These detention centers should never have been allowed on U.S. soil
My grandparents told me when I was growing up, over and over, that it wasn’t a matter of if it happened again but when and where. I always figured they were talking about another Holocaust — the attempted extermination of the Jewish people during World War II. I am the grandson of two Holocaust survivors, Baruch and Fradla Rubner of Brooklyn, New York, who came to America by way of Lodz, Poland.
I have said and honestly believed that if anything even close to what happened to my grandparents ever happened again that I’d stop whatever I was doing, quit my job, sell my house, pick up arms and storm the gates. Of course, I haven’t done any of that. Like most Americans, I sit with my jaw agape at what we’ve become.
Today, we’re arguing in American politics about whether the conditions inside prison-like holding pens for both adults and children seeking asylum are correctly defined as a “concentration camp”
as the term came to describe the Nazi death camps of wartime Europe — as opposed to an “internment camp,” a “detention center,” or just another “Trump International Hotel.”
I personally have no interest in arguing whether the camps on our southern border full of kids in cages count as “concentration camps” or not. But the very fact that we’re even having this debate at the moment says a lot about how far we’ve fallen as a society.
These federal detention centers are a horrific situation that should never have been allowed on American soil. Families are torn apart —
perhaps permanently, due to horrendous record keeping. They are so overcrowded that many sleep outdoors or on cement floors, while a government attorney defends the practice of not supplying internees with such basic necessities as soap and toothpaste. It’s not a death camp, though children have died unnecessarily in our custody, but it is no less a crime against humanity with hateful ideology as its core value.
Last week, about 200 people rallied outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Detention Center in Aurora that is run by the private company GEO Group. The people held up homemade signs and shouted “we love you” to those interned within. The heartbreaking images of human beings, peering through barred windows at supporters holding notes are absolutely enough to make me understand why the comparisons to concentration camps are being made right now.
John F. Kennedy, probably misquoting Edmund Burke, said it best: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good to do nothing.”
In 1942, Republican Gov. Ralph Carr of Colorado lost his party’s nomination for a third term after passionately opposing the internment of JapaneseAmericans during World War II. In response, the very fine people of the Colorado Republican Party decided to send him packing, nominating his unremarkable lieutenant governor, John Charles Vivian, for the top spot in the following election. Coloradans now revere Carr as one of our finest statesmen, for good reason. And very few of us have ever heard of John Charles Vivian.
Today, a monument to Gov. Carr sits at Kenosha Pass off U.S. 285, the stretch of which is known as the Ralph Carr Memorial Highway. His immortal words, inscribed in stone, “when it is suggested that American citizens be thrown into concentration camps, where they lose all privileges of citizenship under the Constitution, then the principles of that great document are violated and lost.”
Carr also defended noncitizen Italians, Germans and Japanese, as well as American citizens of their descent, as the war raged on, saying: “They are as loyal to American institutions as you and I.” Although many of the Japanese-americans interned during the war were born here, Carr didn’t make any such distinctions. And that’s because this entire country was founded by “unwelcome” immigrants, and American history in this regard simply does not afford our society any moral high ground.
It’s time to stop saying “we’re better than this” or “this isn’t who we are.” America is a morally self-conscious nation founded on lofty ideals but also a place where genocidal atrocities against indigenous people, black slaves, and migrant workers undeniably have occurred. This is exactly who we are, and the only way to stop repeating our terrible history is to at least first acknowledge it.
At least six children have needlessly died in the custody of our government since September. Regardless of what you call it, anyone supporting, encouraging, ignoring, redefining, profiting from or otherwise attempting to justify this devastating reality is squarely on the wrong side of history.