Are U.S. immigration agents sending migrants and asylum seekers to “detention centers” or “internment camps”? Are they being held in “processing centers” or “concentration camps”?
It depends on who you talk to. Sometimes the U.S. government uses bureaucratic and benign terms like “detention centers,” which immigrant advocates argue minimize often harsh conditions. At other times, they use sensational nicknames like the “Speedway Slammer” that suggest their purpose is for punishment.
Journalist Andrea Pitzer said in a recent interview with The Marshall Project that each tone serves a purpose for a different audience. One is used to stoke fear among immigrants, while another approach is intended to have a calming effect, to gain the public’s acceptance of the administration’s enforcement practices, she said.
When President Donald Trump visited a Florida detention center last year that his administration dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” Google searches for the phrase surged. Critics concerned by descriptions of inhumane conditions at the facility reacted by turning the nickname on its head, calling it “Alligator Auschwitz.”
Some have sought terms to clarify the purpose of immigration enforcement and detention, sparking controversy by using “concentration camps” to describe where people are sent amid immigration crackdowns.
In one high-profile example, Democratic U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York faced backlash when she used the term in 2019, during Trump’s first term, tweeting, “This administration has established concentration camps on the southern border of the United States for immigrants, where they are being brutalized with dehumanizing conditions and dying.”
Opponents accused her of diminishing the horrors of the Holocaust.
Concentration camps are most often associated with the worst of Nazi Germany: extermination camps designed for systematic mass murder. But concentration camps, which are defined differently, have existed for more than a century in several countries — including the U.S.
Modern concentration camps date back to the 1890s, with the inventions of barbed wire and automatic guns, which made controlling large groups of people easier, Pitzer told The Marshall Project. Around the turn of the 20th century, concentration camps were used by the British in South Africa and by the Spanish in Cuba.
In her 2018 book, “One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps,” Pitzer wrote that concentration camps involve the mass detention of civilians, without due process or a full trial, based on their identity, rather than something they had done.
While Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents go after people who don’t have authorization to be in the country, observers note that they have expanded their purview in the past year, arresting people with legal protections and green cards, and even U.S. citizens. Pitzer also pointed to Trump’s use of disparaging language toward specific groups, saying this suggests that certain people, like those of Somali and Haitian descent, are targeted based on their identity.
While ICE has legal authority to detain people based on their immigration status, agents are acting with “extra legality,” said Waitman Beorn, a Holocaust historian at Northumbria University in England, pointing to instances of ICE blocking oversight, hindering access to legal counsel and transferring people to far-flung facilities in an apparent effort to isolate and confuse them.
There isn’t a specific point at which a facility becomes a concentration camp, but Pitzer said that the U.S. has crossed that line today.
Beorn said the term “needs to be demystified, meaning that something does not have to be Auschwitz to be a concentration camp.”
Concentration camps evolve within a system. Before there were established camps in Nazi Germany, Beorn said, victims were sent to improvised sports arenas and warehouses.
He said what the U.S. detention centers “resemble is the early period of Nazi concentration camps.”
In recent months, ICE has purchased several warehouses to turn into detention centers. That makes the system even more like a concentration camp, Pitzer said.
While concentration camps don't automatically mean conditions are poor, a lack of access to adequate food, sanitary conditions and medical care are common consequences of mass detention. Outbreaks of measles, tuberculosis and Covid have been reported at camps, according to reporting by the Texas Tribune. Eighteen people have died in ICE custody so far this year. At this time last year, there had been seven deaths. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, has refuted claims about poor conditions, and has said in a statement that “all detainees are provided with proper meals” as well as medical treatment.
There is opposition to calling ICE detention centers concentration camps. That resistance has come from some Jewish groups, those on the far right and others who don’t understand the difference between a concentration camp and Nazi extermination camps, such as Treblinka or Sobibor.
But Beorn and Pitzer said people should be willing to understand the historical contexts behind the term. If comparing other situations to the Holocaust is off-limits, Beorn said, then the goal to never let it happen again loses its power.
“There isn’t sort of a suffering Olympics bar here where it has to be this brutal to be a concentration camp,” he said.
Meanwhile, some in the public discourse continue to search for better, clearer terms.
In a recent conversation between journalist John Washington and Syracuse University professor Austin Kocher, who have both studied immigration, Washington said he’s settled on using "immigration camp.” Kocher said he thought that was appropriate because it implies a form of informality that operates outside of the norms. Unlike a prison, where someone has been convicted of a crime, camps hold people on civil matters.
“People are in camps for administrative purposes; they are not there ‘cause they’re in trouble from a legal perspective,” Kocher said. “But that’s not how it really works in practice, obviously, because these are sort of black holes.”
While there is heated debate over what these places should be called — and some terms are more accurate than others — researchers, authors and scholars have looked to the past to understand how terminology has been used and how it has evolved.
During World War II, Japanese Americans were rounded up after Japan bombed the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Greg Robinson, a history professor at the Université du Québec À Montréal, said that government officials used euphemisms, referring to them as “evacuees.” That kind of language was dangerous, he said, because it made it seem like the government was helping people when it was actually depriving them of their liberty and property.
The government also used phrases like “assembly centers” and “relocation centers” for the camps where 120,000 Japanese American people were held. President Franklin D. Roosevelt called them concentration camps on a few occasions.
After the war, there was a shift away from language that obfuscated what happened. The word “internment” became more widely used by the government, as well as by Japanese Americans, Robinson said. But since then, it has fallen out of favor. That’s because the term refers to citizens of a country that has been declared an enemy. Most of the Japanese Americans who were incarcerated were U.S. citizens.
Generations later, debates and misconceptions continue about the words that most accurately — and ethically — describe these places.
The Japanese American Citizens League published a handbook in 2013 about terminology related to World War II. Instead of using “relocation,” the organization recommended “forced removal,” and instead of “relocation center,” it suggested “American concentration camp.” In 2022, the Associated Press revised its guidance, saying “internment” was inaccurate and instead recommended using “incarceration.”
Language evolves, and phrases that appear neutral now can change by the next generation. Robinson said that in the future some terms, like ICE, could carry a more negative connotation.