Abstract

This article analyzes the use of Holocaust analogies in the wake of the Trump administration’s policy of forced detention and concentration of undocumented migrants. The authoritarian turn under Donald Trump led to a debate over the applicability of the term «concentration camp» for the migrant detention and holding centers at the southern border of the United States. In June 2019, when Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, declared the migrant detention centers «concentration camps», she provoked a shift in Holocaust memory culture, as she asked Americans to look before the Holocaust to the long western history of the concentration and detention of unwanted and subjugated populations. Ocasio-Cortez’s public demand that Americans look at their colonial and racial past of forced detention produced heated reactions which fell primarily along party lines, with the Republican Party embracing the mantle of Holocaust exceptionalism and the Democratic Party open to analogies as potential motivators of political action. The debate also opened another chapter in the scholarly discussion of the efficacy of analogical reasoning, with the conditions at the border and the Trump era’s abuses suggesting an urgency for some