Breaking: Trump is now sending people to concentration camps

Is this who we are — a country that sends people on its soil to concentration camps to be raped, to starve, to die?

(Photo: Sarah Creta)

Late last night, the New York Times ran a story that the Trump administration is planning to deport some migrants — possibly as early as today — to Libya.

The State Department warns against traveling to Libya “due to crime, terrorism, unexploded land mines, civil unrest, kidnapping and armed conflict.” The country remains divided after years of civil war following the 2011 overthrow of its longtime dictator, Muammar Gaddafi. A United Nations-recognized government in Tripoli rules western Libya, and another in Benghazi, led by the warlord Khalifa Haftar, controls the east…

…A major transit point for Europe-bound migrants, Libya operates numerous detention facilities for refugees and migrants. Amnesty International branded those sites “horrific” and “a hellscape” in a 2021 report, which found evidence of “sexual violence, against men, women and children.” The Global Detention Project says detained migrants in Libya endure “physical mistreatment and torture,” forced labor and even slavery.

Several years ago, The New Yorker profiled these Libyan concentration camps. “Death in Libya, it’s normal: no one will look for you, and no one will find you,” it quoted a migrant telling Amnesty International. Under Libyan law, migrants have no rights whatsoever, including the right to counsel. According to the article, thousands of “migrants are disappearing into ‘unofficial” facilities run by traffickers and militias, where aid groups have no access.”

Before Doctors Without Borders made the decision to pull out of caring for migrants in Libyan detention facilities due to violence, it reported that guards would beat patients who attempted to leave their cells in order to receive medical care. Guards would also spray automatic weapons into overly crowded cells, indiscriminately killing many of those inside.

The mainstream media describes these Libyan hellholes as “detention facilities.” These outlets should hang their heads in shame for whitewashing reality. They are concentration camps. The United States is now in the process of sending human beings to concentration camps. By the time you read this, the first military flight with migrants on board may have already departed the United States for Libya.

Is this who we are — a country that sends people on its soil to concentration camps to be raped, to starve, to die?

Let’s be crystal clear: the Libyan renditions won’t end with migrants — although it’s bad enough that they are being sent there without any due process whatsoever. Over the past few weeks, the Trump Administration has been deporting American citizens abroad, including a four-year-old with Stage Four cancer, who was shipped off to Honduras without any medication or medical care. The frightening reality is that none of us is safe.

CECOT, the notorious Salvadorian gulag where the Trump administration has deported over 200 men without due process, is apparently too humane for Donald Trump. Now, he is upping the ante by sending migrants to one of the most dangerous places on earth, a punishing dystopian nightmare in Lybia, which many of them will never leave alive. And what for? Because some of them overstayed their visas, while others followed the laws of this country and requested asylum at the border?

Occasionally, I think about what it must have been like to be living in Munich in 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power. Most Germans were still going about their lives, working, caring for their kids, taking an occasional holiday somewhere. Sure, life became horrific for the Jews, communists and trade unionists almost immediately. Of course, freedom of speech was curtailed, the state seized control of the media and educational curricula. Critics of the regime were arrested. Yes, the Brownshirts spent a day outside Jewish-owned shops, offices, and doctors’ practices, warning Germans not to enter. But that was just one day and besides, who had time to worry about that?

For ordinary ethnic Germans, life went on. In a few short years, unemployment dropped precipitously thanks to a huge public works and rearmament program. The Kraft durch Freude (Strength Through Joy) program subsidized vacations, theater tickets and other cultural offerings. So what if the nice Jewish professor suddenly had to leave his job at the university? So what if the trade unionist down the street suddenly disappeared to a detention facility in a little town named Dachau on the outskirts of Munich? None of this affected the vast majority of Germans.

Until it did.

This is why the rendition of human beings to the hellscape that is Libya should alarm us all. Once you begin to warehouse people the government deems to be “undesirable,” in what the media euphemistically calls a “detention facility,” without any due process, you have irretrievably broken something that can never be recovered.

First, they came for the undocumented migrants.

Then, they came for the asylum seekers.

Then, they came for American children.

Soon, they will come for you and me.

You can bet on it. Throughout the ages, despots who flauted the rule of law have always escalated. Eventually, they turn on their own people, even the ones who are going about their days quietly, paying little attention to the news and feeling cocooned in their own little world.

We must demand that legacy media call things by their proper names. If the “detention facilities” in Libya are not concentration camps, what are they? If the rendering of American children to a foreign country is not illegal, what is? If this administration’s refusal to provide due process for the people on American soil is not another step on the road to autocracy, what is it?

This is an emergency. We cannot afford to go about our day, with our eyes averted.

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Further Reading:

The New York Times: The Trump administration plans to send migrants to Libya on a military flight

Amnesty International: Libya: Horrific violations in detention highlight Europe’s shameful role in forced returns

Global Detention Project: Libya Immigration Detention Profile

The New Yorker: The Secretive Prisons That Keep Migrants Out of Europe

Medicins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders: Libya: Recurring violence against migrants and refugees forces MSF to suspend activities in Tripoli detention centers

The BBC: Three US citizen children, one with cancer, deported to Honduras, lawyers say

PBS: The conditions inside the infamous El Salvador prison where deported migrants are held

ABC News: 'Shocking': Experts question Trump claiming 'I don't know' about upholding Constitution