https://www.cnn.com/profiles/z-byron-wolf
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary definition of concentration camp (which was their top trending term Wednesday) is:
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 —used especially in reference to camps created by the Nazis in World War II for the internment and persecution of Jews and other prisoners.
That does not specifically say that a concentration camp must be a Nazi camp, but it does refer to Nazis.
On the other hand, the detention camps the US has created are for people seeking asylum in the US, which makes them refugees, so a camp for a large number of them meets this dictionary definition.
Encyclopedia Britannica says that the people held in a concentration camp are noncombatants held without trial,
often to keep them from becoming guerrillas, as with the Japanese Americans during World War II. There were no such camps for German Americans. But they argue concentration camps should be distinguished from refugee camps.
What to call the internment of a type of people by the US government without trial has been an open debate for some time.
In deciding the famous 1944
Korematsu v. United States, the case debating the constitutionality of ordering Japanese Americans into camps, the Supreme Court was split on what to call the facilities.
In the majority opinion, which upheld the government's ability to put people in camps, the justices rejected the term "concentration camp," writing, "and we deem it unjustifiable to call them concentration camps, with all the ugly connotations that term implies."
