Deterrence.
I guess it is to make parents less likely to try to bring children with them.
It has always been nearly impossible to comprehend how the Nazis could put children on trains and send them to concentration camps. How could those actions be tolerated by the world and how could the Nazis be so cold and heartless. It's hard to wrap you mind around how it all happened. Well, you're seeing it happen before your eyes right now.
You have a president that is ordering this to be done. You have people that have been put into positions with unlimited power and no repercussions. You have elected officials that blatantly lie (propaganda system). You have a fear based system that prevents people from resisting. You have people of power and wealth (e.g. Tim Cook) that benefit from what's taking place, which further supports and enables the president's actions.
The Nazi took members of ethnic minorities and put them into death camps and massacred them in horrible ways.
Comparing the deportation of illegal immigrants (illegals immigrants can be of any ethnic or religious background) with the industrial mass murder of entire ethnic groups? That’s an absurd comparison.
I agree that what happened to the young girl in the article was messed up but your comparison is still ridiculous.
EDIT: After I posted this comment, many people replied to me disagreeing with me. Rather than reply individually to each person I’ll just edit this comment and say what I have to say here.
There is a gigantic difference between deporting people who are in a country illegally vs targeting people for discrimination based on ethicality and/or religion.
The Nazis targeting ethnic minorities and placed them into labor camps. Which later became death camps.
That’s different than placing illegal immigrants who violated immigration laws (and once again I repeat include people of every ethnicity and every religion) into facilities to later be deported.
If people were being thrown into labor camps in America just for their ethnicity that would be akin to the nazis. But people are being deported for violating immigration laws and are being placed into facilities to facilitate the deportation. Illegal immigrants I repeat again and again can be members of any ethnicity or religion. The Nazis placed people into labor camps because of their ethnicity and later murdered them.
Furthermore many legally immigrant groups and ethnic minorities in America such as the Latinos in South Texas and South Florida voted for Trump specifically so he could pursue these immigration policies.
I agree these policies have gone too far though. What happened to the little girl in this article was messed up.
These are not concentration nor death camps, but Nazi camps all the same. It's important to be familiar with all of history and not dismiss a comparison because it doesn't fit the most extreme version that we know. How close do you think the Dilly TX center is in it's operation to these other types of Nazi camps? In which ways are they similar or different? Does that change anything?
The Nazis targeting ethnic minorities and placed them into labor camps. Which later became death camps.
That’s different than placing illegal immigrants who violated immigration laws (and once again I repeat include people of every ethnicity and every religion) into facilities to later be deported.
If people were being thrown into labor camps in America just for their ethnicity that would be akin to the nazis. But people are being deported for violating immigration laws and are being placed into facilities to facilitate the deportation. Illegal immigrants I repeat again and again can be members of any ethnicity or religion. The Nazis placed people into labor camps because of their ethnicity and later murdered them.
Furthermore many legally immigrant groups and ethnic minorities in America such as the Latinos in South Texas and South Florida voted for Trump specifically so he could pursue these immigration policies. I agree these policies have gone too far though. What happened to the little girl in this article was messed up.
(Actually I think I’ll edit my original comment to include this reply as well since many other people replied to me as well. Better that than reply to each person.)
I find it very difficult to believe that there is not an ethinic component to the events we are witnessing. Groups are not homogenous in their beliefs or desires. It's kind of telling when we start treating groups like South Texas or South Florida Latinos as if they have some homogenous view.
It was a process over almost 10 years to get to that. Before they were rounding up people to be deported, when it became an issue too large to process deportations the labour camps were next, so on and so forth until gas chambers and industrial murder became the final solution.
If you think the parallel is ridiculous, think again.
That's not how it started. It started with labor camps for political enemies and other undesirables. They became death camps step by step, over time.
We have to nip them in the bud before they have a chance to become death camps. People are already dying of neglect.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46896823
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/10/us/ice-detain-irish-man-five-...
https://www.rte.ie/news/ireland/2026/0209/1557514-seamus-cul...
> Then it was 42 hours of waiting in the airport holding rooms. Eventually they were put on a plane — then a minivan — to the facility in Texas. Maria Antonia said she didn’t really understand where they were going until they saw the center out the window.
> they had been detained for nearly four months.
But then they made noises about getting rid of undesirable people by shipping them out of the country. Prior to that plenty of dehumanizing rhetoric that Trump and others eerily echo. It was only after the forced deportations didn’t pan out that ghettos started. Then detention camps. And finally extermination centers.
It’s very reasonable to look events which appear similar to the start of genocides and decry them.
Having said that, what should the penalty for overstaying a visa by ~7 years[1] be? Nothing? I'd love to see the Democrats propose an alternative approach here, but all I seem to hear is thought terminating cliches like "no one is illegal". Is the proposed alternative just open borders?
[1] > She lived in Colombia with her grandmother and regularly traveled back and forth to the United States to visit her mother, who had been in the U.S. since 2018. (Maria Alejandra had overstayed a visa but since married a U.S. citizen and was applying for a green card.)
Maybe if someone can live somewhere peacefully then they should be allowed to just live there. Maybe making laws that lead to horrors is the crime.
Maybe the real nihilists are the people who'd rather see unjust laws followed than to look at something evil and re-evaluate the legitimacy of giving power to the people doing the evil thing.
The current administration approach is to unleash a masked, unaccountable paramilitary to hold people in warehouses converted into concentration camps.
We also as a democracy simply cannot allow the status quo of a permanent underclass of non-voting residents to be a large percentage of our population. It’s corrosive to have different classes of people with different labor protection rules, wages, etc. There simply is not a clean path forward that doesn’t involve some kind of amnesty simply because seeking justice would be a humanitarian and economic crisis.
Amnesty might not be justice, but as a nation it’s our penance for decades of destabilizing our neighbors and allowing this situation to continue. Let’s get a reasonable immigration system in place and move forward.
Usually receiving a green card forgives any visa overstays. Because she married a US Citizen she would almost assuredly have received the green card. The months of suffering of a little girl are just due to a delay in a bureaucracy approving some paperwork.
But, absolutely - after we fix the broken system and start processing immigration in a reasonable and timely manner, then we can start asking what the penalties should be for people who abuse our immigration system. But I don't have an ounce of energy to spare on that deflection until the former is done.
The current one has already been killed once, and is flagged again.