The Trump administration has consciously used immigration enforcement as a tool to terrorize undocumented immigrants and their American relatives, and to delight a base that revels in the use of state violence against those they see as trying to take their country from them, even to the point of undermining Trump’s own agencies’ enforcement operations. Top immigration officials have been purged, in part because, despite the extensive suffering Trump policies have created, the president’s advisers see the political leadership at DHS as “weak.” Trump’s latest choice to head Customs and Border Protection told Fox News’s Tucker Carlson that many of the “so-called minors” in detention are “soon-to-be MS-13,” based on having “looked at their eyes.”
If these acts do not represent animus toward those human beings the president has described as murderers, terrorists, and rapists, whom he declares an infestation, whom he identifies as the enemy by sending the U.S. Army to the border, whose families he has destroyed in a bid to inflict sufficient agony so as to deter future newcomers—if all of this does not make American immigration detention facilities concentration camps, it makes them far too close to the concept for any American to find acceptable.
This is, perhaps, the most daunting element of this entire conversation. If these facilities even vaguely resemble concentration camps, then American society has failed in ways many Americans do not want to contemplate. That resemblance would cast the Republican Party and its president as the perpetrators of an act of historic villainy. The Democratic Party leadership does not want the responsibility of leveling this charge and is incapable of bearing it, and most Republicans seem convinced that the omelet is worth a few cracked shells.
The conditions at these facilities may not result from acts of deliberate malice, but as with Andersonville, the administration’s unwavering pursuit of its ideological goal—making life so unbearable for migrants that they turn back—has made these conditions inevitable. The administration’s harsh approach to both the migrants and their countries of origin has failed in its stated aim. It has not decreased the number of people seeking refuge here, but the more people arrive, the harsher the administration’s response becomes. The administration’s only proposed solution is to legalize the unlawfully draconian treatment it has inflicted on migrants.