“I want to preserve this story in a time capsule and send it adrift in the vast ocean of essays. This narrative of human suffering, set in 2025, is filled with tears and resilience.” Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts doctoral student arrested by DHS agents for co-authoring an editorial in the Tufts student newspaper, has written an account of her time in ICE detention: “‘Even God Cannot Hear Us Here’: What I Witnessed Inside an ICE Women’s Prison” (Vanity Fair).
Remember the debate in 2019 about whether “immigrant detention centers” were concentration camps? They were. They are. And their existence is utterly antithetical to any notion of human rights.
In 2019 I wrote a post about what it means to call something a concentration camp: Three mistakes.
Friday, July 18, 2025
Rümeysa Öztürk writes
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I like your 2019 phrase theatre of cruelty.
In case I ever argue in real life about the definition of US camps, I will say that I flash on to a scene in the Humphrey Bogart Stalag movie where a Swiss man is in the camp measuring the distance between bunks so he can report back to Geneva.
To me, if a place does not meet the standards of the Geneva Convention then it's surely something other than a prison.
I borrowed that phrase from by Antonin Artaud. Heather Cox Richardson just referred to performative cruelty — the same idea.
Let’s remember, too, that the Geneva Convention applies to prisoners of war. People being held in these camps/gulags don’t fit that definition, unless someone claims, as this administration does, that we have been “invaded.”
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