This administration is holding migrants and refugees captive in concentration camps. Children and adults are sleeping on top of one another on cold, concrete floors, with no access to medical care, all by design. In fact, news just broke of a secret racist and sexually violent Border Patrol facebook group where agents joke about migrant deaths. About 24 immigrants have died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody, with more dying under the watch of other federal agencies, like Customs and Border Protection (CBP), including five children. The sole intended purpose of these camps – whether for migrant children at the border or parents ripped away from their families in cities and towns across the country – is to uphold systemic racism by inflicting widespread harm and causing perpetual fear in our communities.

Our country has a dark history of family separation and mass detention of marginalized communities in concentration camps and it is one that we haven’t fully addressed or atoned for. Multiple generations of Japanese Americans experienced racism and horror when they were hunted down and corralled into camps. Native Americans and indigenous communities were dehumanized, forced off their lands and into camps. And millions of Black and Brown people today are trapped in our country’s mass incarceration system, away from their children and loved ones.

Now, the White House is demanding more money and Congress is willing to give billions more dollars to the Deportation Force and more camps. The idea that we only have to provide a few basic needs in order to “fix” the current humanitarian crisis is wrong. The camps must be closed and the mass deportation force and policies brought to an end.

We are at a moment of choice. We can either continue Trump’s policies of family separation and the criminalization of immigrants, and allow our government to keep killing asylum seekers. Or we fight back against a government that refuses to recognize the humanity of these children and of immigrants and refugees.