Bookended by Guantanamo Bay and Vietnamese “political reeducation centers,” the American detention centers along the U.S.-Mexico border now appear on Wikipedia’s list of concentration camps.
The facilities, which have come under scrutiny in recent weeks as migrant children have been separated from their families, have increasingly been deemed “prisons” or “concentration camps” because of the conditions to which the detainees are subjected. Former first lady Laura Bush recently likened them to the Japanese internment camps of World War II.
Listed under “separation of immigrant children” on the Wikipedia page, the entry joins a list of our history’s most egregious human rights violations, from Auschwitz to the killing fields in Cambodia.
The entry, which has come under revisions from both sides since it was added to the page, currently reads: “As part of the 2018 Trump administration’s family separation policy, nearly 2,000 minors were separated from their parents while trying to illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico border and placed in detention centers.”
It goes on to note that “The former head of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, John Sandweg, was critical of child separation telling NBC News, ‘You could easily end up in a situation where the gap between a parent’s deportation and a child’s deportation is years.’”
In response to the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein introduced the Keep the Families Together Act on June 8, which proposed restricting the separation of families. As of Monday, all 49 Democrats in the Senate had co-sponsored the bill. The bill has no Republican endorsements. House Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) introduced a similar bill in the House on Tuesday.
Republicans in both chambers of Congress have yet to agree on a policy.