History Lesson: Gitmo Started as a Detention Camp for Immigrants
From the Bolshevik Revolution to 9/11, mass detention starts as a temporary measure and becomes an indefinite nightmare.
ANDREA PITZER
06.23.18 9:16 PM ET
President Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday declaring he would end separation of children from parents at the U.S. border, which might or might not actually happen. Thursday morning, Customs and Border Protection said the government would stop referring cases against parents crossing the border with children for prosecution. (The story was denied by the Justice Department.) The same afternoon, The Daily Beast reported the government's new plan to hold detainees on military bases, perhaps in Texas and Arkansas.
These flailing responses reflect the general chaos of the White House, but also jam up the system, rendering it more damaging and dysfunctional for those trapped in it. Tracking the fate of each individual detainee should be a priority in the midst of this pandemonium.
But there are other, more panoramic reasons to keep an eye on detention practices along the border. The further things move outside the traditional legal process in these detention facilities, the more likely the camps are to evolve into something more malignant. The longer the detention and the more secret or hidden the facilities, the worse the possibilities for what can happen.
In my research and reporting on mass civilian detention around the world in the last hundred years, I found that again and again, countries where low-grade indefinite detention was allowed to fester, worse things came to pass.
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https://www.thedailybeast.com/history-lesson-gitmo-started-as-a-detention-camp-for-immigrants?ref=home
