If the United States, probably the wealthiest country and most powerful country in the history of the world in terms of just sheer volume of resources to do things, if this is what we are going to do, just imagine what excuse that will give to so many other countries that will be looking to do much worse.

Hello and welcome to Why is this happening with me your host Chris Hayes. Well, if you're a loyal with pod listener, you know that we often do things here on this show that are totally off the news cycle and completely out of nowhere.

And then sometimes we do things that are right in the center of the news today is one of those latter kinds of programs. You have, if you've been following the news, probably followed over the last several weeks, a controversy about the proper nomenclature for the system of regular detention for the migrant population being apprehended at the border, the vast bulk of whom are applying for asylum as they are entitled to do under both US and international law.

In an Instagram video that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez made, she referred to them as concentration camps. Now I have a suspicion it's possible that the seeds of that might have been on Twitter where an author of the global history of concentration camps was writing about the camps and author who we then had on all in, who sort of talked about the history of the concentration camp. But I sometimes I wonder to the degree to which like that was part of what was in the zeitgeist or whether Alexandria Ocasio Cortez actually

watched that segment or saw that on Twitter before she said that. But when she did say that, it occasioned a huge amount of controversy. Lin Cheney said it was despicable, a whole bunch of Republicans as she needed to do that it was it was making light of the Holocaust, it was minimizing the suffering under the third rike that it was despicable for her to say that.

Then there were a lot of other people who said no, no, no, actually in an academic sense like what a concentration camp is is not just the death camps in Nazi Germany in fact it's a institution that existed both before the Nazis and after the Nazis and these forms of irregular detention for civilians looks a lot like that. And to the extent that I think there was good faith discomfort with the term I think it has to do with the kind of running together people's colloquial understanding of that term concentration camp.

As being inseverably connected to the Nazis and the final solution and the degree to which people understand it as a category that's larger than what happened in Nazi Germany.

There was also a tremendous amount of like opportunistic bad faith on the part of conservatives who like to make controversies out of things. AOC says and also don't want to talk about the reality of the conditions of detention.

One of the things that happened in the wake of that controversy was people did start talking about the realities of conditions in those detention facilities children forced to care for each other in a kind of like crazy Lord of the flies way where 11 year olds are looking after two year olds there's lice outbreaks there's flu outbreaks children not being given access to baths or showers appalling over crowding there's one facility in Clint Texas that was run by CBP which is.

I'm a colloquially referred to as a border patrol customs and border protection that facility has now had 200 of those children removed to somewhere else 100 saying so there is this sort of crazy thing that happened which is like the invocation of this very charged term a controversy about the term but then in a I think a productive way attention examination on the actual conditions in the facilities that Alexandria Cassio Cortez was describing and that ultimately became the main story.

Correctly we should note now one of the things I should say here before introducing the guests today is that the detention system of the American immigration bureaucracy is actually quite complicated and also long standing and there's a great immigration journalist out of a ghetto who I follow on Twitter and always read who has been making this point that calling them camps in some general sense can get rid of some of the actual and suggestive.

And there's a lot of different different different different different different different different reasons CBP has these things called E led us which are ice boxes because they are so cold that have been notoriously terrible for years even under the above administration.

They are often in the middle of the desert on remote locations they're supposed to only hold people for 72 hours one of the things that happening now is they appear to be holding people for long periods of time CBP also runs processing centers like the one of Clint Texas ice runs its own detention and processing centers private prison companies contract with ice to do detention then there's a whole bureaucracy under HHS that that takes care of children called the office of refugee resalement they have private contractors they have been

contract out to you so you have this sprawling bureaucratic archipelago but what you do have in total we should be clear is a growing system of detention right the numbers are going up and up and up and an administration that is committed to detention as a policy goal.

I mean Donald Trump ran very explicitly against what he called in rather dehumanizing fashion catch and release the idea that if you apprehend a 25 year old Guatemalan woman with her five year old Guatemalan daughter at the border and they're seeking asylum and she has an aunt who lives in El Paso there is no reason to detain the woman.

You process her you process her asylum claim and then you release her because there's no public safety threat represented by her and then as was done under the Obama administration you put in case management systems that make sure she is assigned a lawyer or some sort of point of contact so that she shows up to court dates and her asylum claim is processed and granted or not.

That is unacceptable in the eyes of Trump administration so what they have been doing is detaining larger and larger numbers of people which means more and more folks housed in this bureaucratic archipelago of civilian detention so should we call that system concentration camps.

My guest today's Andrew Pitzer and she's the author one long night a global history of concentration camps she first came to my attention because someone retweeted a threat of hers about the similarities between concentration camps she study throughout history and the systems of immigration detention that are currently expanding under the Trump administration that caught my eye I had her on the television show all in which is that a PM we've done some MSMBC and.

She was so impressive and so knowledgeable and so air you died and brought such a uniquely deep perspective to the like controversy of the day I wanted to get her back for a full hour long discussion I also wanted to get her back because I went out and got her book and read it and just learned a ton that I wanted to share with you so this conversation is as relevant as it could possibly be for a bunch of reasons it's not just the case that there's an expanding camp system here.

There are concentration camps operating in China that we've done an entire podcast about that have a million weger ethnic weger muslims under camp conditions reeducation camps that are truly ghastly totalitarian enterprises.

There is going to be more of this in our future as the climate crisis produces more and more refugees more desperate populations running away from where they are to a new place and there is going to be a temptation increasingly for governments not just authoritarian governments but so called liberal democracies.

To warehouse those populations in detention away from everyone else as a way of essentially quote dealing with the problem and for that reason you have to understand.

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