What do you call a place where people are sent, without any due process, and where they face brutal and inhumane conditions and from which they cannot leave? When the CECOT facility in El Salvador began to dominate the news earlier this year, the term “concentration camp” started bubbling up in stories that described the heavy overcrowding, the lack of adequate food or water, the 24-7 harsh lighting, the limited access to toilets, the beatings and more.
And then those stories, and the use of that term, came to the US as well. According to recent reporting, the conditions in the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” facility in the Florida everglades are similar: The reporting suggests that lights are left on 24 hours a day, the food that is served is often rotten, those inside aren’t allowed to practice religion, there are mosquitoes everywhere and more. Donald Trump has said that those who try to escape will probably be eaten by alligators.
There’s been some debate over whether it’s appropriate to call facilities like these “concentration camps,” considering the term’s tight historical connection to the Holocaust. Of course, there is no evidence that the people at CECOT or the Florida facility are being systematically murdered. However, the historical definition of a “concentration camp” would say that it is a place where minority groups are detained without due process and experience harsh conditions.
The debate over what qualifies as a concentration camp is not new, said Eric Muller, a distinguished professor in jurisprudence and ethics at the University of North Carolina School of Law. An expert on the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, he also has family ties to the Holocaust and has studied what happened in Nazi concentration camps.
Muller recalled a conflict that flared up in the 1990s between some in the Japanese American community and some American Jewish organizations over the use of the term “concentration camp” to describe the camps where Japanese Americans were incarcerated.
“An exhibit was created in Los Angeles about the [Japanese American] camps that used the term ‘concentration camp’ in the title. It was a traveling exhibit, and it was set to go from its home in Los Angeles to be exhibited at Ellis Island in New York,” Muller said. “When some in the Jewish community learned that not only was this exhibit coming but that it was using the term concentration camp, there was a negative reaction.”
Muller said it’s accurate to use the term concentration camp for what are often referred to as the “internment camps.” He noted that this has long been contentious, though, and it even sparked a heated debate in the U.S. Supreme Court during World War II.
During deliberations in the infamous case Korematsu v. United States (1944), Associate Justice Owen Roberts said the case revolved around “convicting a citizen as a punishment for not submitting to imprisonment in a concentration camp, based on his ancestry,” and he said that “relocation centers” were a euphemism for “concentration camps.”
This angered Associate Justice Hugo Black, the author of the majority opinion, who said it was “unjustifiable to call them concentration camps, with all the ugly connotations that term implies.”
Muller said he has no problem referring to the camps that immigrants are currently being sent to as concentration camps. He simply thinks that those who use the term need to make it clear they’re not directly comparing them to places like Auschwitz.
“What happened at Auschwitz was different,” Muller says. “What I have trouble with is people throwing the term around and insisting what they’re doing is simply using the correct term when what they’re really doing is using the correct term for an emotionally-laden reason.”
If people are going to use the term, they should simply be aware of the connotations and be clear about what they’re saying, Muller says. His parents and grandparents barely escaped the Nazis, and his great uncle died because he was not able to escape, so this obviously matters to him.
“My dad recalled seeing his synagogue burning down the street from his house. He watched his grandfather get taken by the Gestapo. My grandfather was in the Buchenwald concentration camp for several weeks,” Muller said. “His brother, my great uncle Leopold, was not so lucky. He and his wife Irene stayed in Germany—simply because Irene’s mother was old and sick—and they stayed too long. They were deported in April of 1942, and they either died or they were gassed.”
As someone who’s studied the imprisonment of Japanese Americans and has family ties to the Holocaust, Muller said what he sees happening to the U.S. government and how immigrants are being treated affects him “deeply.” For any of the many, many people in this country with similar family histories, this is a traumatic thing to witness.
“Watching the growth of an authoritarian presidency, a passive legislature that is allowing the executive to pretty much do what he wants, watching the transformation of American institutions, watching the courts struggle to play catch-up and function in a role of saving democracy that they’re really not designed for—it is like watching a version of our past,” Muller says. “It’s like watching 1933 and 1934. It’s not like watching 1942.”
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