“Concentration Camp: A camp where persons are confined, usually without hearings and typically under harsh conditions, often as a result of their membership in a group which the government has identified as dangerous or undesirable.”

—American Heritage Dictionary

“I dissent, therefore, from this legalization of racism. Racial discrimination in any form and in any degree has no justifiable part whatever in our democratic way of life. It is unattractive in any setting, but it is utterly revolting among a free people who have embraced the principles set forth in the Constitution of the United States. All residents of this nation are kin in some way by blood or culture to a foreign land. Yet they are primarily and necessarily a part of the new and distinct civilization of the United States. They must, accordingly, be treated at all times as the heirs of the American experiment, and as entitled to all the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution.”

–Supreme Court Judge Frank Murphy on the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II

“We have two enemies. We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within. And the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries. If you have a smart president, he can handle them … but the thing that’s harder to handle is the lunatics we have inside…”

—Donald J. Trump

If Adolf Hitler had been a reality television star, he might have gotten away with everything. 

One tires of comparing Trump to Hitler, but, to paraphrase the late Johnnie Cochran: if the jackboot fits you can’t acquit. This isn’t to suggest that their atrocities are of comparable scale. However, there is a subtle legerdemain that insists Hitler and the Nazis must remain the ultimate benchman of human depravity, thus comfortably minimizing other acts of heinous cruelty by comparison, whether it be the Armenian, Namibian and Rwandan genocides, the ongoing genocide in Gaza, the mass detentions and deportations that preceded them, or, in MAGA America, the systematic internment of individuals the government has collectively identified as “dangerous and undesirable.”

This is particularly true as many Americans remain entrenched in atrocity-denying mode. Even when we reluctantly face up to our own atrocities, we feel compelled to go back to Nazi Germany rather than our own ignoble past to underscore their gravity. “Alligator Alcatraz” morphs into “Alligator Auschwitz” – not “Alligator Manzanar.” That would hit too close to home, if we even remembered them. Then again, maybe it’s the lack of alliteration. How about “Mosquito Manzanar”?

No wonder diabetes is on the rise in the U.S; the language we use to discuss our past – and present – cruelties is cloyingly sugar-coated. The ugly truth such language conceals becomes “collateral damage.” 

Legacy media has, so far, refrained from labelling these facilities concentration camps. Instead, they refer to them as detention centers or internment camps, branding the latest iteration “Alligator Alcatraz,” complete with bro-ishly fascistic Alligator merch with “jokey” punchlines, some of which backed by a greedy GOP – is there any other kind? – hungry to fill its coffers with blood money. Here, MAGA has outdone the Nazis. For all their inhumanity, the operators of Auschwitz did not cynically hawk caps, T-shirts , and mugs emblazoned with “arbeit macht frei” (work sets you free)beneath cute, anthropomorphic eagle mascots overseeing toiling vermin, though such scenes would not have been out of place in Nazi propaganda. 

If, as Hannah Arendt wrote, evil is banal, then dehumanization is heartbreakingly familiar, a universal pattern of abuse that emerges wherever human beings exist and deny the humanity of others. Legacy media avoids calling these facilities concentration camps because, its hurts their delicate corporate sensibilities. This same hestitation explains why they refrain from calling the mass slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza a genocide. For it to qualify as such, these facilities must carry out exterminations, there must be vivisections, gas chambers, and ovens – horrors the modern perpetrators of evil are simply too savvy to replicate. And while the current campaign against undocumented migrants in the U.S. is not by any measure a genocide, America, like the Nazi Germany in the early phases of the Final Solution, has opted to outsourceits atrocities. 

Still, bestowing the flippant official name “Alligator Alcatraz” on the new facility amid reported plans to reopen its namesake, omits one important fact: women and children were not sent to Alcatraz nor gleefully offered up as potential alligator fodder. However, they were sent to Manzanar, Topaz, Gila River, Heart Mountain, Poston, Minodoka, and Granada – names that should resonate with Americans but often don’t, apart from the families of those who were interned there. 

And in case you thought America had learned from its past, it has. Unfortunately, it is the wrong lesson: women and children could be sent to the Florida facility. 

During World War Two, the American facilities were also euphemistically called detention and relocation centers or internment camps, while their counterparts in Germany were labeled concentration camps and later, as their murderous horrors came to light, extermination camps.

Today, in America, regarding the new facility, extermination is merely implied – whether by carnivorous reptiles or disease-carrying mosquitoes. However, these deaths are not portrayed as collective. Instead, if we carefully listen to Trump and his agents of chaos, they are framed as the sporadic casualties of individuals who “have it coming” for attempting to escape. 

