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.”
Internment camps are built for criminal reasons or to hold political prisoners. Concentration camps are built for eugenics purposes - to concentrate, contain, and control a target ethic group or population. ICE does not exist to address a crime problem. It exists to address the ‘problem’ that America will soon no longer be a white majority country.
The term concentration camp is accurate. When your goal is to engineer the demographics of an entire country, then you’re firmly in the territory of concentration camps. If Trump announced a new open-air prison to hold thousands of “Antifa members,” then that facility would be an internment camp. A facility is labeled based on who it holds:
Actual criminals guilty of real crimes like rape, murder, etc.: prison/jail
Political prisoners: internment camp
Targeted ethnic/demographic groups: concentration camp