Detention has become a euphemism for concentration.  Facility has become a euphemism for prison camp.  With a goal of 3,000 immigration arrests a day this administration is, intentionally or not, setting, the stage for concentration camps in America.  This is something we haven’t seen since World War II and even then the Japanese camps were far better planned and more humane than the horrific conditions for those being swept up in America’s communities today.  What we aren’t allowed to see today is what happens when you fire hose humanity into a system that is both extra-legal, under immense stress to succeed, unprepared for the consequences of reaching their goal and too intimidated to fail. Whatever anyone thought about the challenges of immigration, I seriously doubt if many Americans contemplated these brutal Concentration Camps as a solution.  I say ‘extra-legal’ because the Supreme Court has applied such a radical erasure to the lines of legal behavior it seems nothing is entirely illegal when it comes to the treatment of human beings for this administration.

Keeping one’s abuses hidden is as old as mankind. Nazi Germany had to invent the punchcard computer just to keep track of some, if not most of their horrifying project and their worst camps were outside German jurisdictions.  Much of the German public was initially deceived and then in the shock of seeing, chose not to see.  We have much more antiseptic tracking processes now, but even now members of Congress meet physical resistance when they want to personally and physically monitor or witness the treatment of these people we bunch and imprison without due process as ‘illegal immigrants”.  History won’t forgive us for what is happening right now under our noses. We are in the process of choosing not to see.

We must witness what is happening.  This terrible situation is no longer about the technicalities of immigration, but rather the deportation process has degraded into an issue of the morality of how we treat children, women, men, elders, families, and everyone’s future.  Comfort with or support of these crimes of deprivation of due process takes aggressive denial, or in some religious senses: “sinful denial”.  One can no longer  even fantasize there is a brand new system capable of morally and justly treating 3,000 arrests and detentions a day without due process or transparent oversight.  Thirty five to forty men sharing a cell with one non-private toilet is simply brutal. People sleeping like logs lined up at a lumber mill with aluminum blankets exceeds justification. Put out of your mind the bunk beds of the movie Nazi camp we haven’t the time or money for niceties. Families terrorized and terrified after masked men strip away a father, mother or child is something we have never anticipated could happen in our country and yet it is.  We could try to say that isn’t happening except we also know from video evidence and the daily news that it is.  Good is making America America Again and starting again from that important imperfect benchmark. This must stop!