Concentration Camps…in the United States
They say that images are worth a thousand words. We have heard the descriptions of the immigrant detention centers, but they hardly made a dent. In fact, some of those descriptions lead to celebrations by people who blame the migrants, and the migrants alone, for what is happening at the border. The fact that people are risking life and limb to leave conditions in their home countries that are insufferable seems to not make a dent. Nor do people care how much this is the result of long-standing policies by our own country in Central America. Spare me the blame America first epithets. I almost expect this from people who care little for history, facts or information.
Over the weekend we had a few things emerge. The first was reporting from members of Congress who described what is going on in these centers. This added to non-governmental organization visits that went public with conditions that violate every humanitarian principle of US and International law.
Conditions are so bad that Representative Alexandria Ocasio Cortez described these places with a simple term that sent some people into paroxysms of denial. She called them concentration camps. Granted, most Americans think of death camps when the term comes up. And this is an error in our educational system. Not to diminish the Holocaust, but these camps are not unlike Bergen Belsen in the early years of the thirties when it fires opened. Or for that matter some of the Japanese Internment camps the United Staes ran during World War Two.
They fit the legal definition of a concentration camp. Why? They are meant to bring together civilians into a point of concentration where they can be kept under strict control. There is more. What is happening in these camps is worse than Manzanar. We are separating families, men and women, and children. We have done this in the past, just not in recent times. We used to take children away from First Peoples and send them to orphanages or for adoption. Many of these refugee children, we now know, will never go back to their families. The Associated Press uncovered this, and according to the Christian Science Monitor:
Federal officials insist they are reuniting families and will continue to do so. But an Associated Press investigation drawing on hundreds of court documents, immigration…