Scholars Sound Alarms on Trump’s Border Crackdown. But Academic Nuance Doesn’t Always Break Through.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Rio Grande Valley Sector via AP

When news about the U.S. child-detention centers first began to break, Jelena Subotic saw unsettling historical parallels. Subotic, a genocide scholar at Georgia State University, had researched an unusual concentration camp for children that the Nazi-allied Croatian government operated during World War II. Known as Sisak, it was a place so horrible that at least 1,600 kids died there within five months.

Subotic, a political scientist, worried that children detained at the American border would be harmed, too. Some of the more than 2,300 kids separated from their parents under President Trump’s “zero tolerance” border crackdown might be unable to communicate their medical needs to federal authorities, she feared. And Subotic knew from her genocide research how psychologically difficult it could be for young children to restore the bond with their parents after an extended separation.

On Wednesday, she posted a series of tweets holding up the Sisak camp as a cautionary tale for Trump’s America. The U.S. detention centers are “clearly concentration camps,” she wrote. “What is happening now at the US border is an atrocity. Many of these kids will die.”

“Separating children from parents is extremely unusual,” Subotic said in an interview. “And it’s done by horrific regimes in the past. And so I wanted people to be aware that this is not a normal practice.”

Subotic is one of the many scholars from fields like history, sociology, and political science who are trying to shape public understanding of America’s unfolding border crisis. In recent weeks, seemingly every Trump immigration move has prompted a real-time counter-mobilization of academic research, either by scholars themselves or by journalists calling on their expertise.

You see that in John Fea and Yoni Appelbaum’s breakdowns of how a biblical passage cited by the attorney general was used by defenders of slavery. You see it in Aliza Luft and Daniel Solomon’s analysis of Trump’s animalizing rhetoric. You see it in the debate over whether it’s fair to call America’s migrant detention centers concentration camps. (The answer, say two experts, is a qualified yes.)

For some scholars, research that had percolated for years suddenly carries an immediate resonance. On Monday, for example, the political scientists Emily M. Farris and Heather Silber Mohamed published a journal article documenting how news outlets stoke fear of Latino immigrants through imagery depicting them as criminals. Farris drew on her research in a Twitter thread contrasting two images that have shaped the family-separation narrative: the photo of a little girl crying as a border agent frisks her mother, and a picture released by the Trump administration of faceless boys in detention.

“We should think about how those images play a role in who we think is deserving of our concern,” Farris, an assistant professor at Texas Christian University, said in an interview. She added, “Images are powerful, and we don’t necessarily think about them as mediums for the ways we can interpret different policies.”

Engaging, With Nuance

In interviews with The Chronicle, other historians and political scientists emphasized a dilemma of engaging this debate: how to raise alarms about the potential for human-rights abuses while conveying a nuanced understanding of a fast-changing situation. (Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday intended to stop family separations. It remained unclear on Friday how relatives would be reunited.)

The academics’ challenge is complicated by a paradox of scholarly communication right now. Thanks to social media and the proliferation of outlets like Vox and Monkey Cage, scholars are mixing it up in public like never before. But some scholars are frustrated that academe’s fact-backed warnings don’t penetrate to policy makers or large swaths of the public. Their struggle: getting readers to consider their evidence without dismissing them as Ivory Tower elites yet again denouncing Trump.

“They look at whatever their uncle said on Facebook, and that’s equally valuable than anything I can ever say,” Subotic said. “Even if I’ve studied this thing for 10 years, it doesn’t matter.”

Among academics, historians have emerged as particularly prolific interpreters of the family-separation story. They use two main techniques: precedents and analogies.

For example, Princeton University’s Tera W. Hunter published a New York Times op-ed this month detailing the long history of American child-snatching. Her evidence ranged from the domestic slave trade to the late-19th-century practice of removing Native Americans from their families to attend boarding schools designed to assimilate them. In Time, meanwhile, Columbia University’s Mae M. Ngai analyzed another precedent: the Japanese-American internment camps of World War II.

Other historians are pushing back against what they view as the improper use of certain Holocaust analogies. Waitman Wade Beorn, a Holocaust historian at the University of Virginia, singles out former CIA Director Michael Hayden’s tweet of an Auschwitz-Birkenau image to warn about the dangers of Trump’s policies. Beorn, writing in The Washington Post, rejected comparing the murder at Auschwitz to the trauma inflicted on children detained at the American border.

But Beorn argues that it is appropriate to draw parallels to another element of Nazi history. Between 1933 and about 1941, Jews could be released from concentration camps in Germany after a period of detention. They could then decide to leave the country — the Nazis’ goal. That policy, he says, is similar in spirit to Trump’s effort to deter immigration by separating families at the border.

Such nuance is difficult to convey on Twitter. Another historian, Terrence G. Peterson of Florida International University, experienced that this week when he posted the following tweet: “I don’t understand how every historian and social scientist who works on internment/concentration camps can say ‘this is how horrible things start’ and so many people still ask, ‘but is it really?’ YES. The answer is YES.”

Peterson, toggling between Twitter and TV news on his couch at the time, was expressing frustration that public figures were failing to heed scholars’ finely calibrated warnings. That’s how he intended the tweet, anyway. What some readers took from his message, retweeted nearly 9,000 times, was darker: This is it. The Holocaust is imminent.

“That’s the big conversation happening among a lot of academics,” Peterson told The Chronicle. “How do you balance warning people — getting them to act, getting them to be upset and concerned about something that you find concerning — without having them go too far down the path of viral fear-mongering?”

Marc Parry writes about scholars and the work that they do. Follow him on Twitter @marcparry or email him at marc.parry@chronicle.com.