What's in a name?

The Trump administration’s opening of the Everglades concentration camp this month has triggered a lot of fury. I wrote an opinion piece this weekend for MSNBC that looked at the facility and compared it to our global legacy of detention camps, especially concentration camps.

The headline they went with was “Don’t call it ‘Alligator Alcatraz.’ Call it a concentration camp.” It was theirs, not mine, but I don’t have a problem with it.

My main worry about it is that some people seemed to read the headline and not the piece itself. That headline launched a million posts calling for nicknaming the Florida “Alligator Auschwitz” instead. I’ll address the naming question later in this post, because honestly, I’m worried less about naming than I am making sure people understand what’s going on in the Everglades.

I’ve been studying concentration camps in one form or another since 2008, and I sometimes forget that most of my audience encounters maybe one or two things I’ve written or said on video. So once in a while, it’s good to stop and provide context that might be helpful.

Today, I want to talk about what a camp is, what they’ve looked like in the world and in the US in the past, and how we can reclaim democracy while we labor under a political system that gives rise to such monstrosities.

What camps are exactly

In Saturday’s piece, I defined concentration camps as “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.”

Breaking that down, we’re generally talking about camps for civilians, not prisoner of war camps. There are no perfect bright lines between camp systems, and sometimes in the past POWs have been held along with civilian concentration camp detainees, but more often the two groups have been separate.

These camps emerged in the last half of the nineteenth century and began as imperial projects clamping down on independence in colonial regions. Did mass relocation and detention happen before that? Absolutely. You can’t get to concentration camps without the Spanish, British, and U.S. government abuse of and genocide against indigenous populations around the world in the centuries before concentration camps arose.

What made concentration camps a revolution in detention was the patenting and mass-production of barbed wire and automatic weapons, which allowed detention of thousands by a much smaller number of guards. Think of it as going from the atomic bomb to a hydrogen bomb.

As for trials, when I talk about concentration camps not having real trials, the truth is that most people who end up in camps historically haven’t had any trial. But where there are trials, they’re expedited end runs around the standard judicial process.

The Soviet Union had trials, too, in which no defense could be presented, and the length of Gulag detention might go in waves every few days, with countless people in a row getting whatever was the sentence of the moment. In colonial Kenya, British judges meted out detention to whole crowds with the wave of a hand.

In the Everglades, the president and Florida’s governor have authorized importing JAG officers from the National Guard, giving them six weeks of training, and calling them immigration judges. They’re setting up expeditionary (meaning mobile) courtrooms and plan to “try” and deport people almost immediately. Given the reports of vetting of servicemembers at prior events, and calls for loyalty purges, we’re likely to end up with a Trumpist bench of judges at these facilities, further politicizing an already nasty process. These are kangaroo courts and kangaroo justice.

Detention so far

Defenders of the administration say that the communities involved are not being targeted on the basis of race or ethnicity, even as one ally and advisor crowed about feeding 65 million immigrants to local alligators. The current lead on immigration detention policy, Stephen Miller, has said publicly that America is only for Americans, and it’s no mystery what he means by this.

We’ve long seen the distinct targeting of people of color from the Trump administration, going back to Trump’s first days in office in 2017 trying to impose a Muslim travel ban and as recently as his executive order expanding visa restrictions from Haiti and Venezuela, as well as several African and Asian countries.

Others may find themselves swept into the net, like Harvard scientist Kseniya Petrova, who’s facing federal smuggling charges. This diversification of the target pool to a Russian like Petrova is less an indication of any lack of bias and more a sign that the government will preferentially target people of color but are happy to simultaneously arrest those who work for institutions the president has attacked and have publicly opposed Vladimir Putin (as Petrova has). But my sense is that they’re also happy to widen the net because it adds to the general terror, in their minds further solidifying their power.

Camps around the world

Over the last 130 years, concentration camps have existed on six continents. Monarchies have imposed them, democracies have embraced them, Communist Party-run nations have adopted them. There is no kind of national political ideology that hasn’t resorted to them, because every culture has fault lines that unscrupulous political actors can use to divide a country’s population.

