Is Alligator Alcatraz a Concentration Camp?
One expert says yes.
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.
[…]
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.
Alas, this is what the nation in aggregate voted for. And the supporters will note that it’s not unwarranted, it’s necessary, these people are criminals and other things like “it’s only x-number of women and children, you expect me to consider this
genocidalexcessive?”“And the best goes on and on and on and on…”
If that doesn’t chill you to your bones, I don’t know what will.
Keep calling out the fascism, Steven. Sunlight is important against forces that thrive in darkness and untruths.
The Japanese American Citizenship League certainly recognizes the similarity to a certain set of camps created by the US in WWII.
Is it a concentration camp? Yes.
This strikes me mostly as a semantic exercise. For most Americans, “concentration camp” means “death camp.” So, using that terminology naturally—and I would say, clearly intentionally—evokes Dachau and Auschwitz.
We’ve long called places where people are imprisoned for a status other than criminal “internment camps,” “detainment camps,” “detention centers,” and the like. Given how anathema that is to our ostensible values—and, indeed, the clear text of the Constitution—that would seem sufficient.
@James Joyner: I see your point, but reducing these issues to handwaving about semantics is what empowers individuals to create the excess Trump and de Santis are taking journalists on tours of. There’s nothing in our ostensible values–or even the Constitution itself–that says creating temporary holding facilities for immigration violators is problematical at all.
See how that worked? Semantics matters. Rhetoric is a tool.
@James Joyner:
Which I (and Pitzer) acknowledge.
But I don’t think it means that this is just semantics.
@James Joyner: While I do understand the threat of over-playing specific terms, this to me is very much like the fascism debate. How bad does it have to get before we can use the really bad words needed to describe them?
I am satisfied that the threshold for using both words has been surpassed.
Arguing about whether X terminology is correct or not is the sort of things academics care about, and nobody else does.
While I can appreciate the fact that there are academics on this blog, and that this post was written by one, the political utility of the discussion is, it seems to me, quite small.
Now maybe some politician/activist/spokesperson can make it work. I’m not sure about that. It’s not gonna be me telling them that any particular word is the wrong one, though.
@Jay L Gischer: On the one hand, yes, academics, myself included, like to argue over what words mean and how they are applied.
On the other hand, what words mean and how they are applied (and understood by the mass public) is at the heart of political power.
@Steven L. Taylor: I’m just not convinced that either “fascism,” which I’m actually more comfortable with, or “concentration camp” have the intended effect. Those who already agree that Trump is evil will glom onto those terms and gain satisfaction. Those who love Trump will roll their eyes. But this strikes me as having a negative anchoring effect: those on the fence will say, “No, this isn’t anything like Auschwitz, so we’re good” rather than, “While, it’s not Auschwitz, it’s pretty damn bad.”
I do have some vague memories of pretty awful conditions for those who came over in the so-called Mariel Boatlift in the early 1980s. But that’s at least easier to justify than rounding up those who are already living here and subjecting them to indefinite internment under conditions clearly in violation of the 8th Amendment.
Is the Pope Catholic?
@James Joyner:
Is that not an argument for calling them what they actually are?
1.) Euphemisms work. They normalize previously taboo behavior. They create false or inconsequential distinctions. They give cover for the ones who pushed Trump from ~45% to ~50% to vote against inflation.
2.) Engaging in lowest common denominator analysis gives us lowest common denominator politicians like Boebert, Tuberville, DJT, and MTG. We should try to pull people out of the intellectual sewer, not meet them there.
Is it not the job of scholars and educators to explicitly reject this sort of propaganda? This sort of dishonesty?
This isn’t about a damn blowjob, some other failure to live up to the dignity of an Office, or even graft; this is about human beings. And it’s an attack on both the spirit and the letter of the Constitution as well as the immediate philosophical inspirations for America’s founding documents.
@James Joyner: Or in Viet Nam we called them “Strategic Hamlets”. So we have plenty of experience at concentration camps.
Doesn’t feel good, eh?
Wiktionary:
In support of James’ argument, they illustrate the definition with a picture of inmates at Buchenwald. However, the definition says nothing about death.
@James Joyner:
Do we have enough transparency into the ICE detention system — who goes in, where they are, what happens to them, what conditions they are held in, what their final situation is — that we know these are not death camps?
This isn’t just a frivolous question — we have seen how camps similar to these turn out, time and time again, throughout the world, with outcomes often ranging from death by neglect to death by gas chamber. The US Japanese-American Internment Centers in WW2 were the outliers.
Without independent verification, you’re just taking the word of unidentified masked goons who kidnap people on the streets with no warrant, and the people who employ them.
ICE is doing everything they can to keep people from seeing the conditions in their “detention centers,” including arresting congresspeople. They will grudgingly let them in a few days later, after they’ve had time to clean it up.
