Before World War II, this phrase was used to describe the detention of civilians without trial based on group identity
Activists put child dummies in cages at several New York sites
Kids in cages: Geneva protest urges UN action on Trump migration policy
https://www.thelocal.ch/20190617/kids-i ... ion-policy
Don't look away
How the Trump Administration's Border Camps Fit into the History of Concentration Camps
By Andrea PitzerJune 18, 2019
Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, examines the detentions of migrants in America.
Migrants gathered inside the fence of a makeshift detention center in El Paso Texas
Sergio Flores for The Washington Post/Getty Images
In February 2018, U.S. border agents took a four-month-old baby from his father, who was deported overseas. Last May, a 16-year-old boy died from influenza after being held in a detention processing facility in McAllen, Texas. Earlier this month, a transgender migrant died hours after being paroled from custody.
As more unaccompanied minors and other asylum-seekers arrive on the southern border, alarming accounts continue: reports of rotten food causing illness, kennel-style fences holding migrants in El Paso, Texas, and another facility in the same city holding more than six times its capacity of detainees. This week, the Department of Health and Human Services announced that it would handle the influx of unaccompanied minors by housing some of them at Fort Sill, an Army base in Oklahoma that held detainees of Japanese descent during World War II, a bleak reminder of another time when America failed to live up to its values.
Beyond each individual crisis, we should ask, what are these places? Are they refugee camps, or are they something else? History provides the answer.
People today tend to think of Nazi death camps as defining the term “concentration camp.” But before World War II, this phrase was used to describe the detention of civilians without trial based on group identity. During a rebellion in Cuba in 1896, the Spanish Empire swept rural peasants—mostly women and children—off the land. Declaring them a threat, Spanish forces held them behind barbed wire in fortified cities. Around 150,000 people died. Three years later, America opened its own concentration camps for women and children as part of an effort to suppress a revolt in the Philippines during the Philippine-American War.
Around the globe in southern Africa, the British government opened its own concentration camps in the new century, embracing civilian detention as a civilizing force for an “uncultured” people. Unsanitary camp conditions and inadequate food triggered medical crises. By the time the British moved to address the disaster they had created, it was too late for many detainees. Tens of thousands of children died.
These camps opened and closed in different settings but never vanished from the face of the earth. In southern France during the Spanish Civil War, hundreds of thousands of refugees fled across the border, ending up in camps without sanitation or food. In Myanmar in 2012, more than a hundred thousand Rohingya Muslims were segregated into camps that left the community vulnerable to ethnic cleansing years later.
Today’s U.S.-Mexico border camps are the heirs of these concentration camps. Putting people in similar conditions will unleash illness and death. The more people who are detained, the larger these crises will become.
By the time a country gets to the point that those in power and a majority of their supporters embrace policies that back up virulent rhetoric and accept detention as the central response to a political or humanitarian problem, it is very difficult to undo.
From its first days, the Trump administration has mouthed dehumanizing rhetoric about migrants. On the day Trump announced his candidacy, he fired his opening salvo against Mexicans, and, as president, he has only continued in the same vein about all migrants crossing the southern border. Setting up measures like a weekly immigrant crime report during the first weeks of the administration, the White House underlined the president’s antagonistic approach.
In a tweet on Monday night, Trump wrote about plans for the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to initiate mass immigration arrests and removal: “Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States. They will be removed as fast as they come in.” While the scope of deportation that Trump is threatening appears to be unlikely given current resources, attempts at mass deportation typically cause additional detention crises, in transit camps and at transportation sites charged with moving detainees. This operation will only further degrade the system.
This year, we have seen the border camps grow and the declaration of a phony national emergency that is turning into a real one. If the administration were focused on humanitarian issues, these facilities might have more in common with refugee camps. But the administration has repeatedly lied about family separation, claiming at first that it wasn’t happening, while taking children from parents as a form of deterrence. President Trump’s antipathy to Mexicans and Central Americans is being transformed into policy at the highest levels of the most powerful government in the world. In combination with miserable conditions on the ground and brutal acts by agents charged with enforcement, U.S. detention camps—which were already abysmal under several prior presidents—have evolved into a more dangerous entity.
Decades of stoking resentment have polarized views on immigration. Embracing harsh rhetoric in 1993, President Clinton helped reverse tolerance for migrants by proclaiming that America would not “surrender our borders to those who wish to exploit our history of compassion and justice.” During his administration, the Republican Congress went further, expanding detention broadly for migrants, reducing their ability to get legal representation, and making it easier to deport them. Clinton embraced this legislation, and future administrations followed suit.
Even if additional resources are provided for those in detention, if those resources are accompanied by further militarization of the border, the administration’s policies will be working at cross purposes with each other. If the detention-centered approach is kept, no amount of aid will keep these camps from becoming part of the American landscape for years to come. Arresting immigrants for even minor infractions and ramping up detentions at the border, the administration has also rescinded Obama-era easing of some rules for migrants with U.S.-born children or no criminal record, thereby expanding a backlog of cases that already stretched for years. Intentionally jamming a faltering system can overload it beyond repair.
