“Morning Joe” co-host Joe Scarborough unleashed on President Donald Trump’s “savage” ICE detention centers and compared them to the prison camps that Japanese Americans were forced into during World War II.
“You have so many things going on here,” Scarborough said Tuesday of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers. “First of all, just the savage treatment that so many of these detainees are getting, that we get reports out of a man from Northern Ireland who was held there for months and months, basically said it was like a concentration camp.”
He continued, “You have other stories of abuse, lights on around the clock, just the most savage, inhumane conditions in some of these facilities.”
The MS Now host called out the Department of Homeland Security for repeatedly “lying” to Americans.
“You have DHS, who has lied to Americans time and time and time again. They’ve lied over and over and over again,” he continued. “So who is going to believe DHS? Who is going to believe ICE when they are lying about the conditions that so many of these detainees are being held in? Nobody! The answer is nobody! And yet it continues. And not only that, it expands.”
After decrying that the ICE camps are “not detention centers” but rather “industrialized internment camps,” the former politician declared that he would like to invite a historian to come to the studio to “compare” the conditions.
“I really would like a historian to come on and compare Japanese [American] internment camps of the 1940s to the condition in these internment camps, because I think this may be even more extreme than those internment camps, based on what history I’ve read so far,” Scarborough said.
Calling the Trump administration’s ICE camps “absolutely savage,” he added, “It’s on an industrial scale. It’s un-American. There’s no transparency, and in the state of Michigan, DHS literally killed a Toyota parts plant from coming in that would have created jobs for working Americans.”
“How screwed up are these priorities?” he added.
Scarborough’s remarks follow the Trump administration rapidly expanding the number of ICE camps and increasing arrests and detentions nationwide during Trump’s second term. One of the new camps was built at Fort Bliss in Texas, a move criticized by Japanese American groups because the base was also used to incarcerate members of their community during World War II.
There have been innumerable reports describing inhumane conditions in the camps as the number of individuals incarcerated has nearly doubled over the past year amid Trump’s immigration crackdown.