Is Alligator Alcatraz a Concentration Camp?

In a recent discussion thread, the question of whether to call things like Alligator Alcatraz a concentration camp was raised. I know the term, like “fascism” and related concepts, are often seen as problematic for modern deployment because people so associate them with one very specific, very distinct, and very awful regime. The fact that Auschwitz and Dachau were concentration camps that became sites of mass death does not mean that all concentration camps are execution sites. And not being a mass execution site does not mean that a concentration camp without mass deaths is somehow not a problem.

It is telling about how we Americans view ourselves, that we forget/ignore that the Japanese Internment Camps of the WWII era were, in fact, concentration camps.

A concentration camp is a place where people deemed undesirable by a government are concentrated and contained.

At any rate, given this discussion, I was drawn to this headline at MSNBC: Don’t call it ‘Alligator Alcatraz.’ Call it a concentration camp. The piece is by Andrea Pitzer, who wrote an entire book on the subject of concentration camps: One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps.

For many Americans, the word “concentration camp” evokes another country, a time long ago and a facility operating in the dark of night, away from the prying eyes of an outraged public. But a new concentration camp opened in Florida’s Everglades this week, and it’s the opposite of a secret.

[…]

But it’s not just a new prison, Alcatraz or otherwise. I visited four continents to write a global history of concentration camps. This facility’s purpose fits the classic model: mass civilian detention without real trials targeting vulnerable groups for political gain based on ethnicity, race, religion or political affiliation rather than for crimes committed.

[…]

While concentration camps have historical roots in earlier forms of mass detention, they themselves are modern. The patenting and mass production of barbed wire and automatic weapons over a century ago made it possible to detain large groups with a small guard force for the first time.

She notes that concentrarion camps did not originate with the Nazis.

At the turn of the twentieth century, imperial powers such as Spain and Britain set up concentration camps in colonial regions. The camps had staggering death tolls that made early systems unpopular. But World War I led to a revival of the concept, with nearly a million people detained globally. The wartime camps paved the way for similar systems after the conflict ended, such asthe Soviet Gulag and the detention of homeless people in multiple countries.

Those were all in place before the Nazis came to power, so Hitler’s camps aren’t the lone precedent for the Everglades project. But even the extreme case of Germany offers disturbing parallels — and not just because the Nazis also allowed reporters to tour their camps.

Let’s not forget how all this connects to events we are witnessing on a daily basis.

We’re seeing other clues that police-state tactics are intensifying in America. Masked agents in unmarked cars or without warrants who refuse to show IDs are sweeping people off the street. Some who vanish reemerge; others have been effectively disappeared.

On the following count, it seems worth pausing to note that the Trump administration is trying to revoke citizenship from a set of persons so that pesky rights can be dispensed with. This is the purpose of revoking the constitutional right of birthright citizenship.

Years before he came to power, however, Hitler wrote about his goal of stripping German Jews of legal protections so that they would have no more rights than aliens and could be put into camps.

In 1935, at Hitler’s behest, the German Reichstag passed the Nuremberg Laws, a focus of which was to identify German Jews and revoke their citizenship, with countless other regulations restricting them. Dreaming of a pure Aryan nation, the Nazis initially imagined their targets would self-deport. Once the myth of self-deportation collapsed, they turned to more punitive measures.

And taking away Temporary Protective Status from almost a million people is meant to make to take away legal protections so that they can be more easily removed.

What will happen in the U.S. if the pressure to self-deport fails, as it did nearly a century ago? We’re already seeing aggressive moves against people living in the U.S. legally. The administration is still trying to strip legal status from half a million Haitians who were allowed in before Trump’s return. The DOJ is prioritizing cases involving the possible revocation of citizenship, working to undo birthright citizenship itself and targeting the citizenship of political enemies. The administration wants to define who can be an American in ways that appear profoundly racist, and it seems immigrants are the most politically advantageous large population to target.

Note, too, the already obvious cruelty we have seen.

In the Everglades Tuesday, Trump announced his interest in a multistate network of sites like the one he came to see. Florida proposed the facility as a temporary camp for deportations, but the historical term for this kind of camp is a transit camp, and they’re concentration camps, too. The U.S. also has already sent detainees to El Salvador, Panama, Rwanda and Libya, among other nations, and is in talks with dozens more countries. We’re watching the imposition of a global concentration camp network.

I have been meaning to write about how SCOTUS has green-lit these deportations of US-held migrants to third-party countries, where the deportees would be without rights or the likelihood of aid. What are the odds that being dumped in Libya or Sudan isn’t a slow-motion death sentence for migrants from some other part of the world? How would you fare if you were dumped in Rwanda without the means to help yourself?

She concludes as follows.

When people think of concentration camps, they think of more than a million people murdered at Auschwitz. But extermination camps appeared only after nearly a decade of Nazi rule and several evolutions in wartime detention.

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The history of this kind of detention underlines that it would be a mistake to think the current cruelties are the endpoint. America is likely just getting started.

Note that the Trump bill just passed has substantially increased funding for ICE and for the tools needed to increase deportations.