Donald Trump's brutal ICE detention facilities have been blasted as "concentration camps." This is a freighted term -- summoning more than a century of deplorable history. But experts in the field have no hesitation in using these words to describe the network of facilities that the federal government is using to literally warehouse tens of thousands of immigrants -- men, women, and even children -- snatched out of their communities by masked federal agents.

The activist group 50501 recently hosted a video call on this topic. It featured Andrea Pizer, the author of One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, as well as journalist Frank Abe, co-editor of The Literature of Japanese American Incarceration and a longtime activist in pursuing redress for the abuses of America's World War II camps.

In his introductory remarks, Abe insisted that Trump's new ICE warehouses "are nothing but 21st Century American concentration camps." He added that the subject was personal to him: "I'm a third-generation Japanese American, and I know a concentration camp when I see one."

The words "concentration camp," for many, evoke the horrors of Hitler and of facilities like Auschwitz, where more than 1 million people were murdered by the Nazis. But Pitzer drew a firm distinction (as do other experts) between "extermination centers" and concentration camps. The latter are not synonymous with "death camps" -- although people held in concentration camps often die by disease, deprivation, or indifference.

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