The USA’s new ‘concentration camps’

Here are the facts: every day, a record 52,000 adults are being held by the USA in around 200 detention centres. They are there because they tried to cross illegally into the US.

Around 13,700 children are also being held for attempting the same crossing.

For many of those children, the conditions are dire.

Reports have described a lack of beds or blankets; lights left on at all hours; no soap or toothbrushes to keep children clean. At least seven children have died in the last year.

Last week, New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said, “The United States is running concentration camps on our southern border.”

Can that be true? Historian Andrea Pitzer defines concentration camps as “mass detention of civilians without trial”. By that definition, Ocasio-Cortez is right.

However, the term is extremely loaded. It is most often used to describe camps in Nazi Germany, during the Holocaust. Six million Jews died in those camps.

“You demean their memory and disgrace yourself with comments like this,” Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney tweeted at Ocasio-Cortez.

“What we’re doing is just not the same as what the Nazis or the Soviets did,” agreed the historian Lance Janda in PolitiFact.

Language matters

So, is the US running concentration camps or not? It is partly a matter of how you define them. If a concentration camp means holding people in poor conditions without a trial, then, yes. If it means repeating one of the most extreme crimes in history — the deliberate murder of millions of people — then, no.

But does arguing over definitions miss the point? Perhaps the real question is: can this situation ever be acceptable? For many, the answer is no. And the fact that it is the United States of America, the so-called “land of the free”, behind the policy that makes it worse.