 When it comes to migrants in detention facilities at the border, there's been so much discussion in politics about whether or not it's appropriate to call them concentration camps or even accurate to say that they're comparable to concentration camps. But as we have this conversation, as mainstream media continues to dwell on this, as Republicans hammer away at how insensitive it is for someone like AOC to call them that, we're missing a broader issue. We're missing what's actually happening in these facilities regardless of what you want to call them. Now when you look at these migrant detention facilities slash concentration camps, I don't know how you can dispute the fact that these are in fact concentration camps. And me personally, that's what I'm going to call them because I call it like I see it. That's what it looks like. What I'm going to do though is I'm going to show you footage from these facilities and allow you to judge for yourself because what you're going to see here is actual human suffering that's going on people who are begging and pleading for individuals that bring their cell phones into the facilities to get the word out about the conditions. And it's absolutely gut-wrenching. It's heartbreaking. And when you see this, if you actually believe that all human beings are equal and you have human compassion and just basic empathy, then something will go off in you as you watch this. You're going to feel for these people. So the first video I'm going to show you is from Representative McGovern who took a video of, I want to say, a couple dozen migrants in a relatively small room. This is their reaction to him filming them. Oh, come on. They've been here for over 40 days. No showers, no meals. They're saying that the lights are kept on all night long. That was really, really difficult to watch. You see the tears in their eyes. You see just, you see people genuinely suffering. And you know, it's hard to really grasp that this is happening in our country. More tax dollars are funding that suffering that we're seeing. And they talked about how they haven't showered in 40 days. Can you imagine how uncomfortable that would be? How gross you would feel? And then when it comes to how often they're being fed, it was difficult to really grasp what they were saying. But one guy, he put up his finger, which kind of signaled, you know, maybe they're not eating very often, maybe once per day. So they're not showering. They are presumably not eating very frequently. They're having to sleep with the lights on. This is absolutely morally reprehensible. They're stripping away the dignity that human beings should always have. But I mean, that's the point. What they're doing here is they're trying to send a message to other people who may think about crossing the border. If you come here into our country, this is not a place that will be welcoming to you. This is what you're going to have to deal with. So by, you know, not allowing them to shower, feeding them infrequently, putting them in these small confined areas with a lot of people that are obviously overcrowded, that's the point. The point is to strip away their human dignity. You know, they're cruel because they want other people to not want to come into the country. And the Trump administration isn't necessarily trying to hide this type of footage. In fact, they released footage of Mike Pence going into one of these facilities and touring the facility. And you see people in cages basically with the same response. And I'm going to play that video clip for you. But look at Mike Pence's face because you will see just this blank stare on his face, completely apathetic, not caring at all. I mean, you see them, they're trying to send a message, you know, we have an Ian, they're doing, you know, the four zero. And there's nothing, just complete and utter lack of empathy entirely. It's baffling. Take a look. How can you go into a facility? See all of those people crammed into a confined area? I mean, watching that, I felt claustrophobic myself. How can you go into that facility, though, and just not even acknowledge their existence? It's like he walked into a fucking zoo and was checking out an exhibit. That's the response. But in fact, it's even worse than that because if you walked into a zoo, you know, there would be some type of human emotion that would be expressed on a normal human being's face. But we got nothing there from Mike Pence. We got a seemingly sociopathic response from him. He didn't care at all that there were all these people in cages behind this fence and obviously too many people for one area. And towards the end there, you know, it seemed like they were lying down, trying to demonstrate that one, if they're going to sleep, it's going to be on concrete. But two, even if they wanted to sleep on the concrete, they can't really do that because there's not enough room for all of them because there's so many people confined to a singular area. Now, let me remind you, Trump's administration released this video. They want people to see it. They want the word to get out about these conditions. Now, they're not overtly saying, you know, these are the horrible conditions. In fact, they would maintain that the conditions are lovely. In fact, Mike Pence said, you know, I talked to somebody and she told me how wonderful it is and how her children are being taken care of and whatnot. So they're going to say that they're going to try to maintain that facade. But Mike Pence knows exactly what he's trying to do. This information was deliberately released by Donald Trump's administration because they want us to see it. They want people who may or may not cross the border to see it. They want that to dissuade them. And they also want their supporters to see, look, this is what we're doing. All these people that would be trying to integrate into your society, your white society, they're now locked behind cages. Look at what we're doing. So this is propaganda and it accomplishes numerous things for the Trump administration, numerous things. See, when you and I see it, we feel disgusted. We feel nauseous by looking at the way that our government is treating other human beings. But when a Trump supporter who is highly xenophobic sees this, he or she applauds it and thinks my government is doing something. Trump knows this. Mike Pence knows this. And they also hope that other immigrants get the message too. Now, a couple of weeks ago, we talked about AOC's visit to the border and she talked about how poorly women and children were treated. One of the migrants asked for water. They told her to drink out of a toilet. So I'm going to play a clip of AOC's testimony before Congress because that really what you're going to see here is emotion from someone who's normal. Like if you go into these facilities and you try to process what's happening, this should be the response. You