An opinion, and a plea
I’ve been turning this over in my mind for weeks, and I’m done dressing it up in unoffensive language. So here it is: America is running concentration camps, and the cruelty inside them is not a malfunction. It’s the design.
I’m not using that phrase to shock people. I’m using it because it’s accurate.
A group of scholars who study these camps and have catalogued 150 historical cases of them — looked at what the United States is doing and concluded that our network of ICE detention centers meets the criteria for concentration camps.
They said they chose that word on purpose, to use precise language instead of euphemism. (a mild, indirect, or pleasant word or phrase substituted for one considered too harsh, blunt, or offensive.)
They did it so the American people could heed the warnings the past is screaming at us.
People are being concentrated in places the government controls completely — who enters, who leaves, under what conditions — with lawyers, journalists, members of Congress, and families locked out.
Twenty-three people died in these facilities between October and March, on pace for the deadliest year in over two decades.
That’s the frame. Now look at who’s inside it.
They’re being abducted while doing what we told them to do
Morning Joe ran a segment on protests at the detention center in Newark, New Jersey. They began to talk about the cruelty of mass deportations.
Mika talked about the cruelty of ICE officers hanging around courts to detain people as they show up for their asylum hearing. She became emotional and started to cry.
It was the first time I’d seen someone on legacy media show emotion while reporting on mass deportations anx about human rights abuses in ICE detention centers.
This part of the mass deportation project destroys every excuse the government offers.
The people being detained are not, for the most part, hiding. They’re showing up. They’re going to their asylum hearings. They’re walking into their scheduled ICE check-ins, a requirement of our immigration system.
Theyre doing everything right — and that’s when the door slammed shut.
You can’t claim a person is evading the law while you’re arresting them in the act of obeying it. But it’s even more sinister than that. ICE agents have called immigrants and told them they have to come and do a check-in that day.
But that’s what we are doing, every day, to people who have lived here for decades, working, paying taxes, and raising children who have only known what it’s like to live in one country. America is their home.
Their crime is not a crime. The only “crime” they have committed is not being born here
And, the administration has made unmistakably clear that they’ve also committed the crime of not being white.
The 238
As the mass deportation agenda had just gotten underway, the government rounded up 238 Venezuelan men and shipped them off to CECOT, a torture prison in El Salvador, rather than deporting them home.
A 60 Minutes investigation cross-referenced the government’s own list against court records and could find no criminal record for 75 percent of them — 179 men. Most of the rest had nonviolent offenses like shoplifting.
The government didn’t just condemn 238 innocent people to life in a foreign goulag because they mistakenly thought they were members of Tren De Aragua.
ProPublica released the results of an investigation into the people who were on that flight to El Salvador. They discovered that the Trump administration knew in advance, before the flight to El Salvador took off, that the people in that plane were innocent.
So what got them sent to a foreign dungeon? Their skin. Their nationality. And their tattoos.
Andry Hernández Romero, a gay makeup artist who entered the country legally, had two crown tattos with his mother’s and father’s names. Those crowns were the only “evidence” the government brought to court. A photojournalist watched him arrive at CECOT, heard him say I’m not a gang member, I’m gay, I’m a stylist, and watched him cry for his mother as his head was shaved.
Jerce Reyes Barrios coached kids’ soccer; his “gang tattoo” was a Real Madrid crest, and the “gang sign” he flashed in Facebook photos a decade ago was the rock-and-roll horns (🤘)
Neri Alvarado was taken over a rainbow autism-awareness ribbon and his brother’s name. He spent his free time teaching kids how to swim and caring for his little brother with Autusm.
And it wasn’t improvisation: DHS’s own “Alien Enemy Validation Guide” instructed agents that a Michael Jordan “Jumpman” tattoo or a Chicago Bulls number-23 jersey counted as points toward deportation. A Bulls jersey. Think about that.
They were ushered into CECOT with a guard welcoming them — “Welcome to hell on earth” — beaten, shorn, held incommunicado with no access to families or lawyers. The Homeland Security secretary said they should stay there for the rest of their lives. And it later emerged that the administration knew, before it sent them, that many had no criminal history at all.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia
That is the context for Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland father and sheet-metal apprentice mistakenly deported to that same prison despite a standing court order protecting him.
The Supreme Court told the administration to bring him back. They dragged their feet for months — and when they finally did, they charged him, in what a federal judge later called an abuse of prosecuting power. They punished him for exposing their error.
Then it got smaller and meaner. He offered to go to Costa Rica, which agreed to take him and grant him refugee status.
The government told the court Costa Rica wasn’t an option — a claim the judge said amounted to misleading her, because Costa Rica’s offer was real and standing the whole time.
Instead they tried to ship him to Uganda, then Ghana, then Eswatini, then Liberia — countries he has no ties to. None of this is about safety. It’s about hurting a man who refused to disappear quietly.
And now the children, again
It’s family separation all over again, and somehow worse, because now we are jailing the kids directly.
The administration reopened the Dilley detention center in Texas, and more than 6,300 children — some as young as a few months old, 97 percent with no criminal record — have been held during this term.
Many aren’t new arrivals at all; they’re kids who’d lived here for years, swept up when their parents were taken at those same routine check-ins.
A five-year-old U.S. citizen in a bunny hat was detained with his father. Children there describe cloudy water and worms in the food, lights that never go off, and so little to do that some play with rocks.
One toddler stopped speaking. When the kids drew pictures and wrote letters about it, guards confiscated the crayons.
These are children who just want to go home and see their friends. As Representative Joaquín Castro put it, it’s the one place in America where we cage young children who have done nothing wrong — and the point is to send an ugly message: you are not welcome here.
The tell
If you still doubt that race is the reason, look at who we do welcome.
As the door slammed on Sudanese and Afghans and everyone fleeing actual war, the administration cut refugee admissions to a record-low 7,500 — and 99 percent of the people let in were white South Africans, admitted on a disputed claim of anti-white “genocide.”
Years ago this president asked why we couldn’t have more immigrants from places like Norway while disparaging Haiti, El Salvador, and the nations of Africa. Norway.
The happiest, whitest, most generously governed country he could think of. The mask isn’t slipping. There is no mask.
This is what white and Christian nationalism looks like when it stops being a slogan and becomes a policy: a country deciding, in writing, that some people belong and others are disposable, and that the line between them is color.
So I’m asking you
I’m not writing this to make you feel hopeless. I’m writing it because I believe most Americans, if they actually look — at Andry crying for his mother, at the crowns with his parents’ names, at the kid in the bunny hat, at a man punished for the crime of being wrongly deported — will recognize this for the moral emergency it is.
The euphemisms exist to keep us from looking. Detention. Removal. Processing. Don’t let those words do their numbing work on you.
Say the true words. Concentration camps. Family separation. State cruelty as policy.
And then push back — harder, louder, and more often than feels comfortable — because the scholars are right about one more thing: the longer these systems are allowed to stand, the more they harden from emergency into permanence.l
This is who we are becoming.
We don’t have to let it be who we are.
