Friends,
According to today’s Washington Post, the Trump regime plans to renovate industrial warehouses to hold more than 80,000 immigrant detainees at a time.
The plan is for newly arrested detainees to be funneled — let me remind you, with no due process, or independent magistrate or judge checking on whether they are in fact in the United States illegally — into one of seven large-scale warehouses holding 5,000 to 10,000 people each, where they would be “staged” for deportation.
The large warehouses would be located close to major logistics hubs in Virginia, Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, Georgia and Missouri. Sixteen smaller warehouses would hold up to 1,500 people each.
America’s immigrant detention system is already the largest in the world.
With the $45 billion Congress appropriated for locking up immigrants, the regime has revived dormant prisons, repurposed sections of military bases, and partnered with Republican governors to build immigrant tent encampments in remote regions.
“We need to get better at treating this like a business,” ICE acting director Todd M. Lyons said at a border security conference in April, according to the Arizona Mirror. The administration’s goal, he said, was to deport immigrants as efficiently as Amazon moves packages: “Like Prime, but with human beings.”
The logistical problems of converting warehouses into detention camps are significant. Warehouses are designed for storage and shipping of things, not people. They are often poorly ventilated and without precise temperature controls, and they lack access to the plumbing and sanitation systems needed to support thousands of full-time residents.
Beyond logistics is the dehumanization.
Ninety-three years ago, in March 1933, the Nazis established their first concentration camp in what is now Dachau, Poland. Other camps were soon established in Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen.
Initially, the Nazi’s put into these camps Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, and others deemed a threat to the Nazi regime.
After the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 9-10, 1938, approximately 30,000 Jewish men were arrested and sent to these camps in a mass, large-scale action that targeted them for being Jewish. The systematic mass murder of Jews in camps designed as extermination camps did not begin until late 1941 and early 1942, as part of the “Final Solution.”
The U.S. began forcibly moving Japanese Americans into camps in early 1942, following President Roosevelt’s signing of Executive Order 9066 of February 19, 1942, which authorized military exclusion zones. Initial roundups of “enemy aliens” started immediately after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941.
Around 120,000 people of Japanese descent, mostly U.S. citizens from the West Coast, were incarcerated in ten camps in remote inland states and temporary Assembly Centers. Hundreds more were imprisoned in Hawaii.
Once dehumanization begins, it’s hard to end.
As I noted, ICE is arresting, imprisoning, and deporting people it accuses of being in the United States illegally — but there is no due process, no third-party validation of ICE’s accusations.
ICE now holds more than 68,000 people in detention facilities, according to agency data. Nearly half — 48 percent — have no criminal convictions or pending criminal charges, ICE data shows.
ICE’s biggest current facility is a tent encampment at the Fort Bliss U.S. Army base in Texas, which now holds around 3,000 people but was expected to have a capacity of 5,000 by year’s end.
The largest proposed ICE warehouse would hold up to 10,000 detainees in Stafford, Virginia. Another with capacity for up to 9,500 is planned for Hutchins, near Dallas. A third, with space for 9,000, in Hammond, east of Baton Rouge.
There is no place in a civilized society for the warehousing of people. There is no justification in a society putatively organized under the rule of law to imprison people without due process. There is no decency in removing hardworking members of our communities from their families and neighbors and imprisoning them and then deporting them to other countries, some of which are brutal dictatorships.
When the history of this cruel era is written, the shame should be no less than the shame we now feel about the roundups and detention of Japanese Americans in World War II.
Hopefully, the dehumanization of the people the Trump regime aims to warehouse will not result in the sadistic cruelties of the Nazi’s starting ninety-three years ago.
This post has been syndicated from Robert Reich, where it was published under this address.