USA, bishops in opposition to migrant facilities: they’re just like the jail camps of World War II | EUROtoday

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The US bishops harshly criticize the plan which supplies for brand spanking new mega-centres for the detention of migrants. “The thought of keeping thousands of families in huge warehouses should test the conscience of every American. Whatever their immigration status, they are human beings created in the image and likeness of God and this is a “moral turning point” for our country”, denounces the bishop of Victoria in Texas, Brendan John Cahill, president of the Migration Committee of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, commenting on the details of the Trump administration’s new plan which intends to double the federal detention capacity for immigrants by spending around 38.3 billion dollars from last year’s reconciliation bill to implement another detention model by the end of 2026.

“This is equivalent to almost fifty times the annual budget of the entire immigration justice system and almost five times the funds allocated this year for the management of the federal prison system”, underlines the bishop in the statement relaunched by the Vatican media.

According to what Monsignor Cahill reports, the plan involves the opening of at least eight “mega centers”, each of which would be capable of detaining from 7,000 to 10,000 people: «Apart from the internment camps used to incarcerate the Japanese in the 1940s, such structures have no precedent in American history – he observes -. These are deeply troubling measures: the federal government has no positive track record of detaining large numbers of people, especially families, and the scope of the proposed facilities is difficult to understand. The private prison industry stands to benefit the most from this increase in immigration detention.”