They’re concentration camps, without a doubt

Dear Editor: The Trump administration is running concentration camps at our southern border.

These are not death camps, where prisoners are sent to die — although people are dying. These are concentration camps, locations where prisoners are held in horrific conditions without being charged with crimes.

We can shroud it in euphemism all we want, explain it away, but these are the atrocities we are committing:

• Making asylum seekers sleep on concrete or dirt floors with the lights on 24/7.

• Feeding them uncooked frozen food, Kool-Aid, and other processed junk.

• Feeding toddlers infant formula.

• Refusing to provide toothbrushes and soap.

• Penning detainees in areas that Customs and Border Patrol officers call the “dog pound.”

• Forcing mothers to begin breast feeding again because they are denied baby food.

• Leaving babies in soiled diapers.

• Confining some asylum seekers still sweaty from their journey to “the freezer,” kept at 55 degrees, for weeks at a time.

• Denying detainees medicine and toilets.

• Making them sleep under aluminum foil sheets instead of blankets, and with no pillows.

• Exposing them to illnesses for which they are not given care.

• Refusing to move them to ICE facilities with beds, food and bathrooms in favor of military installations.

The Trump administration has detained more than 40,000 children so far this year, a 57 percent increase from last year.

Vice President Mike Pence accused Democrats of not appropriating money to prevent these deplorable conditions. But President Donald Trump had no problem moving money from the defense budget to fund his racist border wall. It’s just easier to blame former President Barack Obama and the Democrats than to take responsibility for the inhumanity we are perpetrating.

Remember, Anne Frank was not gassed or incinerated in a Nazi death camp; she died of typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

Is this how we want history to remember us? Ted Millar Milton, N.Y.