The detention centers at the U.S. border were established to hold people who are trying to enter the country illegally or under dubious asylum claims. The centers are necessary to determine just who has a legitimate claim to seek residence in our country.  People detained there receive: food, water, clothing, medical attention, etc.

Conditions there at present are not optimal due to severe overcrowding since so many people are trying to take advantage of the grid lock in congress. They are swarming the border hoping to gain entry before any real action is taken to rectify this unprecedented influx of migrants.

All of the people currently in a detention center entered the country of their own volition and subjected themselves to detention. No one picked them up in their homes and transported them to the detention centers!

The concentration camps, to which some are alluding, are an entirely different situation. No one went willingly to a concentration camp. These people were picked up in their homes, (sometimes in the dark of night), on the streets, and anywhere else the authorities could locate them. Once there, they were selected as to their usefulness as slave labor. Healthy ones were allowed to live while the young or infirm were dispatched to the ovens.

Food and water were disbursed minimally, at best. They were put to forced labor under barbarous conditions. Once their usefulness was expended, they, too, were expended.

“Never again” means that conditions such as the above should never be repeated. It does not mean that: never again can a country have borders. Never again can a country control immigration.  Never again can a country be run by the rule of law.

Never again should we allow such false comparisons to gain traction.

Gerald Caruso

Falmouth

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