But let’s be honest. The children we may eventually send to these “camps” – paid for with the same American tax dollars that pay for the bombs dropped on Gazan children and IDF snipper bullets embedded in their skulls – are those we feel safe sacrificing to predators. This, of course, assumes they haven’t already been sent there, which may be a naïve assumption given the current regimes record of human rights abuses.

Yet, one can’t help wonder: did the children who boarded the Lolita Express and found themselves trafficked in Palm Springs amid the glitzy golden halls of Mar-a-Lago, zig and zag as they desperately tried to elude billionaire predators? Perhaps one day we’ll uncover the evasive strategies they employed, if the Epstein files are ever released. Or perhaps they surrendered to their alleged attackers, letting them do whatever they wanted with them simply because they were “stars.”

But it’s all fine. Nothing to see here. The files do not exist. Rest assured, Trump is going after the real criminals – the rapists, the cartel kingpins, and their mules – to make America safe again, or at least its white citizens. Of course, no one, least of all their felonious president, is going to deport them. History has shown, however, that even “law-abiding” presidents aren’t above finessing the Constitution and imprisoning their own citizens when it suits their political needs, though it helps when those citizens are people of color.

In 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Presidential Executive Order 9066, which led to the imprisonment of 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentrations camps. The government justified this action under the pretext that it was simply “relocating” them for their own protection. However, in his dissenting opinion in Korematsu v. United States(1944) Supreme Court Justice Frank Murphy, speaking truth to power, condemned the decision to uphold the order as “an ugly abyss of racism.” 

Today, Trump’s executive orders (14159 and 14165) claim that their aim is to protect American citizens . In fact, they undermine the constitutional rights of everyone, citizen and non-citizen alike, while the private companies and Republican donors who build and staff these facilities profit from racism and xenophobia.

However, it is slowly beginning to dawn on American citizens that the dangers they face come not from the migrant boogeymen conjured up by Trump, but from the government he heads. 

Americans will soon see which rights guaranteed by citizenship are truly safeguarded as they begin to feel the economic and social repercussions of immigration crackdowns, tariffs, and the dismantling of the safety net, although thanks to the “mother’s charm” of Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Alaskans appear to be shielded from these consequences. 

Murkowski’s convictions have the tensile strength of Baked Alaska. No “Maverick McCain,” during the final countdown, she gave a thumbs up to her constituency and the middle finger to the rest of the country, paving the way for the “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBB) to return to the House, where her RICO (Republicans Inevitably Chicken Out) partners in crime approved it, sending it their Don for his signature. 

Once enacted, the bill will have devasting consequences for tens of millions of Americans, many of whom are already beginning to feel the strain of DOGE. 

But wait. Realpolitik and just plain logic would dictate that voting for the widely unpopular bill would hurt Republicans in the midterms. Even Evita Musk opposes it. Yet, the GOP appears unfazed by the prospect of a blue wave – at least not enough to vote against it.

The question is why? Perhaps they’ve all privately pulled a Murkowski, negotiating special exemptions for their states. Or maybe, like the First Lady during her husband’s first term, they really don’t care because they’re confident the election will be rigged in their favor? 

Trump’s executive orders, now totaling 170 and counting, haven’t been limited to unconstitutionally detaining and deporting non-citizens. On March 25th, he issued an executive order ostensibly aimed at “protecting election integrity.” Translation: systemic voter suppression on a scale, as the Dear Leader himself might say, the world has never seen before. And while the Republicans may not have read the OBBB, it’s unlikely they failed to read Trump’s executive order (even if the functionally illiterate president probably didn’t), salivating at the prospect of a guaranteed election victory.

But let’s assume the midterms won’t be rigged and, between now and midterms, protests against the Trump regime gain momentum. If waves of “No King,” “Good Trouble Lives On,” and other national protests challenge his self-proclaimed divine right as the King of America, what happens next? Will he resort to another L.A.-style crackdown? And if so, who would stop him? Congress? The courts? Once again, he might deploy the national guard, the military, or even his own private Gestapo – the Proud Boy and Oath Takers militia – to crush the “insurrection.” This time, however, the target wouldn’t be immigrants but birth-certificate-holding, REAL ID-carrying American citizens, shipped off to Manzanar-a- Lago. Or perhaps we should call it “Alligator Abu Graibu,” given reports ICE has sexually abused hundreds of detainees.

As for certificate-of-life-birth-holders, your cells await.

Generations from now, if we somehow manage to survive this dark chapter of national disgrace and course-correct our downward moral trajectory, will school children (assuming schools still exist) study The Diary of Ana Francisco alongside the history of the rise and fall of the Trump Reich?

The answer depends on how we respond to the current crisis.

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