A camp in a country in which the leader openly expresses animosity toward those interned, in which a government detains people and harms them by separating children from their parents or deliberately putting them in danger, is much closer to a concentration camp than a refugee camp. Nothing we are doing is likely to repeat Auschwitz, or to come anywhere close to it. But the history of concentration camps shows us that when it comes to this kind of detention, even when a government isn’t plotting a genocide, shocking numbers of people can still end up hurt—or dead.
Andrea Pitzer is the author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, and her work has also appeared in The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, Vox, Slate, and USA Today.
https://www.gq.com/story/us-border-concentration-camps
A devastating thread appeared on Twitter yesterday posted by attorney and Gaia Project Consulting CEO Elizabeth McLaughlin, who claims to be the friend of an migrant aide worker who told her that asylum seekers in Texas are being held in outdoor pens called the “Dog Pound” which is exposed to the elements with dirt floors, and from their they are moved to “The Freezer” which is kept at 55 degrees, while they refused access to baby-formula, toiletries or clean, warm clothes.
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
IF YOU CARE ABOUT WHAT TRUMP IS DOING AT THE BORDER, you need to read and share this thread. @jacobsoboroff @JuliaEAinsley please read this.
I have just gotten off the phone with a friend who is a legal volunteer in Border Patrol facilities.
Don't look away.
1/
And in the “I fracking told you so column” perhaps these overcrowded conditions are why CBP has quarantined as many as 5,200 adults who apparent at risk of contracting both Mumps and Chicken Pox while in custody of 39 detention centers.
ICE has recorded cases of either mumps or chicken pox in 39 immigrant detention centers nationwide, an ICE official tells CNN.
Of the 5,200 detainees in quarantine across those centers, around 4,200 are for exposure to mumps. Around 800 were exposed to chicken pox and 100 have been exposed to both.
The Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly warned of the toll the increasing number of migrants at the border has taken on the department. This week, Acting DHS Secretary Kevin McAleenan urged lawmakers for additional funding to assist operations, calling the crisis "unlike anything our country has ever faced.
So, that’s just swell.
Before i continue with Ms. McLaughlin’s thread, I want to again point out that it is legal to cross the border from any point and seek asylum in the U.S. so technically none of these people should be held in the first place not to mention without probable cause, access to legal presentation and an opportunity to provide bail.
If you are caught crossing the border and you don’t ask for the protection of asylum the first offense is a misdemeanor which has a civil penalty that starts at fine of $25.
What exactly the fuck is the reason for holding each and every person — whether they request asylum or not — in detention for weeks to months on end? This is all simply put: Bullshit. Dangerous bullshit.
And they are also using a former Oklahoma site for these extra-legal detention that used to be an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during WWII.
Ok, so now back to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
· Jun 13, 2019
Replying to @ECMcLaughlin
My friend has done two tours now volunteering as a legal advocate inside CBP facilities.
She passed along information about what is happening there that indicates that the Trump Administration is violating every basic human right, and is moving toward military "solutions."
2/
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
So that folks understand the process: CBP has outposts on the border. Refugees seeking asylum travel hundreds of miles on foot, including with infants and small children, and turn themselves in at these outposts *on foot.*
Here's what happens next. Don't look away.
3/
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
· Jun 13, 2019
Replying to @ECMcLaughlin
CBP then transfers these human beings to a facility called "the Dog Pound." (Here, my friend started crying.)
The "Dog Pound" is comprised of cages, outside and on dirt, with no protection from the elements.
Don't look away.
4/
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
There are dozens of teen moms there.
There is no baby food.
While there, my friend saw a CBP agent take a baby from her teenage mother, strip the baby of its clothes, hand the baby back to the mother, and send them outside to the "Dog Pound" to sleep in the dirt.
5/
The existence of the “Dog Pound” has been confirmed right here on Dailykos:
Last week, a New Mexico State University professor discovered that U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has been detaining migrants again outside near the Paso del Norte International Bridge in El Paso. From Bob Moore’s interview with government professor Neal Rosendorf for Texas Monthly:Rosendorf described it as “a human dog pound”—one hundred to 150 men behind a chain-link fence, huddled beneath makeshift shelters made from mylar blankets and whatever other scraps they could find to shield themselves from the heat of the sun. “I was able to speak with detainees and take photos of them with their permission,” Rosendorf said in an email. “They told me they’ve been incarcerated outside for a month, that they haven’t washed or been able to change the clothes they were detained in the entire time, and that they’re being poorly fed and treated in general.” [….]
