Are you sure? I looked into the prison population in the US and it's on par with the number of Uyghurs in these camps. And that's absolute numbers, not per capita.
A better comparison would be Japanese internment camps - I don't think anyone is defending those anymore.
No, it's not a perfect comparison, in large part because responsibility doesn't rest on a single central entity. But it's awfully similar. The US has more prisoners per capita than any country in the world. The "scale" of it is atrocious (as is the Chinese treatment of Uyghurs, just to be clear) and America's lack of moral standing on this issue is a big deal because until recently, we've been both a military superpower and the vanguard for human rights.