As many have noted before me, the most vulnerable groups are usually targeted, but once mass detention is established for one group, it becomes much easer to extend to other groups than it was to set up in the first place. Whether camps persist and become entrenched is often a question of internal power struggles (and sometimes also depends on whether there is an external war happening).

Democracies, however, are more likely to undo a concentration camp regime. This is probably due to the fact that citizens in a democracy have at least some chance at removing their leaders.

In each case, camp systems rise out of national and international influences. During World War I, when internment of aliens became a global phenomenon, occurring in dozens of countries, most parts of the planet developed some kind of procedure and bureaucracy for pre-emptive mass detention of civilians.

That international culture and trend became even more pronounced after the war ended. In the 1920s and 1930s, camps became ubiquitous. After the rise of both advertising and political propaganda created potent psychological weapons to sell even nasty things to the public, the kind of demonization necessary to create a concentration camp regime became exponentially easier to do.

It usually takes years of propaganda to get people to accept camps. But exposed to enough propaganda, a majority will come to either embrace their neighbors being rounded up or tolerate it out of fear or confusion.

Yet because of the role of national culture in identifying who gets targeted, from the beginning, each ruling party, when asked about its camps, has been emphatic that their country isn’t running camps like those other horrible ones you’ve read or heard about. Theirs are different, they say, because this particular group is a real threat to public safety or to the nation and deserves to be locked up.

So international trends combine with specifics from each national culture to make camps possible in a given place. With that in mind, it’s worth looking at U.S. history, and the roots of the current immigration detention crisis.

Camps in the U.S.

From its very beginnings the U.S. has arbitrarily targeted groups for relocation, detention, and political gain on the basis of who had citizenship. Indigenous people received the rights—on paper, at least—afforded U.S. citizens only a century ago, though they’ve faced ongoing oppression and dispossession on many fronts in the years since.

The trans-Atlantic slave trade legalized the kind of cross-border human trafficking that is currently embraced by the Trump administration for deportations and made it into a hallowed American institution. Asian Americans found themselves denied citizenship decade after decade in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—and during World War II, Japanese Americans who were in fact citizens found themselves herded into camps all the same. From Japanese American internment to Jim Crow to Native reservations, the rights of citizenship for minorities, even once secured on paper, have long been contingent and unfulfilled.

Civilian detention for U.S. citizens likewise has a shameful history, with tremendous abuses in the prison system. The United States routinely boasts some of the highest incarceration rates among democratic nations around the world.

Acceptance of atrocious conditions of mass incarceration and staggering numbers of prisoners as an integral part of American society has helped pave the way for a brutal immigration system. Much of what Trump is doing today in terms of immigrant detention comes from policies carried out by prior presidents, who have all in recent decades enacted policies further brutalizing immigrants. Now, with the massive funding for ICE detention passed by Congress last week, it’s possible that the immigrant detention system will eclipse even the U.S. prison system.

Though to be clear, even when bad policies already exist, it’s possible to make them worse. Monstrous systems can always be made crueler. Presidents Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Biden—not to mention Congress—all bear some responsibility for what’s unfolding today. But right now, the Trump administration has its foot on the accelerator.

Questions of naming

As promised, I want to address what we should call this camp in the Everglades. Reports from the first arrivals there describe maggots in the food, religious intolerance, and a lack of access to medical care and even water. Is it enough to just highlight the inhumane conditions in this camp? Is it important to call these things concentration camps if they fit an academic definition? Should we compare it to Auschwitz? Is doing so disrespectful to a singular specific span of history that is unique in horrific ways?

When I wrote my book, it was in part because so many people didn’t seem to know any history of concentration camps except Auschwitz. A minority of Americans might be familiar with pre-death camp sites like Dachau, or had heard about the Soviet Gulag. But there was little understanding that concentration camps had risen out of colonial settings at the turn of the twentieth century, unleashing mass death, and evolving from there.

