Yes, We Need ‘Camps’ for Illegal Immigrants

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, June 18, 2024

 

Rachel Maddow is apparently afraid that she might be sent to a detention camp in a second Trump term.

 

Asked in a CNN interview last week if she fears that she’ll be “targeted” in a second Trump administration, she replied, “I’m worried about the country broadly if we put someone in power who is openly avowing that he plans to build camps to hold millions of people, and to ‘root out’ what he’s described in subhuman terms as his ‘enemy from within.’”

 

“For that matter,” she continued, “what convinces you that these massive camps he’s planning are only for migrants?”

 

“So, yes,” the TV host and podcaster concluded, “I’m worried about me — but only as much as I’m worried about all of us.”

 

The mechanism by which immigration authorities would arrest a native-born journalist and hand her over to ICE for detention was never explained, nor how this would pass muster with any court anywhere.

 

The word “camps” is obviously redolent of totalitarianism and brutish colonial practice and is considered threatening in and of itself. As the subhead of an MSNBC piece put it, “under Donald Trump’s post-election vision, the government would actually round up immigrants and put them in camps. That’s not hyperbole; that’s the plan.”

 

The word entered the bloodstream with the publication of a New York Times article last November headlined, “Sweeping Raids, Giant Camps and Mass Deportations: Inside Trump’s 2025 Immigration Plans.”

 

The Times said the plans amount “to an assault on immigration on a scale unseen in modern American history,” although the scale of illegal immigration over the past three and a half years — to which the plans are a response — has also been unseen in modern American history.

 

The less inflammatory synonym for “camps” is enhanced ICE detention space, but that doesn’t have the same ring.

 

The point of detention, by the way, isn’t to hold people, it is to remove them, as Trump noted the other day.

 

Immigration hawks would be happy to skip the detention phase and simply turn around illegal immigrants at the border, or pick them up within the U.S. and send them back home immediately.

 

If the ACLU and other open-borders organizations didn’t do so much to fight removal, there’d be less need for detention.

 

The perverse effect of the use of the word “camps” is that it takes something that is normal and authorized — nay, mandated under federal law — and makes it sound illicit.

 

The Immigration and Nationality Act makes it clear that illegal immigrants are supposed to be detained.

 

You know who else wants “camps” or enhanced detention capacity, depending on your taste in words? The Biden administration.

 

NBC News, reporting on the relatively small-scale results from the Biden executive order, noted that a “senior DHS official said that without money from Congress for more detention space and deportation flights, Border Patrol will continue to be forced to release some illegal border crossers into the U.S., particularly those from countries that Mexico is reluctant to accept.”

 

And as The Hill noted, “the administration is shaking up federal immigration detention and enforcement amid a push to cut costs systemwide and increase detention capacity to implement President Biden’s new asylum policy.”

 

It is certainly true that what Trump is planning is something much more extensive — because Biden’s priority has been admitting illegal immigrants, and Trump’s would be removing them.

 

The only reason that we are talking about “millions of people,” as Maddow put it, is that so many migrants with no right to be here have come on Biden’s watch. Whatever her other faults, Maddow wasn’t one of them, and whatever she might imagine in her conspiratorial fever dreams, immigration enforcement really isn’t about her.