Cable news people call them “prison camps” or “Trump prison camps,” but look in any dictionary: prisons are where people convicted of crimes are held. As Merriam-Webster notes, a prison is:
“[A]n institution for confinement of persons convicted of serious crimes.”
But what do you call a place where people who’ve committed no criminal offense (immigration violations are civil, not criminal, infractions)? The fine dictionary people at Merriam-Webster note the proper term is “concentration camp”:
“[A] place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard.”
Multiple reasons.
As is always the case when fascism, authoritarianism or similar takes over, things happen slowly, and there’s a reason for that: humans notice fast changes very quickly, but not necessarily slow changes. They didn’t start building these concentration camps yesterday. This has been going on for a while.
Because at least right now, there isn’t the stated goal of keeping people there, but just keeping them there in the intermediate term. We all know where this is going, but it does make it a little more difficult to use that term.
The Trump administration has a habit of suing the press. This has already had a chilling effect. See CBS, BBC, and I think ABC as well. They have decided that it does not make sense financially to fight it, and there are probably a number of lawyers much smarter than I who know what they’re talking about. And since most major news sources are profit-driven and public broadcasting is chronically underfunded, that’s all you get.
The word “concentration camp” often gets confused with the word “death camp”, and we have failed to properly differentiate. How often do you hear about the Nazi concentration camps where they killed people on an industrial scale. No, those were death camps (they had concentration camps as well). But the term has been used wrongly for so long that when people hear “concentration camp”, they think “death camp”, so calling it a concentration camp, while correct, could make a fair number of people think the wrong thing - as of now, there is no systematic extermination, and I hope we get a handle on this before it gets that far.