I wanted to write about how humanity had arrived at Auschwitz and what happened afterward. (Because of course, all the camps around the world didn’t disappear after 1945, even as humanity confronted the evils of Nazi extermination.)

So for me as an individual, it’s important to use the phrase “concentration camp,” because I’m trying to inform people about this arc that these civilian camps have had, affecting tens of millions of lives worldwide across more than a century. I also want my readers and listeners to understand that something large and systemic is underway right now in America. We have a lot of history that suggests what’s happening isn’t just going to vanish on its own. We’re going to have to act.

Why say camps (or not)?

I think political leaders who oppose the camps should consider calling them what they are, and should work to educate people about what a concentration camp is. But what individual people call these camps is less important to me, and there may be times where even public officials use different names in talking to different people. Sometimes you’re going to be calling attention to the grim history we’re repeating. At other times, you might want to persuade someone who’s bought into propaganda about immigrants in the past by talking about the physical setting and the treatment of people in these facilities instead of using a phrase that will trigger them.

I don’t think it’s at all disrespectful to the memory of the dead to use the term “concentration camp,” But saying the Everglades concentration camp is equivalent to Auschwitz is, to my mind, a different matter.

It has two problems. The first is that it isn’t true. People know that a million detainees haven’t been murdered in the Everglades. The second problem is that as things get worse in the detention system under Trump—and they will—how can you convey what is changing if you’ve already described what was there before as Auschwitz?

Dissident humor can be fantastic and powerful. But I think memes and hyperbole tend to render concentration camp references into a reality show rather than actual reality, and this tendency has been weaponized in powerful ways by the right. My sense on this issue is that it’s better not to let the administration set the terms of how we talk about it.

“Alligator Alcatraz” seems aimed at simultaneously terrorizing and entertaining, and I’m not interested in doing either, so I wouldn’t use it. Substituting “Auschwitz” for “Alcatraz” seems even worse, for its dishonesty and for letting the administration set the framework for our language.

But really it’s up to you. I’m not here to give you rules as much as I’m trying to help people think about what is true and real, and what will be effective.

Where do we turn now

I also promised to write this week about ways to resist the expanding concentration camp regime, and I want to be strategic in how I explain it today. Providing a framework for how I’m thinking about it might help you come up with other ideas yourself, because there are so many ways you can push back, and you don’t need to wait for a guru or an influencer to act.

First, I’d like to say a few words about people on my social media feeds suggesting violent and illegal acts. I generally address nonviolent tactics, because those have typically been the most effective movements and are the easiest to study in terms of what works. I myself endorse nonviolence, while understanding that even those who commit to nonviolent action frequently end up charged with assaulting police officers or faced with other bogus charges. So I have no illusions that committing to nonviolence protects protesters, or that a tyrannical government will hesitate to make opposition itself criminal activity.

But after the Everglades camp opened last week, I saw people recommending armed liberation of the camp or subjecting it to drone attacks. I would like to say respectfully that if you’re posting on social media about taking these actions, you’ve already removed yourself from being an effective agent of the kind of violent action you’re expressing an interest in taking. And honestly, there are so many things you can do that are likely to make a significant difference without you having to be convicted of a crime because you posted it on social media before you did it.

On the ground

The most immediate thing I would recommend you do is to push back on these developments in your community. Start with where suffering is already happening and work backward to see strategic places where you can insert yourself to alleviate harm or to gum up the concentration-camp machinery.

That means helping detainees and families of those already arrested or deported. You can reach out to church groups, immigrant nonprofits, cultural associations, and many other places to see how you can help. You may have invaluable skills that are rare, or just the patience to do grunt work that’s necessary. It’s all important.

Taking a step backward in the chain of harm from there, we can consider how to keep people from being caught by ICE in the first place. There are education efforts to help immigrants know their rights, which isn’t always sufficient but has already saved people from arrest. When you know those rights as well, you can be more effective at helping others. There are other related actions you can take in this arena, such as helping to file requests for virtual hearings for immigrants who are slated to appear in court but fear arrest by ICE.