CBP previously detained people under the bridge in March and early April but moved the detainees to enclosed conditions after a public outcry over reports of children and pregnant women sleeping on gravel and being bombarded with pigeon droppings. At the time, CBP officials said they were using an area on the east side of the port of entry as a processing center for migrants, preparing them for transfer to other facilities or release. Officials didn’t respond to questions about when they resumed detaining rather than processing people outdoors.
Both Rosendorf and Representative Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, said they were told by detainees that some people have been held more than a month outdoors. They said they saw only single adults held outside at the bridge. Escobar said she was told most were Cuban men. The report by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General that triggered Rosendorf’s trip to the bridge was based on an unannounced inspection on May 7 and 8, a little over three weeks before he saw people detained outside.
These migrant men are fathers and sons and brothers who in all likelihood came here to work and provide for their families. It’s not okay just because there are no women or children that we know of currently detained by Trump and his monstrous administration in such cruel and inhumane conditions.
For those who don’t know, El Paso is in the Chihuahuan Desert where temperatures routinely reach into the 90s or low 100s at this time of year.Bob Moore
@BobMooreNews
NEW: After @NealSoftPower stumbled across a “human dog pound” near an El Paso international bridge, @CBP acknowledged it has been detaining migrants outdoors for extended periods as temperatures hit 100. My story for @TexasMonthly. 1/
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news/borde ... rderpatrol …
In El Paso, Border Patrol Is Detaining Migrants in ‘a Human Dog Pound’
Immigration officials have resumed the much-criticized practice of keeping people outdoors for weeks to relieve dangerous overcrowding.
BY
ROBERT MOORE
DATE
JUN 11, 2019
Neal Rosendorf, a government professor at New Mexico State University, took this photograph of migrants he discovered being detained outdoors near the Paso del Norte Bridge in El Paso. The men said they had been held there more than 30 days, without showering or changing clothes.
Neal Rosendorf
After New Mexico State University professor Neal Rosendorf read a government report exposing dangerous overcrowding of detained migrants at the Paso del Norte International Bridge in El Paso, he headed to the port of entry to see if he could find anyone protesting conditions there. When he reached the west side of the bridge, he encountered an unmarked open gate, which he walked through in the hopes of asking Border Patrol agents whether they had seen any protesters. Continuing underneath and then past the bridge about 100 yards or so, he was stunned by what he saw—migrants who said they’d been held outdoors for weeks as temperatures rose to nearly 100 degrees.
Rosendorf described it as “a human dog pound”—one hundred to 150 men behind a chain-link fence, huddled beneath makeshift shelters made from mylar blankets and whatever other scraps they could find to shield themselves from the heat of the sun. “I was able to speak with detainees and take photos of them with their permission,” Rosendorf said in an email. “They told me they’ve been incarcerated outside for a month, that they haven’t washed or been able to change the clothes they were detained in the entire time, and that they’re being poorly fed and treated in general.”
U.S. Customs and Border Protection took eight days to respond to Texas Monthly’s questions about Rosendorf’s discovery. In a statement this week, a CBP official acknowledged that the agency was detaining migrants outdoors for extended periods.
“During the current crisis, U.S. Border Patrol has had to take extraordinary measures to ensure the safety of our agents and those in our custody. As such, and to avoid severe overcrowding of USBP temporary holding facilities, every available space which provides both freedom of movement, safety, and security for those in our custody are used as necessary,” the official said. “Throughout the intake, processing, and holding of those in our custody, some individuals are being held in an area near the [Paso del Norte)] Bridge … Some of those locations are partially outdoors while still providing relief from sun, wind, and inclement weather.”
The official said CBP tries to make bathing available to detainees. “However, shower facility use is prioritized for children and vulnerable populations. Clothing is changed or provided as necessary and as available.”
Rosendorf said he was able to spend almost fifteen minutes talking to the detained migrants until Border Patrol and CBP officials discovered him and ordered him to leave. The CBP official acknowledged that “staffing shortfalls and conflicts” allowed the government professor to wander through what is supposed to be a secure area. “Unfortunately, this was a rare instance where there was a breakdown in communication and area coverage/relief was not as seamless as it should have been. Local leadership is addressing this issue,” the official said.
CBP previously detained people under the bridge in March and early April but moved the detainees to enclosed conditions after a public outcry over reports of children and pregnant women sleeping on gravel and being bombarded with pigeon droppings. At the time, CBP officials said they were using an area on the east side of the port of entry as a processing center for migrants, preparing them for transfer to other facilities or release. Officials didn’t respond to questions about when they resumed detaining rather than processing people outdoors.
Both Rosendorf and Representative Veronica Escobar, D-El Paso, said they were told by detainees that some people have been held more than a month outdoors. They said they saw only single adults held outside at the bridge. Escobar said she was told most were Cuban men. The report by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General that triggered Rosendorf’s trip to the bridge was based on an unannounced inspection on May 7 and 8, a little over three weeks before he saw people detained outside.
