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Trump’s Massive Deportation Plan Echoes Concentration Camp History
Trump’s language about immigrants “poisoning” the U.S. repeats past rhetoric that led to civilian detention camps, with horrific, tragic results
Trump’s Massive Deportation Plan Echoes Concentration Camp History
Trump’s language about immigrants “poisoning” the U.S. repeats past rhetoric that led to civilian detention camps, with horrific, tragic results
The Republican National Convention hit rock bottom on its third day in Milwaukee, Wis., on July 17, with a sea of signs calling for “Mass Deportation Now.” If former president Donald Trump is elected for a second term, he and his advisers promise to remove from the U.S., via forced expulsions and deportation camps, as many as 20 million people—a number larger than the country’s current estimated population of undocumented residents. Put into effect, this scheme would devolve quickly into a vast 21st-century version of concentration camps, with predictably brutal results.
Concentration camps are built for the mass detention of civilians based on group identity, excluding protections normally afforded by a country’s legal system. I wrote a history of these camps that traced an arc from their 19th-century origins in Spanish-occupied Cuba through the development of death camps in Germany and their modern-day descendants around the world.
Trump’s plan to launch a massive deportation project nationwide—the first plank in the platform approved at his party’s convention—draws on the same flawed historical rationales and pseudoscience that built support for concentration camps worldwide in the 20th century. Early architects of these camps veiled their efforts in scientific terms while using terror and punishment to seize more power.
For example, Trump has claimed repeatedly that undocumented immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the U.S. “Blood poisoning” is a medical condition; saying that foreigners are poisoning a nation’s blood is simply a slur. But perverting scientific or medical language to violate human rights and permit atrocities comes from a familiar playbook.
Justifications for brutal immigration policies have often distorted scientific goals of public health programs. Trump and his advisers have long been prone to panic-mongering over the threat of disease from immigrants. They’ve likewise twisted sociology to stoke anxiety about assimilation to justify a Muslim ban or to try to make racist comments seem less objectionable. Even simple principles of statistics get skewered as Trump lies about crime committed by immigrants.
