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Building more detention centers, to hold the increasing numbers of people charged with illegal entry, who after serving their sentence (if any) are deported, is comparable to that?
Umm. Yes? A cocker spanial may look different from a Jack Russell terrier, but it's not difficult to recognize them both as dogs.
Those detention centers are being stuffed to the gills with people who committed a misdemeanor - not exactly hardened criminals here.
Their children are being taken away and passed off to "foster homes" that have managed to "lose" 20% of the children they're supposed to be taking care of. HUMAN BEINGS ARE PERMANENTLY LOSING THEIR CHILDREN OVER A MISDEMEANOR. In what world is that OK? Ever?
The parents are deported afterward rather than killed? That's nice. However:
1) Give it time.
2) What of the parents who never get their kids back? Is that a fitting punishment for a misdemeanor?
Taking people's children, whether those children are killed or not, is one of the cruelest things that can be done to a person, and it crops up in the most shameful corners of history.
- Native Americans had their children taken away to put in "Indian Residential Schools."
- In WWII, children with "Aryan blood" were taken from their parents and adopted out to "racially suitable" German families (and many, many other children were killed).
- U.S. slaves had their children taken away and sold, often never to be seen again, and bystanders of the time comforted themselves with the erroneous belief that black parents, not being fully human, didn't feel the same affection for their children that white parents did.
- Now it's back. This time it's the children of illegal immigrants being ripped from their families, and that same element of society says, "Well, they knew the risk. If they wanted to keep their children, they shouldn't have come here," and the little unspoken postscript, "they clearly don't care that much about their children." Potato, potahto.
And what about this?
Link 2
Workers are being forced to work for $1 - $4 a day by:
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Depriving detainees of basic necessities like food, toothpaste, soap and toilet paper, so they have to work to pay for those items from the detention center's commissary.
They have to perform slave labor if they want soap, or want to eat? That's one of the classic earmarks of a concentration camp.
Work to eat> eat to live> live so that you can eventually be set free.
Take out that middle step, and you have: Work in order to be set free. Sound familiar?
Nazi concentration camps weren't pure death camps. They were also a source of essentially free labor. This, too, has been done before.
It won't look exactly like Nazi Germany becuase the starting point is different. Maybe it won't devolve into a death camp; maybe it will just be a modern version of the Asian internment camps the US had during that time.
"Are they being killed? No? Do they eventually get set free? Yes?" If that's our acid test for whether something is cruel and wrong, then we need to rethink our criteria.