The report didn’t mention people detained outside. “When we observed conditions and reviewed custody records at the CBP facility at the Paso del Norte Bridge, we did not see evidence at the time of our visit that people were held outside for excessive time periods,” inspector general spokesman Arlen Morales said. “We will be conducting additional unannounced inspections and will continue to report on our observations.”
CBP policies state that people shouldn’t be held for more than three days at its facilities, which generally are small cells designed to keep people for just a few hours while they are processed. But DHS has said its detention arm, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, is at its maximum capacity of about 52,000 because of the ongoing surge of migrants at the border. As a result, CBP is holding more than 30,000 people in its facilities, according to DHS.
Escobar said ICE could alleviate what the inspector general called “dangerous holding conditions” at the Paso del Norte Bridge by releasing more detainees. That would allow CBP to move migrants from the bridge to ICE’s long-term detention facilities so they could begin the asylum process. “I know for a fact that some ICE beds are taken up by people who should be paroled, should be connected to their sponsor, people who are not a threat to America or society, people who are still waiting for the final adjudication on their asylum requests,” she said.
CBP hasn’t said how many people are being held outdoors at the bridge, but Escobar said she saw “at least a couple hundred” when she visited the area on Friday. She said the conditions are straining migrants and border agents.
El Paso’s forecast calls for high temperatures in the upper 90s to low 100s for the next several weeks. In recent days, the makeshift shelters of the people held outdoors have become increasingly visible to pedestrians crossing into the United States on the bridge above. Escobar fears that disaster looms. “As the weather warms up, I am afraid more people will die,” she said. “It’s impossible to control dehydration when you have people in these large groups sitting outside—even when they’re under a shady area.”
Apparently, Border Patrol’s strategy is to hide what they’re doing from the public, then to stall when questioned by the media or members of Congress. In this instance, they took 8 days to respond to Texas Monthly’s inquiries after Moore began working on this story.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news/borde ... rderpatrol
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
· Jun 13, 2019
Replying to @ECMcLaughlin
The "Dog Pound" has no running water, no covers, no tarp, no care, no safety from the elements. It is freezing at night, and deathly hot during the day.
Everyone is sick. My friend said she saw a baby on this trip that was so sick "I thought it would be dead by morning."
6/
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
Toddlers in the "Dog Pound" who had been eating solid food are given only infant formula. Moms are trying to start breast feeding again so their children don't starve.
These moms are dehydrated, sick, & have walked miles through desert with no water. CBP gives them nothing.
7/
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
· Jun 13, 2019
Replying to @ECMcLaughlin
It gets worse. Don't look away.
From the "Dog Pound," these human beings are moved to an area called "The Freezer."
The Freezer is kept at 55 degrees.
Some of the refugees who are moved there are still wet from their journey, and are put in The Freezer wet.
8/
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
CBP is keeping human beings in "The Freezer" for weeks at a time. WEEKS.
Including critically ill people, disabled people, sick children, teenage mothers with babies.
The floor of The Freezer is made of dirt or very rough concrete. There are no beds.
Keep reading.
9/
The use of The Freezer has also been confirmed, this time by Human Rights Watch:
United States immigration authorities routinely detain men, women, and children, including infants, in frigid holding cells, sometimes for days, when they are taken into custody at or near the US border with Mexico. Migrants and US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents alike commonly refer to these cells as hieleras (“freezers”).
All immigration detainees have the right to be treated with dignity and humanity, and children, whether unaccompanied or with family members, are entitled to additional safeguards under US and international law. This report examines US authorities’ compliance with the specific protections that should be afforded to children, drawing on 110 interviews with children themselves or women detained with their children. As detailed below, we found that conditions in holding cells at the southern border are often poor and in several critical respects identical to those previously found by US courts to be in violation of CBP’s obligations and prior commitments.
Women and children detained along the border usually spend one to three nights, and sometimes longer, in CBP holding cells, where they sleep on the floor, often with only a Mylar blanket, similar to the foil wrappers used by marathon runners, to protect them from the cold. Border agents sometimes require them to remove and discard sweaters or other layers of clothing, purportedly for security reasons, before they enter the holding cells.
Almost all of the women and children we spoke with said that they were not allowed to shower, sometimes for days, until just before they were transferred to longer-term detention facilities. Nearly all said that they did not receive hand soap, toothpaste, or toothbrushes in these holding cells, meaning that for the duration of their stay they were not able to wash their hands with soap before and after eating and after using the toilet. Most women said that menstrual hygiene products and diapers were available on request, but several told us they did not have access to these items while in CBP holding cells. If they had these and other toiletries among their personal property, they were not allowed to retrieve these items while in the holding cells.
Alright, back to Elizabeth.
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
· Jun 13, 2019
Replying to @ECMcLaughlin
From "The Freezer," refugees are supposed to be moved to ICE facilities that are designed for residential care. They have beds, food, bathrooms.
However, (keep reading) THOSE FACILITIES ARE EMPTY.
