11 - Concentration Camps in Trump’s America?

Summary

This chapter examines the debate over the applicability of the term ‘concentration camp’ for the migrant detention centers at the southern border of the United States in the context of the Trump administration and its authoritarian turn. In June 2019, Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, when she declared the detention centers “concentration camps,” provoked a turn in Holocaust memory culture, as she asked Americans to look prior to the Holocaust to the long Western history of the concentration and detention of unwanted populations. Ocasio-Cortez’s public analogical reasoning produced heated reactions which fell primarily along party lines, with the Republican Party embracing Holocaust exceptionalism and the Democratic Party open to analogies as potential motivators of political action. The debate also opened another chapter in the scholarly discussion of the efficacy of analogical reasoning, with the conditions at the border and the Trump era’s abuses suggesting an urgency for some. For those interested in direct action, Ocasio-Cortez’s evocation of the memory of the Holocaust required immediate intervention in the name of Holocaust vigilance.