1. United States
2. Wash.
3. Letter

I would like to talk to you about the detention facilities currently operating on American soil. The conditions and treatment of the people inside these facilities is not detention. It is neglect, abuse, and cruelty on par with some of the worst war crimes in history, and it is being funded by American taxpayers and operated in the name of American safety. Historians have a word for facilities where a government imprisons people based on their ethnicity or national origin, in inhumane conditions, without adequate legal process: concentration camps. The United States signed international conventions against this. We built museums about why this is wrong. We prosecuted people at Nuremberg for doing this. The fact that we are now perpetrating a version of it is not something future generations will look back on with anything other than horror. I am asking you to use your oversight authority to investigate these facilities, to demand independent inspections, to defund the expansion of this system, and to remember that "just following orders" is not a defense that has aged well historically.