ICE IS SHUTTING THEM DOWN.
Don't look away.
10/
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
What our government is doing instead is moving refugees to MILITARY INSTALLATIONS.
The announcement about Fort Sill, which was used as a Japanese internment camp, is only the start.
So why would our government be doing this?
11/
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
· Jun 13, 2019
Replying to @ECMcLaughlin
Here's why
These concentration camps (let's call them what they are) will be under the control of the Department of Homeland Security, but within the Department of Defense.
12/.
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
Unlike ICE facilities, which allow site inspectors inside, there will be no inspection of military-run camps.
The military will be able to deny access to anyone it chooses. No media. No oversight.
13/
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
· Jun 13, 2019
Replying to @ECMcLaughlin
Lawyers will not be allowed in. Human rights monitors will not be allowed in.
The camps will also be protected airspace, meaning that no drones can fly over them to take pictures of what's going on inside.
14/
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
The Trump administration will be able to conduct itself in whatever way it wants to without anyone knowing what's going on inside.
Think about what that means. Think about why they would want that.
This is happening RIGHT NOW.
15/
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
· Jun 13, 2019
Replying to @ECMcLaughlin
ICE facilities with beds and food are EMPTY, because the Trump administration is moving refugees into military-run concentration camps where they can do ANYTHING THEY CHOOSE without oversight, media scrutiny or advocate access.
16/
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
This administration is already committing atrocities at CBP facilities.
Border Patrol agents at the facility where my friend was working refer to these human beings as "bodies." Not people. "Bodies."
They are denying medicine, toilets, beds, food, shelter and clothes.
17/
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
· Jun 13, 2019
Replying to @ECMcLaughlin
My friend said that "Flores is on very tenuous ground."
We're days away from being met with "we're not going to let you in, no matter what."
18/
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
What is coming is crimes against humanity.
America is already perpetrating mass human rights violations, and this administration is setting it up so they can do far worse, in secret, under military supervision.
19/
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
· Jun 13, 2019
Replying to @ECMcLaughlin
Military forces are already been shifted to CBP. My friend saw *coast guard agents* (read that again) working for CBP at this facility.
If we do nothing, there will be blood on our hands.
20/
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
If Pelosi does nothing, there will be blood on her hands and the hands of every Democrat who refuses to act to end this administration's reign.
Fascism is here.
21/
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
· Jun 13, 2019
Replying to @ECMcLaughlin
If this enrages you, devastates you, frightens you, share this thread.
Then call your member of Congress and read it to them.
Then call @SpeakerPelosi and ask her why she sits silently by as our government does this.
22/
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
We're on a fast train to hell.
There's only one way to stop it.
Trump must be removed from power immediately, by any legal means, using every weapon in our arsenal.
23/
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
· Jun 13, 2019
Replying to @ECMcLaughlin
This is where we are. This is WHO we are.
Look reality in the face. Don't look away.
Fight like human life depends on it.
It does. It does. It does.
/end
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
PS. I have been asked to tag @AOC in this thread with an urgent plea that she read it.
What is happening at the border mandates immediate action and revolt in the Democratic party.
PPS. My friend has photos of the facility. This is real. It's America, right now.
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
· Jun 13, 2019
Replying to @ECMcLaughlin
Last tweet: please donate to @RAICESTEXAS. Please do it immediately and as much as you can.
Please donate to the @ACLU.
Please fight against this administration with everything you've got.
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
To those of you asking: tag your reps, your Senators, tag anyone you want.
Every American needs to see what this administration is doing in our name.@HouseDemocrats need to ask themselves if they'll sit idly by while America perpetrates atrocities.
Elizabeth C. McLaughlin
@ECMcLaughlin
· Jun 13, 2019
Replying to @ECMcLaughlin
Please read. Please share. Lives are in the balance.
Pass it on. Tell your congress person.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/6 ... he-Freezer
This Army base interned Japanese during WWII. Now it’ll be a concentration camp for migrant kids. This needs to stop
Will Bunch
Sue Ogrocki / AP
Fort Sill, a sprawling U.S. Army base in the flatlands 85 miles southwest of Oklahoma City, has a pleasant-looking stone entrance, framing a piece of heavy artillery. That just hints at its violent story — launched with a generation of bloody military campaigns against Native Americans that only ended with the imprisonment of the legendary Apache chief Geronimo, who’s buried at the fort.
Fort Sill’s history as an outpost of an American gulag is briefer but no less brutal.
In early 1942, the U.S. Justice Department transferred to the Oklahoma base some 700 people of Japanese descent — in this case, still holding Japanese citizenship and accused of spying based on non-existent or specious evidence — rounded up after Pearl Harbor and imprisoned without charges. It was one small slice of a shameful episode in American history — the internment of at least 110,000 people, eventually comprised mostly of Japanese-Americans U.S. citizens -- by President Franklin Roosevelt at the dawn of World War II.
