to human health
and so noxious that many detainees agree to deportation rather than pursuing their rights to due process. “

People in feces [from overflowing toilets].

People without clean water to drink.

People without adequate food,” Pitzer said,
reeling off a litany.

“They’re denied medical care.

They’re denied their own medicine,
even if they brought them in.

There have been multiple deaths — with one of them even declared a homicide.”
https://www.contrariannews.org/p/is-trump-building-concentration-camps