Donald Trump is rounding up people and putting them in camps already

Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel called the plan an “act of brutality.โ His Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez wrote on social media that the plan “shows disregard for human conditions and international law.” What plan are they referring to? Donald Trump says he is ordering the preparation of a mass detention camp in Guantanamo Bay in which to concentrate 30,000 immigrants.
And yet the plan is even more sinister than it actually sounds. Transporting 30,000 human beings to Guantanamo Bay isnโt merely frightening, it isnโt merely the first step in a Nazi-like agenda, itโs also rather odd. Why do it? Why would anyone go to the trouble and expense to detain foreign nationals in a foreign country merely to process and deport them?
There can only be one reason I can think of. Trump intends to mistreat them, probably torture them, possibly murder them. Trump himself practically admitted as much. He said the facility is being prepared for โthe worst criminal illegal aliens.โ He added that “some of them are so bad we don’t even trust the countries to hold them, because we don’t want them coming back.โ That last, obviously, can only mean that Guantanamo Bay is going to be a one-way trip for some.
Of course, which immigrants will be selected to go there will be up to Trump immigration officials. If that sounds eerily reminiscent it may be because it might remind you of the job given to Dr Josef Mengele at the Nazi death camp in Auschwitz. Mengele often stood at the front of the line of Jews being herded from trains deciding who lives and who dies.
The convicted felon who currently infests the White House has a history of using extreme negative hyperbole to describe immigrants. That history dates back to 2015 when he first descended the escalator in Trump tower to announce his candidacy for president. He referred to immigrants coming up from Mexico as โrapists and murderers.โ In the 10 years since he has reinforced that language to the point that MAGA now accepts it as an article of faith.
I can think of no greater hell than the idea of being transported to a facility in a foreign country with a deserved reputation for torture and injustice and with no oversight. I donโt think itโs overstating the case to think of it as a kind of Auschwitz 2.0. Picking foreign lands far away to commit atrocities is nothing new. Remember, the Nazis didnโt want to commit their most egregious crimes on native soil so they located their most dreadful hell in Auschwitz in Poland โ not Germany. If anyone is going to recreate the horror of Auschwitz, Donald Trump, someone known to admire Hitler so much he kept a book of Hitlerโs speeches by his bed, is exactly such a man.
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Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.