Ah. We’re at concentration camps already.
President Donald Trump signed a memo Wednesday that sets in motion preparations for a facility to house thousands of migrants at the U.S. military camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, which he said was an effort to “halt the border invasion.”
“I hereby direct the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Homeland Security to take all appropriate actions to expand the Migrant Operations Center at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to full capacity to provide additional detention space for high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States,” the memo to the Department of Homeland Security and the Defense Department says.
Trump previewed the directive at a signing ceremony for the Laken Riley Act, an immigration detention measure, saying he would “instruct the departments of Defense and Homeland Security to begin preparing the 30,000-person migrant facility at Guantánamo Bay.”
“Most people don’t even know about it. We have 30,000 beds in Guantánamo to detain the worst criminal illegal aliens threatening the American people. Some of them are so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them, because we don’t want them coming back,” he added.
It begins with “holding.” It doesn’t always end there.
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29 responses to “To house thousands”
I was puzzled why some people in that photograph seemed happy. It was taken as prisoners at Dachau cheer as US forces arrive to liberate the camp in May 1945. Photograph: Horace Abrahams/Getty Images
I’m trying really hard, but I can’t see this as comparable to concentration camps. Detaining “high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States” is a legitimate action. Calling this a concentration camp world kind of obligate us to call prisons in general concentration camps, and that bullet is a bit hard on the teeth.
Well in this lexicon the words “criminal” and “alien” go together. The “high-priority crime” is that their legal status is dubious (I’m not saying there aren’t going to be violent criminals among them) and the location of this prison is currently a pseudo black site.
Context and intent matter. Would “gulag” be a better word? I certainly see more of Stalin and less Hitler with the new administration (though I’ve seen more Hitler than I previously would’ve guessed).
If they are criminal in the sense that they have been convicted of a crime and are currently serving a sentence of imprisonment or are wanted on a warrant, then yes, it makes sense to imprison them. If however they are criminal in the sense that they have been convicted of a crime and have completed their penalty and are not currently wanted, then no, the case for imprisonment is removed. They are simply a person with prior offences and no visa.
Does anyone really suppose, after all the anti-immigrant rhetoric. that the Trump regime is to be trusted to differentiate between “high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States”, undocumented immigrants who have committed no crime other than being undocumented, and, say, immigrants who are legally in the US but have been wrongly accused of ‘eating cats and dogs’?
And does anyone seriously believe that there are 30,000 “high-priority criminal aliens unlawfully present in the United States”?
That’s what I’m saying, pretty sure (verify of course), that the press secretary said that the crime they’re guilty of is border crossing… And that’s just what she said. I imagine she’s got a broader definition than she’s let on.
The US government is well within its rights to deport people that are in violation of its immigration laws, but this
It is literally a concentration camp though – which is not to be confused with a death camp. Hitler started out with concentration camps, and the death camps came later. The concentration part just means gathering all your chosen baddies into one place. Dachau was the first. (I’ve been there. It’s a brief bus ride from central Munich.)
And of course being in Guantanamo, there’ll be lots of useful expertise in ‘people handling’ available nearby:)
Have also been to Dachau, back in 1978. But this morning I was also reading about it in a biography of Mildred Harnack written by her niece’s granddaughter. The way the facility at Dachau was first activated and explained to the world is eerily similar to what Trump is doing right now with Guantanamo.
Trump is, unquestionably, making echos.
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1027531196084551&set=pb.100064830392675.-2207520000
I wonder how many violent, criminal women and children will be housed there?
Tim Haris #5
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1fepbyr/the_wieners_circle_in_chicago/?rdt=60878
If we accept this definition, prisons and jails are (subsets of) concentration camps, in which case we’ve always been at concentration camps already.
That’s what happens with definitions of the sort brandished when retreating to the motte. “It’s just [insert easily met criterion]” is certainly effective at making whatever we’re talking about fit the word in question, but that efficacy is achieved by sanding and filing and sawing off everything that makes the word useful in the first place. It loses specificity and distinctiveness. I could, for instance, argue that baseball is a religion by reducing the notion of religion to something about meaning and ritual, as Emile Durkheim did in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, but I’d have to be very careful not to stray out into the bailey and illicitly capitalize on readers’ existing attitudes toward religion in a stricter sense.
