Valley ICE facilities fit the definition of ‘concentration camp’

Brent Peak

Submitted photo/Northwest Valley Indivisible

A concentration camp is not a death camp. Andrea Pitzer, whose book. “One Long Night,” traces this history across more than a century, defines them plainly: the mass detention of civilians without due process, on the basis of identity.”

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ICE opponents want bigger pushback from Surprise City Council

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Speak Up: ICE opinions still dominate Surprise conversation

OPINION — A woman at the Eloy Detention Center wrote a letter last year that a volunteer had to carry out past security. There was no other way to send it.

“I think I’m going to die in here,” she wrote. We don’t know her name. But what we call the kind of place that holds her — that, we can get right.

When Surprise residents call ICE’s local warehouse a concentration camp, they are told the comparison is overblown and they are trivializing history. That objection deserves a serious answer. The Holocaust was systematic, industrialized genocide. Those were death camps: facilities engineered for extermination. To invoke them carelessly would dishonor the dead.

But a concentration camp is not a death camp. Andrea Pitzer, whose book, “One Long Night,” traces this history across more than a century, defines them plainly: the mass detention of civilians without due process, on the basis of identity.

I’ve visited Eloy. The description fits. It fits what members of Congress discovered when they arrived unannounced at the Mesa Gateway ICE facility April 9 and found people with no bedding, sleeping on concrete floors. It will fit Surprise, too.

We’ve seen this before. Between 1942 and 1945, 18,000 Japanese Americans were confined at Poston in western Arizona. Another 13,000 at Gila River, 30 miles from Phoenix. Convicted of nothing. Two-thirds were citizens.

In 1988, Congress called it a “grave injustice” and apologized to citizens and non-citizens alike — because the injustice was not about their legal status. It was about what was done to them. Joe Okimoto, who endured Poston, doesn’t need us to settle the debate. “It was a concentration camp,” he said.

We know what the ICE facility in Surprise will be and we must stop it. It took 40 years to call Poston what it was. We don’t have 40 years. We have the next city council meeting. We owe it to potentially thousands like the woman in Eloy to get it right.

Brent Peak is co-chair of the progressive grassroots group, Northwest Valley Indivisible. Please submit comments at yourvalley.net/letters or email them to AzOpinions@iniusa.org. We are committed to publishing a wide variety of reader opinions, as long as they meet our Civility Guidelines.