Just wanted to point out that we are at a point in United States History in which we are nitpicking the exact definition of a “Concentration Camp”
@Tony W:
And whether our government is building them.
The fact that a legitimate debate can be had validates, in my mind, my usage of the term.
@James Joyner: I do understand that the language in question can create the kinds of problems you note.
But then again, I am not sure that using softer language solved the problem, either.
The issue is: when do we hit the threshold to use the stronger term? I mean, I am not wrong about the basic definition of the word.
@James Joyner:
“Those who love Trump will roll their eyes. But this strikes me as having a negative anchoring effect: those on the fence will say, “No, this isn’t anything like Auschwitz, so we’re good” rather than, “While, it’s not Auschwitz, it’s pretty damn bad.””
Unfortunately, I think this is correct. This whole debate reminds me too much of calling the rendition places during the Iraq War the gulag of our times. While 20 years later, it still feels like an accurate description, it enabled the Bush 43 administration to attack the criticism of their actions as overreacting and avoid discussing the substance.
@Steven L. Taylor: I don’t disagree. AND, I note that the segment of the population that most frequently adds new words/phrases/usage to the language are women 18-25.
I don’t know what to do with that…
Oh, Steven, I know you are enough of a geek to appreciate this: I have always thought of the Ents in LotR as Tolkien poking fun at his fellow academics. From spending half a day deciding that the hobbits are NOT orcs, to having lost their wives, it really seems to fit.
@Tony W: Its worse, because it is our country that has the camps in question. And half the country doesn’t mind if they meet the definition of concentration camps.
This dovetails into something that I experienced this morning. I live in a 55+ community, I’m 66 myself, so I’m on the young side. I was at the gym and I overheard three people talking about illegal immigrants. They were going on about how they all commit violent crimes and just get them the hell out of the country. Our complex is in South Florida and has over 8,000 units, and overall is probably marginally blue. However, there is a huge gender split. The men, especially American white men, are generally much more conservative than the women. What Trump has done is convinced half the country that illegal immigrants are responsible for pretty much any problem in this country. So getting rid of them by any means will solve almost all problems. And if it is cruel, well they deserve it.
What Trump has done to this country will not be fixed anytime soon, probably not in my lifetime.
@Jay L Gischer:
That’s interesting. Do you have a citation for this? I may like to dig into it.
If I had ventured a guess, it would have been AAVE regional dialects, particularly slang, would be the largest reservoir of lexical additions.
I suppose they aren’t mutually exclusive. For example, if that cohort consists of mavens (in the Gladwellian sense).
But I also wonder if that claim only holds for a particular time period, i.e. 80s-early 90s valley girl.
Purely anecdotal, but not one of the Trumpies I’ve talked to this last week seems to understand that legal citizens are being deported. “Well, if they’re being deported, they must be here illegally or committed crimes.” When I point out publicized instances of that not being the case, it’s “Fake News, Trump wouldn’t do that.”
We’re fucked.
@Jax:
Exactly! My experience is the same, so, at least less anecdotal. Additionally, don’t know/don’t care? Same ol’ same ol’.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I agree. I didn’t mention it, as I was mostly interested in rendering my thoughts in my comment. James definitely has a point.
To Joyner’s point, I would also add the old politics adage MR reminds us about from time to time:
If you’re explaining, you’re losing.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Not a request, but a series of posts about this would be a worthy endeavor.
It has been quite a while, but in an open thread, I mentioned a comment on a blog post. The OP had used “gift” as a verb, and some commenter lamented the state of “her language”.
I didn’t put it this way at the time, but it strikes me that if one were to use a possession frame, it’s more like we belong to our language rather than the other way around. ETA: I find that framing dubious.
On a separate note, I think if I had to choose one flaw that inflicts a mortal wound to Originalism, it would be that it treats language as static.
This goes beyond the pragmatism of a living constitution. By insisting that legal documents be interpreted as they would be at the moment of enactment, no matter how old, it implicitly violates the principle that laws be public.
Indeed, if the population struggles to understand language that evolves from comprehensible to vaguely familiar to archaic, how does any individual fulfill their duty to obey laws?
Desperation sets in. Sad to watch.
@Connor:
Based on previous comments, and the way you portray yourself here, you’re capable of contributing something to this discussion beyond haughty expressions of pity.
You seem content with life as a shallow partisan.
Sad, indeed.
@Jay L Gischer:
100%!!
@Connor: You going to respond to your lies/inability to read posts and bring evidence?
Until you do that, I see no need to take your sniping seriously save to note that always appear totally onboard with some pretty awful stuff.
@Connor:
Desperation?
Or despair?
They are rather different things.
On a historical note:
The British set up “concentration camps” in South Africa during the Boer War, in order to undercut the Afrikaaner strategy of guerilla warfare.
