A definitional aspect of detention camps is that they strip people of, or at least diminish, their legal personhood. And while people held in immigration camps are not completely outside the sphere of law, they are mocked by the law. As the scholar Dan Stone writes of people held in immigration camps: “They are very close to falling into [philosopher Hannah] Arendt’s category of the superfluous stateless person from whom the ‘right to have rights’ has been removed.”

If it looks like a duck...