In June, I joined a western Massachusetts Jewish delegation who spent three days witnessing and protesting in front of the Homestead Detention Center, a massive former Air Force base that was then holding between 2,000-3,000 migrant teenage asylum seekers.
They were kids. Kids who had done nothing wrong (it is legal to seek asylum). Kids who were torn from their families. Kids who are not allowed to hug each other or talk to those who stand outside the high fences to support them.
Kids whose 18th birthday present is being shackled and hauled off to an adult detention facility. Kids who are being kept far longer than the 20 days allowed under the Flores agreement. Kids whose whereabouts and fate are unknown after the facility was suddenly closed recently.
On Aug. 26, Richard Fein spent an entire op-ed debating whether Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-New York, was appropriate in calling these facilities “concentration camps — and deciding that she was wrong.
Except that she’s right. When people are snatched from their families and sent away to crowded facilities based on their race or ethnicity, that’s a concentration camp. Four hundred thirty Holocaust/genocide scholars have written to the U.S. Memorial Holocaust Museum saying that she’s accurate.
Even while acknowledging that some detainees are being held in deplorable conditions, Fein is pretending she is comparing the situation to Dachau. But no one is using the term “extermination camp” to describe these barbaric places.
Growing up, I always wondered how the Germans had allowed Nazism to take over. Now we see: It’s a slow, gradual process. Each incremental step normalizes bigotry, hate and barbaric action. Now we see: It can happen here. And perhaps it might not have happened in 1930s Germany if enough people had spoken out against these aggressions, these assaults on decency, rather than get into pointless arguments about nomenclature.
I hope to see Richard Fein focusing on the real threat and joining us on the barricades. As numerous Jewish voices for immigrant justice are saying, “Never Again is Now.” Let us join together to stop this administration’s continuous attacks on democracy.
Shel Horowitz
The writer is a member of western Massachusetts Jews for Immigration Justice.