As the federal government continues its campaign of mass deportation and migrant detention, our state faces another housing crisis.
The Trump administration wants desperately to detain hundreds of thousands more of our undocumented neighbors, and legal immigrants whose status it lawlessly canceled. But it keeps tripping itself up.
Existing migration detention centers are overcrowded, can’t find staff, and offer inhumane conditions. Attempts to convert old warehouses or build new camps, as in Gilroy, violate state and local laws. Even more expensive is the latest Trump strategy — buying private detention facilities. The Department of Homeland Security’s recent purchase of the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego and the California City Detention Facility in the Mojave Desert from the private prison company CoreCivic cost $1.5 billion, nearly five times the properties’ assessed value.
Why use failed strategies, when the simplest solution is staring us in the face?
The Trump administration should reopen California’s incarceration camps, used to warehouse Japanese Americans during World War II.
This very modest proposal might sound shocking. But it is merely pragmatism.
From a managerial perspective, the advantages are overwhelming. Places like Manzanar in Inyo County and Tule Lake in Modoc County are already under federal jurisdiction — preserved as historical monuments, waiting to be adapted for our new golden era of racist fearmongering.
Furthermore, let us be honest: Modern migrant detention centers operating across the United States are, in scale and function, the logical evolution of 1940s relocation centers.
Why spend billions of taxpayers’ dollars on brand-new detention gulags when the old sites are still available?
Plus, the aesthetics are better. Where mid-century camps were visually open about their carceral nature, today’s facilities are bland and windowless — Amazon fulfillment centers whose inventory is human beings.
If we examine the historical record objectively, a return to the wartime camp model would represent a significant humanitarian upgrade. California’s Japanese incarceration camps were godawful. But compared to ICE detention centers, they possessed a robust civic infrastructure! Incarcerated populations had schools, churches, temples, newspapers, community councils, even sports leagues. If the federal government insists on mass confinement for people who committed no crimes, it should at least do so with the dignity of a baseball diamond.
The geography of wartime incarceration also supports this path. Today’s migrant detention system favors cheaper facilities in California’s Central Valley and deserts. ICE and its contractors are in Adelanto, California City, McFarland, Bakersfield and Calexico; World War II incarceration often began in assembly centers in Fresno, Merced, or Tulare. Manzanar sits in the Owens Valley, in the Eastern Sierra. Tule Lake is just below the Oregon border on a dry lakebed.
Placing newly detained populations in remote places would let the feds keep their abuses out of sight, and out of mind. Progressives, protesting outside urban ICE offices, won’t drive six hours into the desert. It’s much easier to hold another “No Kings” rally in charming downtowns with good coffee options.
Some will object that we are repeating our dark past. But this ignores how Americans view their own misdeeds — we don’t. Yes, the government offered reparations for the World War II camps in the 1980s. But, as a nation, we never truly recognized these places as the concentration camps they actually were.
Hence the moral barrier to reusing them today is remarkably low. If the American public didn’t rise up in rebellion when their fellow citizens were locked away in the desert in 1942, why would they do so for non-citizens today?
Sure, national immigrant protection coalitions seek to close detention centers, end private detention contracts, and defund ICE. But those strategies will take years, while migrants suffer. A few radicals — activists, antifa, rogue California columnists — dream of mass action by everyday Americans to take over such facilities, and liberate the people inside. But that’s just a scene from “One Battle After Another,” right?
If we lack the courage to close ICE concentration camps, then let’s admit it. And stop pretending we are better than our past.
Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: A modest proposal — reopen California’s incarceration camps | Mathews
Reporting by Joe Mathews, Zócalo Public Square / Ventura County Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Joe Mathews, Zócalo Public Square | USA TODAY Network
