Call them concentration camps.

We all owe Catie Laffoon a big thank you for her bravery and documentation of the Core Civic concentration camp located way out in California’s Mojave Desert. The Mojave just happens to have recorded the hottest surface temperature on the entire planet back in 1972 at 201 degrees Fahrenheit/99.3 degrees Celsius. So, what could go wrong?

Back when I was an agent with the US Border Patrol, in general we did not hold migrants in custody unless they had criminal records or warrants for their arrest. The agency and our management’s own argument for not holding non-criminal migrants in custody was that it violated people’s constitutional and human rights according to the 1980 Refugee Act signed by then President Carter to hold them for lengths of time with no cause, with no proof they were a threat to the country. Additionally, I can remember my supervisors saying it would cost a fortune to hold so many people in detention while waiting for their court hearings that our schools and other government assisted programs would have to close down.

Side note: US House of Representatives has removed the 1980 US Refugee Act from their government website.

Don't get me wrong, after Clinton passed his so-called immigration reform bill that made many legal immigrants suddenly undocumented overnight for minor crimes that wouldn’t even prevent someone from being a Border Patrol agent, we began pushing more and more people into detention. It didn’t hurt that the private prison industry was taking off in the early 1980s.

Fast-forward to the Obama administration, and the private prison industry panicked when he announced that the federal government would begin phasing out most contracts with the private prison industry. Obama justified this change in policy by noting the decrease in the prison population. The rampant corruption, sexual abuse and violence often seen in these facilities was also cited as cause for ending the policy. Private prison companies’ stocks crashed after this announcement. This inspired their management to lobby congressional members and specifically then Senator Jefferson Beauregard Session III quite heavily to find a way to use their for-profit prisons for immigrant detentions.

Side note: I would show you those records, but they no longer exist on the Seante.gov website. This is what you see instead:

And just in case you have forgotten in this shitstorm of a decade, Sessions suddenly became Trump’s Attorney General and did everything he could to fill those private prisons including separating thousands of asylum seekers from their children in what was another shameful day in our history. “We need to take away their children," he proclaimed.

Now with Trump 2.0, we have a mass deportation which is arresting every Brown person they can find who does not have papers. Sometimes this includes documented people, sometimes it includes US citizens who are pregnant and then go into premature labor because of the distress agents caused them.

In the last decade, those in private prison or detention custody without criminal convictions or warrants has ranged from 60% to 70% plus. This latest article shows 65% of people taken during Trump’s mass deportation had no criminal record, and 93% had no violent criminal records. This means 93% of people being kidnapped off the streets are having their rights violated which means they are victims.

Noted scholar and expert on concentration camps Andrea Pitzer defines concentration camps as places where civilian populations are arrested and held without trial or legitimate trials. Often those held have no criminal convictions but are rounded up on the bases of political, ideological, religious or other identity that allows the government to single them out.

If only 7% of those in custody right now are people who should be in custody, if ICE is no longer offering them due process which is guaranteed by the US Constitution to “any person” on US soil regardless of their immigration status, and there is no oversight into these notoriously violent and corrupt private prisons/detention centers, then these facilities are not prisons or detention centers but are concentration camps.

It can no longer be said that ICE and the US government run detention camps. Our government has defunded education and other assistance programs because of funding these facilities that are in violation of the US Constitution, the 1980 Refugee Act and even DHS and ICE policy.

These are concentration camps and must be called such, America.