…and I suspect we’ll go lower.
A lawyer from the US Department of Justice argued (with by all accounts a straight face and no embarrassment) to a federal court of appeals that the US has no obligation to give soap or toothbrushes to children being detained — in cages — in a federal facility while their asylum claims are pending.
Meanwhile the online crowds are debating what to call these places where kids sleep on concrete floors under foil blankets, and will no longer get English lessons or even playground access.
Is it wrong to call them “concentration camps”? That’s what the British authorities called the camps in which they imprisoned Afrikaners; the US called the WWII-era camps in which they put US citizens of Japanese origin “internment camps” but I’ve head people call them concentration camps. The terminology gets muddied when one brings in the Nazis. Historians distinguish between the Nazis’ “concentration camps” and the Nazis’ “death camps”, but I suspect a large part of the non-Jewish public today mostly doesn’t.
Personally, although I have no problem with the term “concentration camp” since it’s historically accurate, I think the best word is “atrocity”.
PS. Just to head off one common and inaccurate rejoinder, a recent study shows that “When families and unaccompanied children have access to legal representation, the rate ofcompliance with immigration court obligations is nearly 98 percent.”
And to anticipate a second rejoinder, Godwin’s Law does not apply here.