I didn’t just make this up you know. It’s a real distinction.
I mean are you seriously thinking I’m trying to minimize Nazi horrors? Really?
Is this good enough?
No, of course I don’t think you’re trying to minimize Nazi atrocities.
I wasn’t taking issue with the distinction between death camp and concentration camp. My issue was with setting concentration camp equal to something so broad as “gathering all your chosen baddies into one place”, because that description fits too many things. If it fits things that we wouldn’t call concentration camps, then it’s a bad definition and rhetorically dangerous.
But how useful is it to ignore the fact that the people in prisons are there because of what they have been judged to have done, whereas those in concentration camps are there because of what they are?
Nullius, the US has in fact indulged in concentration camps previously. There’s a strong streak of amnesia in the US about its treatment of both American native peoples and interned Japanese. Stewart @20, yes, that’s an excellent distinction, and one that applied equally to both of the examples I cite above.
Nullius @ 19 – Ah, ok. Well yes, that was a hasty and partly sarcastic definition. On the other hand, what Stewart and Rob said. The internment of Japanese Americans was not in itself drastically different from sending Jews (and Socialists etc) to concentration camps. The end was drastically different, but not the beginning.
The end was different in scale, but not that different in effect. There are many books and academic works on the topic, but this is not a bad 5 minute summary.
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/06/21/brief-history-us-concentration-camps
Ophelia: Ah, I’m particularly unadept at picking out sarcasm from text. And yes, the US most definitely put citizens of Japanese descent in concentration camps.
Stewart: That might not be the most useful formulation. Positive propositions can be expressed in a negative form and vice versa; e.g., all ravens are black = no non-black things are ravens. Likewise, it’s very easy to express many “what they’ve done” characteristics as “what they are”; e.g., they committed murder = they are murderers. Even if we deem that to be pedantic quibbling, we must admit that people have often been sent to prisons for “what they are”, whether that was for being gay or whatever.
A potentially more useful point of distinction would be this: Japanese Americans were interned for fear of what they might do. The same could be said of Nazi concentration camps, as “the Jew” was painted as a society-level threat. Jews were bloodthirsty, baby-sacrificing monsters that needed to be locked away to keep “good Germans” safe.
That is not a typical use for prisons, at least not in a nominally free society.
Weird that German-Americans weren’t interned right along with Japanese-Americans.
More sarcasm. Not weird at all, sadly.
@Nullius – I was careful to write “because of what they have been judged to have done,” meaning that prisons are more often populated by those who have undergone a legal process. I won’t pretend that there are no grayer areas into which one can stretch things. Added to which, the Nazis anchored as much as they could of their persecution of Jews in legal frameworks. Because they never succeeded in extending that to an open legal justification for mass murder, what happened in the extermination camps was not supposed to become public knowledge.
There is a bit of family history that is somewhat related to this discussion.
My father grew up in a (German speaking) Mennonite community in Alberta. He never joined the Mennonite church, but his older brother (Bert) did. Since Mennonites are a pacifist sect, Bert became a conscientious objector when conscription was introduced in WWII. He was put in a work camp for such objectors to being in the military. I don’t think the work was more onerous than normal farm work, but it did separate him from his family including his wife.
My father and his relatives were under the impression that if dad joined the military that would mean Bert would be needed for important farm work that my dad had been doing & Bert would get out of the work camp. So dad joined the RCAF & spent much of the war in Britain keeping instruments on the planes in working order. Bert got out of the work camp for a while, but after dad was overseas Bert went back into the camp. Change in policy? Deliberate dirty trick? Nobody in my family knows.
The pacifism of the Mennonites should make them disapprove of dad joining the military, but since it was to help his brother, this kept family relations good.
This is mild compared to how the ethic Japanese were treated in Canada, but the many generations back German connection may have been part of the reason for the treatment of my uncle.
Oh hey. My mother’s father was born in a Mennonite family. I don’t think he was one himself; he was the editor of the local newspaper then a Chatauqua lecturer then ran for governor of Iowa as a Dem. Quite the bio, I’ve always thought. My granny ran for Iowa secretary of state and won, so ha.