Stepping back to an earlier stage of the problem, we’re faced with the fact that partnerships exist to facilitate ICE locking up people in your community in the first place. So find out where immigrants are detained in your state, county, or town. If you can’t find out, email or call your elected representatives and ask them.

Trace the networks, trace the money. Find ICE facilities. Work on cutting access and funding and economic partnerships with agencies or businesses locally. As ICE expands, we need to cut them off before local economies become even more dependent on these contracts. Meet with philanthropists, business owners, and religious leaders and ask them to partner with you to respect the rights of all area residents and deny the use of area locations for detention. Where you can’t prevent these partnerships or facilities, protest their existence.

Taking another step back invites the question of how this is legal to do in the first place. Pressure your elected officials to protect immigrant rights as key to protecting everyone’s rights, and tell them that immigrants are critical to the country and to your community. Ask them what they’re doing to protect everyone.

The role of protest

Public protest against these policies and concentration-camp detention doesn’t meet a need the way that offering direct services or volunteering with a nonprofit does, but it’s also critical. By clamping down on immigrant rights, the administration is clamping down on every American’s rights. Nearly everything that’s been set at a priority in this second Trump administration—and a lot of what was tried the first time out—appears aimed at imposing a dictatorship. Public dissent is key to blocking dictatorship. It has to be exercised on a regular basis all over the country if it’s to be kept.

The bigger the demonstrations become, the more they will break through the silos and the harder it will become to dismiss protests as the work of “paid subversives.” Big events, especially those that seem fun alongside the serious messaging, start to feel like the honorable side, like the winning side, to more and more people.

But in addition to big national movements, we need local demonstrations. You organizing even a small one in your community, especially if it’s a deep-red area, will help make the connections for area residents who might otherwise never see or hear that what’s happening in their neck of the woods. The more you can call out local detention sites and actions, the better. Many people don’t realize where their money is going, or even know how their community is tied up in the nationwide immigration detention project.

If you can close the loop by connecting local actions to a national network, you’ll likely learn best practices that help you feel the energy boost that comes from support and solidarity. On July 16, No Kings will launch a trio of Wednesday night sessions, “One Million Rising: Strategic Non-Cooperation to Fight Authoritarianism,” at two-week intervals. The first will be devoted to strategic non-cooperation, while later sessions will teach attendees on how to become trainers themselves and how to launch events of their own. On July 17, the next day, “Good Trouble Lives On” demonstrations will take place across the country, supported by dozens of nonprofit groups.

Public demonstrations matter for the courts, too. As Andrew O’Donohue wrote this week, judicial independence having the support of public opinion won’t by itself protect our courts from being dismantled. But as recent events in Brazil and Israel reveal, mobilizing around preserving the courts might.

On the most panoramic level, you don’t even have to focus on the immigration issue to tackle this problem. You can help other targeted groups, or you can take the broadest view possible and focus on corruption. I firmly believe that one of the best ways to shift the American trajectory is to fuel an anti-corruption movement.

An anti-corruption campaign has universal appeal. Saying "Trump is deceiving you" or "MAGA is brainwashed" is unlikely to change anyone's mind. But "we are all, every one of us, getting cheated every day" is tremendously unifying to Democrats, to independents, to nonvoters, and Trump supporters alike.

Anticorruption has been a powerful force in politics at home and abroad in history, and I think it will continue to be useful. It may be the only way that some Trump supporters who feel too bound up with him will be able to walk away. An anti-corruption movement allows those potential voters to be swept up in a movement without making them the intensive and resource-draining singular focus of outreach.

Whether you go big or small, local or national, or all of the above, remember that knitting our communities together more tightly is the only way we can get past this and emerge with a better country. You have to demand your officials represent your interests and not just those of wealthy or powerful donors. You have to know that people have your back, and they have to know you have theirs.

Just get three or four friends or neighbors or coworkers or acquaintances from a college course or your rock-climbing class or pickup basketball or your church or quilting or Discord group together. Decide to do something together, and then get started. 

Your paid subscriptions support my work.