They were a humanitarian disaster, largely because there had been no planning for them in advance, and the British Army was utterly incomptent in adminstering them.
And the outcome was the British felt obliged to offer the Afrikaaners a settlement that screwed the black South Africans, whose racial subjugation by the Boers had been one of the major causes of the conflict in the first place.
From which, much pain ensued.
@Kurtz: Maybe he was referencing his own desperation? It is sad to watch.
There’s an assumption in a lot of Trumpers that if they just start winning, people will respect them. But, we don’t.
@Jay L Gischer:
Tolkien was always inclined to combine a desire for an “English mythology”, and a sense of loss and regret, and the perils of desire and knowledge, with a taste for horrid linguistic puns.
See “Baggins of Bag End”
In a re-translation: “overweight inhabitant of a suburban dead-end.”
🙂
“Farmer Giles of Ham” was perhaps the best and funniest version of this.
And “Smith of Wootton Major” possibly the most concise expresion of the alienation and regret.
@Kurtz:
Check out the works of William Labov and Sali Tagliamonte. You might find Labov’s “gender paradox” especially interesting.
Your instincts about AAVE are spot on. Marginalized groups and subcultures are also innovators. And sometimes their innovations are picked up by young women and scaled from there.
@Gustopher: Connor/Drew has been sad to watch for a long time. Low energy. Bigly pathetic. Sad.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Woo. Strong words there.
All of you. Look in the mirror. Escape this self important echo chamber. It has the potential to be spirited and serious debate. It used to be. It should be. Now it’s just TDS venting.
I’m not a therapist, but I suspect it could be therapeutic to consider “other”. Many years ago, in the days of Alex Knapp, Doug, and others- and blog talk radio- this was a great site. Now….. very unfortunate.
@Connor:
Wooosh.
@Kurtz: One has to get down in the sewer to pull someone out. And that is assuming: 1. Said person realizes they are in a sewer. And 2–Upon realizing they are in a sewer, wants out of the sewer. The process has no chance, however, if people not in the sewer don’t go down to people in the sewer.
Propaganda is a tool that can lead people for good ends or for evil. What Dems have struggled with is understand that the way in– is the way out. Propaganda got us here–and only propaganda will get us out. They’d better learn fast.
@Lucysfootball: In truth, they were already convinced before Trump with 30 years of Fox News. Trump convinced them of the solution to the problem.
@James Joyner:
James, trying to figure out the exact right words for the exactly intended effect has been the great mistake committed by politicians and pundits for the last few decades, the mistake that allowed the current political cancer to settle in and spread. The idea that, if only you could finesse some inoffensive term that would appeal to some paradigmatic (i.e., imagined) voter in some key demographic in a battleground state, instead of just saying terms like “white supremacist,” “Christian Dominionist,” “authoritarian,” or by now just plain “fascist”, is exactly why people who should be vocal, persuasive opponents of all these movements instead sound like people with mouths full of tapioca pudding, incapable of saying anything comprehensible or persuasive. To hell with “intended effect.”
Plus, at its heart, this kind of pablum is fundamentally dishonest. Call things what they are. Teach Americans that they’re not immune to the siren calls of fascism and authoritarianism. Show them how ideas like the current Orwellian term “religious freedom” lead to oppression, pogroms, and other horrible outcomes. Draw clear outlines around people who don’t want to be seen for their prejudice, hate, intolerance, stupidity, cowardice, and everything else abhorrent about the movement they support or lead.
Right now is a critical teaching moment, when people need to hear the history of the word “concentration camp.” No, it’s not a binary state, where you’re either Auschwitz or Alcatraz. Instead, you have a whole continuum of awfulness, including American internment of the Japanese, reservations for Native Americans, concentration camps for the Boers, strategic hamlets for the Vietnamese…Use the term concentration camp, and its history, to stop people from hiding from the evil of what they’re doing. “What, are you saying that I’m a Nazi?!” should not be the sort of slippery defense that verbal equivocation allows.
@James Joyner:
“have the intended effect” on whom, James? Who is the object of this sentence? You? the mouse in your pocket?
This is what I call outsourcing of opinion, or Inside The Beltway thinking where everything is theater criticism assigned to some view from nowhere third party which can never be identified.
You aren’t telling whether you, James Joyner think this is a concentration camp, but instead you are telling us what some unknown person somewhere thinks. As if you’ve conducted polling and focus group interviews and can confidently tell us what those people think, and can speak on their behalf.
Wouldn’t it be better to just tell us what you, personally think? Like, do you, James Joyner, think this is the sort of thing a liberal democracy would build? A prison for people who are held without any sort of due process , without charges or trial, or rights of any kind?
