What is a "concentration camp" and why aren't people using that term to describe Trump's detention centers?

[CousinIT]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/opinion/concentration-camp-andrea-pitzer.html

FREE read: https://archive.ph/coYvx

"Always, always, always concentration camps are an end run around the existing legal system. These people that are getting rounded up because whoever’s in power wants to do something that they can’t do using the letter of the law..."

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/o...

— Rachel Maddow (@maddow.bsky.social) 2026-02-22T15:52:21.005Z

To fast forward to the present, and looking at the administration’s current detention policies, how much of this is truly unique to the Trump administration? How much of it is an outgrowth of American detention policies on the southern border?

It is, of course, both. And that’s an important thing that I’ve been trying to write a lot about. It’s in my book, but I’ve been emphasizing it even more with the second Trump administration because concentration camps are not just a thing that shows up like an alien ship and lands, right? It has to grow out of something in this society.

What are the things in U.S. society that will allow this kind of detention, this mass detention of civilians to take root? The answer is twofold, I would say. It is that we have an extremely carceral state in which local police departments have all of this equipment of war brought over from the very conflicts we were talking about. It is a weirdly militarized, highly violent society where we already lock people up. That’s one important piece of it.

The other important piece of it is that across U.S. history, what is the flashpoint in our society? In Germany, it was Jews that had been vilified for centuries, right? That’s the point where they could have this cultural wedge. What is it in the United States? It is who gets to actually be American. And I mean that in terms of citizenship, but I also mean it in some broader terms as well, right? So from the beginning, Native Americans are not considered Americans. Chattel slavery, we literally are litigating whether Africans brought to the U.S. for chattel slavery are going to count as human. And then with Japanese American internment, which I do frame as a concentration camp system during World War II, the majority of those people were actually U.S. citizens, right? But they were not allowed to actually be citizens in that moment. So who gets excluded that way?

. . .

But always, always, always concentration camps are an end run around the existing legal system. These people that are getting rounded up because whoever’s in power wants to do something that they can’t do using the letter of the law. And anytime you create or expand that kind of detention — and again, we already had some of that before Trump came to office, we’ve got to be clear about it — but when you expand that, when you lean into it, things always get worse in there because it does not have the same kind of oversight.