Upon their arrival, the prisoners were greeted that April by harsh prairie winds that forced them to stay up all night to keep their tents from collapsing. When summer finally came, daytime temperatures soared over 100 degrees, with no shade to protect the internees. Yet the camp’s guards — who watched over everything from tall towers with machine guns — refused to let their prisoners rest during these boiling days.
It was enough to drive a man insane — and then one man finally was. His name was Kanesaburo Oshima. The 58-year-old’s alleged “crime” was volunteering to translate documents for Japan’s consular office on the big island of Hawaii, helping out his fellow Japanese natives who’d joined him in emigrating to the then-U.S. territory. Five months in, Oshima’s worries about his 11 children and the fate of the small shop he ran back in Hawaii ate at his soul.
On May 12, 1942, Oshima couldn’t take it anymore. He walked up to the first of two wire fences surrounding the encampment and started climbing over. A U.S. guard chased him with a pistol and fired several shots that missed, as other internees screamed, “Don’t shoot! He’s insane!” Oshima made it to the second fence and climbed to the top but then stopped — long enough for another chasing guard to shoot him in the back of the head. Kanesaburo Oshima died instantly — one of at least seven Japanese-Americans shot and killed by guards during the World War II internment.David Beard
@dabeard
US plans to detain migrant kids at former WW2 internment camp for Japanese Americans: @TIME http://time.com/5605120/trump-migrant-c ... fort-sill/ …
35
9:35 AM - Jun 12, 2019
Those heartbreaking gunshots are echoing 77 years later. Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced that Fort Sill will again become a camp for people born on foreign soil and detained by the U.S. government — some 1,400 migrant children from Central America rounded up during the ongoing crackdown at America’s southern border. We seem determined as a nation to preach “Never Again” to our schoolkids — while doing the same things again and again.
Yes, there are caveats. So let’s deal with them. It’s very important to note that the Fort Sill was used for similar purposes during Barack Obama’s presidency, for about four months, at the height of a flood of southern border crossings in 2014. I wrote last year that the Obama-era treatment of these kids — some of whom slept in cages — was a disgrace and that I was ashamed and that others should be too that we didn’t pay closer attention and condemn this when it happened.
But, not to sound trite, two wrongs don’t make a right, and for the most part Obama eventually tried to mitigate the 2014 crisis (and unauthorized border crossings did drop.) Trump’s efforts since 2015 — to successfully win the presidency on a xenophobic “Build the wall!” campaign, backed up by a police-state-toward-migrants governing upon taking office — shows a constant striving to make things worse. His policies aim to prove true 2018′s incredibly incisive piece by the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer — that “the cruelty is the point” — and are central to his 2020 re-election scheme.
Somehow, we’re supposed to be reassured that Fort Sill’s camp for kids will be run by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), not by machine-gun toting Army sentries. That’s one small step for humankind, I guess — but the lived experience of 29 months of Trump’s presidency and his abusive immigration policies suggests that the United States has in fact learned next to nothing since the human-rights debacle of the Japanese-American internment.Thomas Kennedy
@tomaskenn
Crimes against humanity.https://www.texasmonthly.com/news/borde ... s-el-paso/ …
In El Paso, Border Patrol Is Detaining Migrants in ‘a Human Dog Pound’
Immigration officials have resumed the much-criticized practice of keeping people outdoors for weeks to relieve dangerous overcrowding.
texasmonthly.com
The U.S. Border Patrol, the first stop for many of these detained youths on their journey to Fort Sill, has — with not nearly enough fanfare — resumed keeping some of its overflow of apprehended border-crossers in what’s been called “a human dog pound” underneath the international bridge in El Paso. Earlier this month, New Mexico State University professor Neal Rosendorf went back to the site that Border Patrol had supposedly abandoned this spring and was shocked to instead find about 100-150 detained men who’d been there for days, desperately seeking shelter from the unrelenting south Texas sun.
"They told me they’ve been incarcerated outside for a month, that they haven’t washed or been able to change the clothes they were detained in the entire time, and that they’re being poorly fed and treated in general,” Rosendorf told Texas Monthly.
If the El Paso situation were an outlier, that would be bad enough. But increasingly the cruelty — the whole point, remember? — is baked into the system. The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists recently exposed a modern gulag of U.S. Immigration Control and Enforcement (ICE) isolation-cell treatment for thousands of detainees “to punish immigrants for offenses as minor as consensual kissing and to segregate hunger strikers, LGBTQ detainees and people with disabilities.” And as you may have heard, at least seven migrant children have died in U.S. custody since Trump took office — a stat that almost weirdly mirrors the Japanese-Americans killed in this nation’s custody during World War II.
