The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Albrecht Classen
On August 20, 1942, Resi Weglein, a Jewish woman in Ulm, southern Germany, was apprehended together with her husband, Siego Weglein, by the police and sent off to the concentration camp of Theresienstadt in modern-day northern Czech Republic. Amazingly, she and Siego survived the three years and were eventually able to return home. Resi then wrote her memoirs about those horrendous experiences, which were finally published in 1988. I published an English translation only last year, 2025 (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), but I had not been aware of the uncanny parallels between Theresienstadt and the many detention centers across the USA that are now popping up almost daily.
Detention centers serve, at least officially, to hold illegal immigrants and subsequently to deport them – but where to? The number of people is massive, and there appears to be no good system in place first to identify the paperwork of those picked up by ICE and to discriminate carefully. In fact, we constantly hear horror stories, since those agents apprehend almost anyone who does not seem to be a US-citizen (mostly, dark skinned, of course), whether they are fully accepted asylum seekers, i.e., political refugees, or not, whether they provide essential work for our communities or not. If you do not carry your passport or other papers with you, watch out.
ICE has reportedly apprehended also American citizens and pushed them into those horrible centers — death traps. Just as in Theresienstadt and many other Nazi camps during the 1930 and 40s, the living conditions in those detention centers appear to be inhumane and below any standards of human decency. There are 2-year-old kids, 80-year-old abuelas, sick people, dying people, just as Resi Weglein observed the situation in her concentration camp. Increasingly, children from within are calling 9-1-1 to report highly dangerous situations, but no one seems to care since ICE is operating under the shield of governmental indemnity. Their task is to fulfill quotas, never mind that they are massively abusing people, disregarding human rights, and the laws of the land.
This is the United States of America that sacrificed ca. 250,000 servicemen during WWII on the Continent alone to free the world of the Nazi horrors, and thus also to end the Holocaust. Now, we appear to follow the pattern set up by the Nazis and commit almost the same crimes against humankind. Resi Weglein reports, for instance, reflecting on the shipment of “10,000 people to the camps in the East ... 500 Jews from Württemberg were among them. ... All those poor people were already three-quarters close to death due to famine, and many probably did not survive the journey to their destination” (38). Subsequently, she commented about Theresienstadt: “From October 1942 to March 1943, more than 50,000 people were forced together in a space where before barely 7000 people had lived” (39). Cruelty, brutality, ignorance, and aggression dominated. Bread, for instance, if any was available, was transported into the camps on carts that had been used before to take the corpses out of the camps (44).
ICE is quietly and secretly buying warehouses (in Marana, Surprise, e.g.) to hold all those detainees. Unbelievably, the US Congress has allocated $45 billion to ICE in July 2025 for this purpose, closely following the Nazi playbook. Why not use a tenth of that money to set up a decent immigration structure and to grant asylum and then citizenship to those people truly in need of refuge? Why do we make them to the bogeymen of political hysteria, to the scapegoats of what economic social threat? In fact, we spend billions of dollars to ship those detainees anywhere in the world. Who will then do the basic agricultural work, who labors in hospitals, in the tourism industry, in the food industry, or in many other areas where the average American citizens is not willing to make a living?
Purging our society of all the newcomers and future citizens ultimately will hurt everyone and is a fundamentally flawed anti-American concept. Detention centers are not Auschwitz, but much suffering happens there. Yes, we need legality and a secure border, but humanely and respectfully.
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