concentration camp (noun)
: a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard —used especially in reference to camps created by the Nazis in World War II for the internment and persecution of Jews and other prisoners.
This is the Merriam-Webster definition of a concentration camp. Considering that the government announced that they would be holding 1,400 children at an old WWII internment camp, we are running concentration camps.
Honestly, I barely even know what to say about this. In May, it was announced that a 10-year-old girl had died in U.S. custody, and she is sadly far from the only person who has passed away. Not only are we imprisoning on a massive scale, but we are also leading children to their death. Government officials are arguing that these kids do not have deserve access to soap, toothbrushes, or blankets because it doesn't specifically fall under the category of "safe and sanitary." American citizens are being harassed -- and sometimes arrested -- just for speaking a non-English language or because they aren't white. These camps are being compared to torture facilities, experts agree that they are indeed concentration camps, and the border has become littered with the dead bodies.
What the hell happened? This country is supposed to be a shining city on a hill; a beacon of hope. Instead, we have become a country of human rights abuses, with the German Chancellor even lumping the U.S. with China and Russia as an adversary to their country. Even the United Nations is beginning to hold a negative opinion of the U.S. saying "The U.S. should immediately halt this practice of separating families and stop criminalizing what should at most be an administrative offense – that of irregular entry or stay in the U.S." We are losing our position as a leader of the free world.
This isn't the first time we've been here. During World War II, roughly 117,000 Japanese-Americans were targeted for arrest and harassment by the U.S. government due to the war. The Executive Order signed by President Roosevelt called for "prescribe military areas... from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any person to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion." These areas were then designated to house Japanese-Americas and hold them there until further notice. The citizens in these camps lived in deplorable conditions, resulting in 1,862 deaths. This action is pretty universally agreed to have been an egregious decision today, but I don't really see how what we are doing today is any different.
It's time for the debate about the use of the term concentration camps to end. It's time for this issue to be the first addressed when talking about political reform in this country and the first to be pursued. It's time for this to be a central issue of the 2020 election; every Democratic candidate must denounce these camps and pledge to shut them down. This is no place for a 1930's style authoritarian police state locking people up without due process. This fact needs to resonate with every American citizen. We need to be calling out the government for running these camps, call for them to be shut down, and work harder to combat the humanitarian crisis created by our government officials.
I want to end this with the quote on our Statue of Liberty as a stark reminder of how far away we are from our ideals:
"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore, Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