Earlier this month, the HHS office that will be detaining children at Fort Sill and other sites — the Office of Refugee Resettlement (which seems very bad at doing its one job) — announced that because it was running out of money keeping so many kids in cages or what not, it’s halting classes and legal aid, even soccer games, for these youths. Again, humans in giant tent cities in harsh climates with literally nothing to do all day sounds painfully like the Japanese-American internment.
Or...a concentration camp.
As the number of U.S. immigration detainees rises in tandem with these reports of horrific abuses, there’s been a growing debate over whether it’s right to refer to the islands of the growing gulag archipelago across America — the nation of “it can’t happen here” — as “concentration camps.” But to experts who know the most about the subject, that question is already settled.Bradford Pearson
@BradfordPearson
One of the sources for my book—who spent his childhood in a Japanese concentration camp in Wyoming—regularly visits family detention centers. I asked him once how the two compared.
“Brad,” he said. “It’s worse than anything we ever experienced.” https://time.com/5605120/trump-migrant- ... re-article …
Trump Administration to Hold Migrant Children at Base That Served as WWII Japanese Internment Camp
HHS said Fort Sill will be used “as a temporary emergency influx shelter”
time.com
I communicated this week with Andrea Pitzer, a veteran journalist who authored 2017′s definitive work, One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps. She told me that Americans have come to associate the term “concentration camp” with its most lethal form — the Nazi death camps, or extermination camps, such as Auschwitz — but the history of detention centers meant to isolate and dehumanize various populations is both more extensive and more complex.
“What we’re doing is dangerous," Pitzer said of Trump administration treatment of migrants. "This kind of mass civilian detention without trial always leads to predictable bad outcomes, from permanent harm to children to illness or death. Each camp system also brings new and unexpected misfortunes into the world that no one planned on. The latter often turns out to be their most dangerous aspect. And once opened, camp systems are very hard to close.”
The journalist Jonathan M. Katz made a similar argument in the Los Angeles Times and on his own website, that it’s time to acknowledge that America is running concentration camps and to treat this with the moral urgency that deserves. He quoted the renowned “banality of evil” Holocaust chronicler and survivor Hannah Arendt, who said even non-lethal concentration camps are a problem for humanity because “the human masses sealed off in them are treated as if they no longer existed, as if what happened to them were no longer of interest to anybody, as if they were already dead…”
Yes, the “human dog pound" of El Paso, the looming detention center at Fort Sill, and these other facilities are indeed American concentration camps, and we have an obligation as human beings to try to stop this by any means necessary. Whether it’s by massive public protest or by a miraculous growth of congressional backbone, we urgently need to force new policies that will speed the flow of children to sponsors or into asylum hearings, and ensure that any detentions are brief and, most importantly, humane. Big picture, it means doing things like restoring smartly targeted aid to Central American nations that will stop desperate people from making a dangerous trek in the first place.
For decades, Americans and finally our government have been apologizing for our short-sighted, foolish, and, yes, cruel treatment of Japanese-Americans from 1941 to 1945. I don’t want my unborn grandchildren to have to apologize for the banal evil that’s taking place right now under President Donald Trump. We need to work much harder to make sure this generation doesn’t dishonor the memory of Kanesaburo Oshima — to make sure that such a thing happens never again.
https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/fort-s ... 90613.html
Fort Sill, a sprawling U.S. Army base in the flatlands 85 miles southwest of Oklahoma City, has a pleasant-looking stone entrance, framing a piece of heavy artillery. That just hints at its violent story — launched with a generation of bloody military campaigns against Native Americans that only ended with the imprisonment of the legendary Apache chief Geronimo, who’s buried at the fort.
Fort Sill’s history as an outpost of an American gulag is briefer but no less brutal.
In early 1942, the U.S. Justice Department transferred to the Oklahoma base some 700 people of Japanese descent — in this case, still holding Japanese citizenship and accused of spying based on non-existent or specious evidence — rounded up after Pearl Harbor and imprisoned without charges. It was one small slice of a shameful episode in American history — the internment of at least 110,000 people, eventually comprised mostly of Japanese-Americans U.S. citizens ..
