Trump Wants Internment Camps, Media Calls Them 'Warehouses'
The Independent reports Donald Trump’s team is planning to renovate industrial warehouses to hold up to 80,000 migrants. The article describes these as a 'second stop for detainees who are being deported.' One might wonder why 'deported' individuals need a 'second stop' in repurposed industrial buildings, a term that strangely avoids the historical baggage of 'internment camp' or 'detention
facility.' This rhetorical gymnastics masks a chilling echo of past policies that locked up Japanese Americans during WWII under Executive Order 9066, or the 'tent cities' built under the 2018 'zero tolerance' policy, which then-DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen explicitly called 'not internment camps'. So, the U.S. government is considering large-scale detention centers for a specific demographic,
but let's call them 'renovated industrial warehouses.' Because the optics of a 'warehouse' are so much less... permanent. How many 'renovated warehouses' does it take before we acknowledge the historical precedent they evoke?