@James Joyner:
The men sent to El Salvador have not been interned, or detained. They have been imprisoned for life by executive order. The vile Noem woman bragged about it, for God’s sake.
America is building concentration camps. There is no more accurate description.
@Connor: And yet you keep coming here looking for validation.
@Jim X 32:
I’m not sure how to interpret this. I wasn’t calling for false comity. What kind of propaganda would you suggest?
Properly identifying movements—calling a spade a spade—doesn’t bear the hallmarks of the particular understanding of propaganda discussed here.
And a complicating observation must be made: even if MAGA was dealt no spades, not only would Trump, et. al claim the deck was cold, they wouldn’t throw in their hand. They would merely insist they all their cards are trumps.
What propaganda can be crafted that outweighs the truth in plain sight?
@Kingdaddy: Indeed. To me it is the correct term, so what else can I say?
Here is the MAGA regime’s position in all its rank dishonest glory.
So what’s the difference? Well the people Trump is rounding up are criminals.
That’s as far as the regime’s apologists usually take the argument. Press them on the obvious flaw – “How can you know they entered the country illegally if they haven’t been afforded due process?” – and you get a variety of bullshit non-answers, the most common of which amounts to “Of course they’re here illegally, that’s why they’re illegals.”
The Trump/Miller regime has resolved to drive millions of people it regards as “undesirables” out of the country and it doesn’t care about the human consequences. Indeed by sending people to countries like Sudan, it’s going out of its way to be as cruel as possible without actually indulging in extra-judicial executions. Yet.
And in case anyone was clinging to the hope that the courts or Congress might eventually stop them:
Trump is a dictator, and the only institutions with the power to stop him within the constitution have no intention of trying. In the circumstances, earnest discussions about the proper meaning of “concentration camp” suggest a refusal to acknowledge what this regime is doing in and to America.
@Connor: If you want to be taken seriously you need to a) stop lying all the time, b) stop saying stupid things (like claiming Kilmar Garcia visited Mexico 100 times), and c) cut back on your Trump Dickriding Syndrome.
Till then, few here will be interested in your unsolicited, self-important lectures. You live in a glass house of amorality and dishonesty, simping for a rapist who incited a terror attack on Congress. You clearly have no integrity and you spew unintelligent nonsense. So there is little respect here for your dumb and unethical utterings.
Also, your constant whining and complaining about OTB makes you seem like a pathetic baby. If you don’t like the site, just go away. Nobody will miss you. You’re not important. If you stick around, up on the juvenile crying and whining about what you think people here should do. Nobody here is going to do what you tell them to do. That you think you have the cachet to give orders is delulu. Nobody here respects you. Sorry to break the bad news.
@Kurtz: The truth, as currently described by Democrats, has no meaning to the target audience of the 5-8 percent of the people they need to flip or stay home. It also has no meaning to the people who see no difference in the Partties and don’t vote. Calling a spade a spade is only valuable if the spade has meaning to the listener. Otherwise, all we have done is salute our own egos for having, as my grandmother used to say, “Told the truth and shamed the devil.”
Leaving aside the larger issue of Dem fixation on the NYT and other legacy media outlets “giving Trump a pass” –instead of building a network of influencers and churches that will propagate the word down to the “sewer” where the couch potatoes and crowd followers we need live. The only starring place is to continuously undermine Republican leadership with their supporters, no matter how loose the connection. Musk has already started by saying Trump in the Epstein files–because that has meaning in MAGA land. You know what else has meaning in that world? They really hate Republicans, and they really like conspiracies and scapegoats. This makes them highly susceptible to believing they’ve been sold out. All it takes is the the right circumstantial inferences in the mouth of talented storyteller and they will attack each other. You know a few things that have no meaning to them? Fascism, Democracy, Hypocrisy, Marginalized People, and vulnerable communities to name a few. You nor I can make those concepts meaningful to them, but we can translate current events in terms of their own self interest–even if it’s a stretch to an intelligent person.
So yes, Trump is the Epstein files. Trump is paying Mexican cartels as ICE agents (hence the masks), Trump is deporting poor white Americans, Trump is skimming the Tarriffs revenue. Trump is rigging the Primaries against Republicans helping their Districts. Trump releases FEMA money in exchange for Presidential Library money. Trump used money to upgrade military Bases for his bribe jet, etc.
Or, one can debate how many angels can fit on a pin head and watch how things shake out.
@DK:
He doesn’t.
The conditions of the detained are not much better before they get there.
Here is a report from a neighborhood ICE detention facility, where the disappeared wait to be sent to a concentration camp. Or worse.
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/los-angeles-ice-immigration-detention-center-rcna216884
And the budget added half a billion for more of this.
This is the thing of nightmares.
What an obtuse article w/its false equivalencies.
Yes. Isnt that unbelievable at this point. That we in 2025 are debating the definition a concentration camp.