Happneing now:
Earlier this month, the Trump administration announced that Fort Sill will again become a camp for people born on foreign soil and detained by the U.S. government — some 1,400 migrant children from Central America rounded up during the ongoing crackdown at America’s southern border. We seem determined as a nation to preach “Never Again” to our schoolkids — while doing the same things again and again
— cruelty is the point
and another step toward fascism
Premature migrant baby found at Texas Border Patrol facility
https://nypost.com/2019/06/14/premature ... -facility/
Migrants being held outdoors near bridge in El Paso, official says
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/paso-del-n ... 019-06-11/
Migrants in U.S. custody describe life in 'ice boxes' and 'dog pounds'
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa- ... SKBN1K82X1
Nearly 900 migrants found at Texas facility with 125-person capacity: DHS watchdog
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/900-mig ... d=63404988
Exclusive: Watchdog finds detainees 'standing on toilets' for breathing room at border facility holding 900 people in space meant for 125
https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/31/politics ... index.html
5,200 people in ICE custody quarantined for exposure to mumps or chicken pox
https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/14/politics ... index.html
Early Arrival: Trump Slashes Migrant Youth Services
https://documentedny.com/2019/06/07/ear ... -services/
Fintan O’Toole: Trial runs for fascism are in full flow
Post by seemslikeadream » Fri Aug 17, 2018 7:53 am
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=41246&p=672829&hilit=immigrants#p672829
Barr AG Nominee Held Immigrants in HIV Prison Camp
Post by seemslikeadream » Tue Jan 15, 2019 8:54 pm
viewtopic.php?f=52&t=41527&p=668705&hilit=immigrants#p668705
Thousands More Migrant Children Were Separated From Parents
Post by seemslikeadream » Thu Jan 17, 2019 4:12 pm
viewtopic.php?f=52&t=41533&p=668768&hilit=immigrants#p668768
Teens in Cage Protest Trump Immigration Policies Outside UN, Demanding Action From Human Rights Council
"Children belong in school and with their families, not caged in detention centers."
Jessica Corbett, staff writer
While an audio recording of detained migrant children crying played in the background, teenagers in T-shirts that read #ClassroomsNotCages stood in a metal cage outside the United Nations European headquarters in Geneva Monday to protest the Trump administration's "cruel" immigration policies.
The action was part of a demonstration that aimed to draw attention to the U.N. Human Rights Council's consideration of a complaint (pdf) filed last year by unions, faith organizations, and human and civil rights groups about the "inhumane [U.S.] policy of tearing immigrant children from their families who come to our borders seeking asylum and protection."Embedded video
Public Services International
@PSIglobalunion
Event begins with heartbreaking soundtrack of children in detention crying for their parents.. #FamiliesBelongTogether #ClassroomsNotCages
8
2:07 AM - Jun 17, 2019
"Children belong in school and with their families, not caged in detention centers," says a website for groups that filed the complaint, which include the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and Public Services International. "We must let the UNHRC know that this cruelty and these human rights abuses cannot be ignored."
AFT president Randi Weingarten was among those who addressed those gathered in Geneva Monday.
"In the past five months, 2,500 children have been separated from their parents at the U.S.-Mexico border. This is despite a judge's order to stop and to reunify the children," she said, according to Reuters. "Six children have died. We are saying to the Human Rights Council: Hear us and help us!"Embedded video
AFT
@AFTunion
.@rweingarten outside the UN in Geneva, demanding the Human Rights Council take action on our human rights complaint against Trump’s family separation and caging children policies. #ClassroomsNotCages #FamiliesBelongTogether
19
2:23 AM - Jun 17, 2019
Alfonso Cepeda Salas, secretary-general of SNTE, a Mexican teachers union, added: "We are here to express our profound indignation at the policy of separating children from their families. Enough, no cages for these children!"Embedded video
Snte Nacional
@SnteNacional
El mundo debe tener escuelas inclusivas para migrantes The world must have inclusive schools for migrants #SNTE Alfonso Cepeda #FelizLunes #BuenLunes #BB21 AMLO #ClassroomsNotCages #55strong @UNICEFEducation @eduint @AFTunion #RSAGER #NIGFRA #JIMIN #RT
234
2:24 PM - Jun 17, 2019
Organizers are urging people across the globe to send letters to the UNHRC—which the Trump administration ditched last year—to "let council members know that we expect them to stand up for these innocent children who are being subjected to this unimaginable cruelty."
The protest follows a slew of recent incidents that demonstrate the human rights crisis at the U.S.-Mexico border—including, as Common Dreams reported Friday, the neglect of a teenage mother and her infant by Customs and Border Patrol and the death of a seven-year-old girl believed to be from India.
Earlier last week, Trump administration officials revealed plans to detain migrant children at a former Japanese internment camp in Oklahoma because an "influx" of minors has overwhelmed shelters throughout the country. A spokesperson for the administration told Reuters Monday that some 13,200 children are currently in U.S. custody.
In an effort to more quickly release migrant children—both those who came to the country without parents and those who have not yet been returned to their families after being forcibly separated under the administration's "zero tolerance" policy—the Department of Homeland Security recently eased its vetting rules for sponsors, who are often U.S.-based adult relatives.
Outside the U.N. office in Geneva Monday, protesters carried signs that said: "Children should not be locked up. Period."
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/ ... tion-human
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggiwq3caA5s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3Fa4fd6JjI
con·scious·ness
noun
the state of being awake and aware of one's surroundings
the awareness or perception of something by a person
the fact of awareness by the mind of itself and the world.
"consciousness emerges from the operations of the brain"
Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness or of being aware of an external object or something within oneself.
Time Talks - Ep 3 -Andrea Pitzer on the History of Concentration Camps and Family Separation,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAUUea9iHkw