should be appalled. You should be disgusted. So what you're going to see is AOC cry as she describes this. You're also going to hear from Rashida Tlaib towards the end of the clip. But try to think about her reaction, which is a normal human reaction, and juxtapose that with the reaction of Mike Pence in your mind as you watch this. And what was worse about this, Mr. Chairman, was the fact that there were American flags hanging all over these facilities, that children being separated from their parents in front of an American flag. That women were being called these names under an American flag. Mr. Chairman, it needs to be noted into record. I spoke to CPB agents, even though they told us not to speak to them too. Remember that? And I said, what do you think we need to do? Because you guys are overwhelmed. They said, one of them stops sending money. It's not working. Another one said, I wasn't trained for this. I am not a social worker. I am a medical care, not a medical care worker. He actually said, I want to be at the border. That's what I was trained to be at. The separate, the one other one, the last one, Mr. Chairman, the separation policy isn't working, he said. So what you saw there was a genuine, normal reaction to have to other human beings suffering. We're no different than the migrants that are in those cages. We can feel claustrophobic. We can feel hunger. We can feel sad. And so AOC is seeing herself in them as any human being would. But when you contrast that with Mike Pence's response, it was cold. And he clearly had no remorse. Now, one last video I want to show you is from a lawyer who met with child detainees and she gives us a little bit more insight into the conditions. Again, you're seeing somebody who was affected in, I think, a normal way, react to horrible conditions. Many had not brushed their teeth for days. They were wearing the same clothes they had on when they crossed the border. Clothes that were covered in nasal mucus, vomit, breast milk, urine. Multiple children had a strong stench emanating from them because they had not showered in days. At Clint, I met a six year old boy who I will never forget. He was tiny and he hardly spoke. When I asked him if he was at Clint with anyone, he began to sob nearly inconsolably for an hour, nearly an hour. This is happening in the United States of America. But please, whatever you do, don't call them concentration camps. So I'll let you decide now. You saw the footage, you saw the testimony from people who toured these facilities, who couldn't show us everything because they couldn't bring their cell phones, even though some of them snuck their phones in and got some photographs. But you saw it for yourself. How are these not concentration camps? How is it inaccurate to call them concentration camps? How? We know what these are. These are concentration camps. And by calling them what they are, we're getting people to really take a second look at the practices that are going on in these facilities. We're getting people to think, wait a minute, we're calling them concentration camps. So maybe I should see for myself what the conditions are like so I can be the judge. So calling them concentration camps isn't just effective politically, but it's accurate. You saw them. These people are suffering in there and they're suffering at the hands of our government and we're the ones who are paying for that. Now, I want to switch gears a little bit because we cover the human angle, but I want to talk about the capitalist angle because even if you see that suffering and could think who's benefiting from this, right, will the capitalist system absolutely finds a way to extract good from even horrific situations and turns a profit out of it? Because these concentration camps oftentimes are privately run. And as Steph Knight of Axios explains, as of November 2017, 71 percent of detained immigrants were being held in private detention facilities according to government data obtained by the National Immigrant Justice Center. Since Trump became president, ICE has awarded more than four hundred eighty million in federal funds to GEO group and more than three hundred thirty million to core civic according to USA spending. It's a similar situation to the late 1980s and early 1990s when all levels of government began struggling to handle the surge in prison populations and turned it to private prison companies to help. Brennan Center for Justice Program Director Inamai Chediar told Axios, the government is rapidly increasing immigration detention and outsourcing it to the private sector. Between the lines, these privately run detention centers often hire fewer staff members, require less training of them or don't implement programming for detainees. Randy Capps, director of research for U.S. programs at the Migration Policy Institute, told Axios, some have even been sued for imposing forced labor on immigrants. When you have kind of weak standards and you have a for-profit motive, you wind up with understaffing and you wind up with lack of services and activities, Capps said. That's where you get to health problems and you probably have mental health problems, too. So we have a system. That is carrying out large-scale human suffering. We are detaining human beings and keeping them in cages. And we also live in a system that incentivizes the profitization of everything. Everything is commodified. So these private facilities that are overseeing detainees, they have an incentive to keep costs low, which means you squeeze more migrants into smaller facilities. You have left staff and it's just a recipe for disaster. This is what capitalism does. Now, even if you eliminate capitalism, that doesn't mean that xenophobia would be eliminated as well. But certainly you can see here how these things are related and capitalism exacerbates the issue that we're all seeing. So overall, I just want you to see this, to see the footage, because if you see this and you have no response, if your reaction is just ambivalence, then I need you to question how you see other human beings. Because if you don't get some type of visceral response to seeing that, if you don't think, man, this is difficult to watch, even if you're against immigration, even if you're a Trump supporter, if you don't have the switch in your head go off and you don't feel something for these people, you need to reevaluate yourself and reevaluate your priorities because you have bought in to this idea that other human beings can be less than you and inferior to you. And that's incorrect and it's fundamentally against what we should be as human beings who are the same as these migrants, just as we may feel claustrophobic in those conditions, they would feel that way as well. Just as we feel disgusting if we couldn't shower, they feel that way as well because they're human beings and we should treat them as human beings.