Andrea Pitzer
Books! One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps, Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World, & a Nabokov bio. Now working on Snowblind: Death on the Polar Ice. Former karateka & record store clerk. Newsletter & podcast: andreapitzer.com.
- Some people are asking what I want Schumer to do. He should be screaming over medical care and access to facilities. He should be going to detention facilities himself and putting his body on the line, as he did at the border in 2019. He should lean into stories about New Yorkers in detention. [1/4]
- The country is furious about what's going on. 86% of Ds and 47% of independents nationwide support *abolishing* ICE. He should offer a vision of how ICE & CBP can be fundamentally diminished or dismantled, even if he can't do it today. Creating a road map generates pressure and possibilities. [2/4]
- He should be creating a list of planned facilities (which are extremely unpopular with most Americans) and encouraging candidates to fight them. Localities are already succeeding at this. Where they can't succeed, they're finding clever ways to punish contractors who collaborate with them. [3/4]
- He shouldn't pretend body cams are a real concession. He should follow the example of Van Hollen, whose visit to Kilmar Abrego Garcia was instrumental in triggering a national shift on attitudes toward Trump immigration actions. I could list more, but those are a few of the things he could do. [4/4]
- You cannot do "commonsense reform" for a secret police force that's declared itself exempt from constitutional requirements. You cannot reform ultraviolent agencies that have been corrupt for decades and now have accountability only to the president's goons and lackeys.
- In many of the first generation of modern concentration camp systems (near the turn of the twentieth century), the vast majority of deaths were caused by disease and malnutrition. Most of the victims were women and children.
- It appears there is now a measles outbreak at the Dilley family detention facility. www.sacurrent.com/news/san-ant...
- I understand it's hard for some to use the term concentration camp, even for those horrified by what's happening. And there are settings (e.g., court) where it may not be helpful today. The key thing to realize is that there's an arc of how detention regimes tend to go, and we're recognizably on it.
- To be clear, we're in such bad shape because the U.S. regime has been a detention regime for a very long time. Now the long-term crisis is getting exponentially worse, with funding already allocated to do incalculable harm. But not all the necessary materials are at hand yet, and we can still act.
