Is Adelanto a ‘concentration camp’? And does it matter?

At a protest this month outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Adelanto, advocates derided what they said are substandard conditions for the roughly 2,000 people imprisoned at the Adelanto campus.

Multiple protesters said the detention center would be more aptly described as a “concentration camp,” drawing parallels to some of the darkest moments in U.S. and world history.

For protesters who opt to use such a charged phrase to refer to immigrant detention, doing so isn’t just a matter of accuracy; above all, they seek to prevent further harm.

What life is like inside Adelanto

Current and former detainees say immigrants at the ICE processing center experience rotten food, inadequate medical attention and punitive isolation.

Immigrant rights groups have filed a lawsuit against ICE and the Department of Homeland Security, seeking to “end the inhumane and illegal conditions” at this facility. The lawsuit describes Adelanto as an unsanitary place where “disease and illness are rampant.”

“Mold grows on bathroom and dormitory walls,” the lawsuit says. “Individuals across various dormitories [have] contracted an infectious skin disease called a staph infection — and more than a dozen detained individuals [have been] hospitalized.”

In recent weeks, two local fathers died following detention at the facility.

What is the state’s role at Adelanto?

California attorney general Rob Bonta, whose office is mandated to monitor conditions inside the state’s detention centers, filed an amicus brief last week bolstering the immigrant rights groups’ claims.

During inspections at Adelanto, Bonta said in a press statement, his team witnessed "shockingly inadequate medical care, a failure to accommodate people with disabilities, disturbingly unsafe and unsanitary conditions and a lack of basic necessities.”

Bonta also said detainees have reported “denied access to facility phones for prolonged periods,” which impeded their ability to contact their families and legal counsel.

What is the Trump administration’s position on Adelanto?

The federal government has denied claims of substandard conditions. In a press statement issued after the death of a detainee, ICE said it is “committed to ensuring that all those in custody reside in safe, secure and humane environments.”

“Comprehensive medical care is provided from the moment individuals arrive and throughout the entirety of their stay,” the statement continues. “This is the best health care tha[t] many aliens have received in their entire lives.”

Meanwhile, the Trump administration continues to expand its network of immigrant prisons across the U.S., even as the number of people who’ve died in ICE custody grows.

What protesters fear

The National Day Laborer Organizing Network staged its recent protest outside Adelanto, in partnership with sister organizations across Southern California. In a message to protesters ahead of the event, the group referred to the detention center in Adelanto as a “concentration camp for immigrants.” Out in the Mojave desert, others also made connections to the past.

“ I'm here today fighting for the fathers, the mothers and [the] community members who have been abducted,” said N. Suzuki, a member of Nikkei Progressives, an intergenerational community organization based in Little Tokyo.

“This is a moment in history, much like it was for Japanese Americans during World War II,” they added, referencing the U.S. incarceration of more than 120,000 residents of Japanese descent. “Solidarity from the masses is critical.”

N. Suzuki and Amy Oba carried a poster with an excerpt from Civilian Exclusion Order No. 69, a 1942 army directive forcing people of Japanese ancestry — most of them U.S. citizens — to leave their homes.

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Elisa Schwartz, a resident of the San Fernando Valley, traveled nearly 100 miles to join protesters in Adelanto. She also referred to the detention centers as “camps” and said that as a Jewish person, it felt “heavy” to be there.

Schwartz condemned the Trump administration’s rhetoric around undocumented immigrants, including efforts to paint them as a mass of criminals.

“I remember hearing this from my mother when I was a kid,” she said. “‘[When you] other people, you can start to hurt them. Once you start to hurt them, you herd them and you can destroy them.’ And this is what this is — make no mistake.”

Does it matter what Adelanto is called?

Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, backs protesters’ use of the phrase to refer to conditions inside U.S. immigration detention facilities.

Her book, published in 2017, looks at how the idea of concentration camps came into being; how these places led to extermination centers like Auschwitz in World War II; and what’s happened to the idea of “concentration camps” since then.

To write her book, Pitzer conducted research in two dozen countries, across four continents. She also spoke with current and former detainees from various camps, as well as guards. All this was anchored in years of archival work.

In One Long Night, Pitzer defines “concentration camps” as the mass detention of civilians “without due process or a real trial, on the basis of identity — usually political, racial, ethnic or religious” she told LAist.

When it comes to the mass detention of civilians, she added, “Who they are is more important than anything they've done.”

Pitzer said she’s not interested in forcing anyone to use the phrase “concentration camps” to refer to U.S. immigrant detention centers. Instead, she explained why doing so is valuable: As protesters at Adelanto aimed to convey, the phrase can help others “recognize that term as an escalation of the usual state of detention.”

Given that some 70,000 immigrants are currently imprisoned across the U.S., she added, “the current potential for harm is vast.”

Those who support the Trump administration’s mass deportation project might be inclined to say that undocumented immigrants are being detained because they crossed the border without authorization, Pitzer noted, and that “there is something that they've done.” But breaching immigration law is a civil offense, not criminal, she said. Plus, “historically speaking,” when governments detain civilians en masse, they devote a lot of time and resources to criminalizing them.

“In Nazi Germany, for instance, [the government] spent years criminalizing German Jews so that they literally could not be there legally. The whole goal was to turn them into ‘illegal aliens,’” she said.

In Pitzer’s view, “It's clear that people who are being rounded up [in the U.S.] are being detained because of skin color, because it's suspected that they're Latino.”

She pointed to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s concurrence in an ongoing case on immigration stops, wherein he gave federal agents the green light to continue making those stops based on factors like “speaking Spanish or speaking English with an accent” and “apparent race or ethnicity.” That text, Pitzer said, “starts to clarify why [detentions are] actually happening and why [this] does fit the definition of concentration camps.”

“When people hear the phrase ‘concentration camps,’ they get a little bit confused, and they immediately think of death camps and extermination centers,” she added. “But what they might not realize is that all around the globe ... there were many, many other camps that never became extermination centers. Yet, they were still terrible places.”

In Argentina, in Chile and in the Soviet Union, she said, “those early camps looked quite a bit like some [immigrant detention centers in] the U.S.”

Camps in each of those nations had their “own local cultural conditions,” Pitzer added. But many of their features — including the lack of access to medical care, sanitation and healthy food for detained civilians, and starting with “people being kidnapped off the street by masked gunmen” — are not unlike what’s happening in the U.S., she said.

Libby Rainey contributed to this story.