THE SET-UP: The Prison-Industrial Complex grew like a greedy lamprey throughout the so-called War on Drugs. The prison population swelled in the three decades after Ronald “Just Say No” Reagan was first elected. Fed by a 171% increase in drug arrests over the course of two-plus decades, the federal prison system became a fattened shark and, therefore, a tempting target for the jawless, blood-sucking parasite commonly known as “private prisons.” Their parasitism paid off, too. US prisons prisons held 50,000 nonviolent offenders in 1980. By 1997, it had grown to 400,000. Not coincidentally, the private prison industry grew by a staggering 1,600% during a two decade-long incarceration spree that largely ended in 2009.
Although he didn’t actually end the Drug War, Obama certainly didn’t make it worse. In 2017, Vox’s German Lopez offered a generous assessment of Obama’s legacy which he regarded as commendable even if it was largely “rhetorical” and tonal. Then again, he allowed de facto marijuana legalization to proceed largely unmolested by the Justice Department. And Obama was “the first president in decades to leave office with a smaller federal prison population than the one he inherited, thanks in part to executive efforts to undo harsh sentences against nonviolent drug offenders.”
But Obama’s key move came in August 2016 when he ordered the “gradual phase-out of private prisons by letting contracts expire or by scaling them back to a level consistent with recent declines in the U.S. prison population.”
Of course, the Trump Administration reversed that within his first year.
Undaunted, Biden campaigned on the promise to end the use of “private facilities for any detention, including detention of undocumented immigrants.” In 2021, Biden used an Executive Order to, like Obama before him, simply let “private prison contracts between firms and the federal Bureau of Prisons to expire without renewal.”
Of course, undoing that was among the first batch of Executive Orders Trump signed upon returning to the Oval Office. That’s because Trump needed them for his massive, years-long effort to ethnically cleanse the population of non-citizen Hispanics. Let’s be honest, that’s who the masked marauders of ICE are hunting down on the streets and in the fields. It’s been sobering to scroll Instagram and see extraordinary rendition “come home to roost.” Watch a few clips of masked goons with no badges or identification jumping out of a car to tackle and zip-tie someone’s husband or wife or the person preparing food. They are operating with impunity.
It’s the impunity that led Edward Luce to write this in today’s Financial Times:
Trump is ushering in America’s ICE age. He has catapulted ICE into America’s best-funded law enforcement agency — and increasingly beyond accountability. The agency’s in-house watchdog was scrapped earlier this year. For the time being, the lower courts can do little to rein it in. The Supreme Court last year gave Trump sweeping immunity from “official” acts he takes as president. That makes ICE Trump’s de facto private army — his security state within the state.
Trump has private jailers, too
CoreCivic and GEO Group have reaped what Trump has sown. Grim as it may sound, they are about to reap much more. Trump’s just-passed megabill includes billions for ICE and his immigration crackdown—including $45 billion for detention. As it stands now, the U.S. immigrant detention system is, per a YahooFinance piece on surging prison stocks, the largest globally.
That’s right. The largest prison population wasn’t enough. The U-S-A also detains the most immigrants. Ka-ching! And it’s about to hold a lot more. Bloomberg just reported today:
The Trump administration is stitching together a wider network of immigrant-detention sites, expanding capacity by thousands of beds through agreements with local jails and private contractors across the country.
About 60 additional local, state and federal jails and prisons have begun holding newly arrested migrants facing deportation since Donald Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20, according to government figures analyzed by Bloomberg.
The facilities include five run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, four operated by private contractors including CoreCivic Inc. and GEO Group Inc., and two sites at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
YahooFinance also reported:
CoreCivic and GEO Group “say they have 14 unused prisons across several states that could accommodate thousands of additional detainees. Hiring is already underway in some locations.
Maybe all those Welfare Kings supposedly living a lavish, Medicaid-funded lifestyle will ultimately meet their work requirement by staffing a private prison filled with immigrants—some who risked everything—to come here and do the jobs they wouldn’t. - jp
TITLE: Are We About to Have Labor Camps in the United States of America?
https://newrepublic.com/article/197619/trump-immigration-labor-camps
EXCERPTS: One aspect of the Republicans’ big, ugly bill that didn’t get enough attention until Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez elevated it over the last few days is the massive amounts of money it directs to the apprehension and detention of immigrants.
It includes $170 billion for immigration enforcement: about $50 billion to build a wall on the southern border, $30 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and $45 billion for detention camps.
What is ICE going to do with all that money? One thing, obviously, is that it will try to hire enough people to hit MAGA apparatchik Stephen Miller’s target of rounding up 3,000 people a day. That’s a target it apparently still hasn’t even met. On June 5, NBC News reported that ICE hit a then-record of 2,200 detentions that day. That included hundreds of people who showed up at regional ICE offices to check in as required by the release program they were enrolled in—a program under which these people were deemed not to be threats to public safety and whose movements were already monitored by ankle bracelets or geo-locator apps.
In other words, ICE has already been detaining thousands of people who, yes, entered the United States illegally but ever since just lived, worked, and even paid taxes. Some may have gotten into some trouble with the law, but they’re wearing monitors and showing up for their appointments. Others have had no scrapes with the law at all. And now ICE is going to have the resources to detain thousands more such people.
Now think about $45 billion for detention camps. Alligator Alcatraz is expected to cost $450 million a year. Right now, a reported 5,000 detainees are being held there. The Trump administration says the new $45 billion will pay for 100,000 beds. So that’s 20 more Alligator Alcatrazes out around the country. But it’s probably even going to be worse than that, because the state of Florida, not the federal government, is footing the bill for that center. If the Trump administration can convince other states to do the same, or pay part of the freight, we’re looking at essentially a string of concentration camps across the United States. Besides, there’s something odd about that $450 million a year price tag. (Here’s an interesting Daily Kos community post asking some good questions about that astronomical cost. The math doesn’t add up.)
On his July 1 visit to the Everglades camp with Governor Ron DeSantis and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, Trump was asked about detainees participating in some kind of work program. The question starts at 5:43 of this video. As ever with Trump, he starts and stops sentences midway and it’s hard to follow. But he talks about “farmer responsibility” and “owner responsibility.” He seems to be describing a system whereby farmworkers and others would live in detention camps but be released to work on farms or in hotels. “They’re not getting citizenship,” he said, “but they get other things.” He didn’t specify what those “things” were. So something is in the works.
And this is where we are, in the United States of America, in the year 2025: We’re looking at the very real possibility of a string of labor camps across the country. Am I overstating things? First of all, I’d rather err by overstating things than understating them. And second, a lot of people once upon a time thought it was overstating things to say that Trump might lead an insurrection against the United States government, or that he’d force media companies and law firms to pay him bribes, or that he’d try to dictate what they teach at American universities, or that he’d do 15 other things he’s turned around and done.
So no, I’m not overstating things at all. The time to start opposing this is right now. Snyder writes that U.S. employers should be made to sign a pledge that they won’t use camp labor. A fine idea. But someone has to write the pledge and circulate it and make noise about it. Democrats, any takers?
TITLE: Why Many Believe Trump Suggested Slavery to Farmers Who Want to Keep Their Long-term Undocumented Workers
https://www.theroot.com/why-many-believe-trump-suggested-slavery-to-farmers-who-why-some-believe-trump-suggested-slavery-to-farmers-who-want-to-keep-their-undocumented-workers
EXCERPTS: The Trump Administration’s hardline approach to immigration was met with protests in L.A., that he simply shrugged off. The people who caught his attention were farmers and hotel owners who said their businesses relied on illegal immigrants. They urged the president to come up with a way for them to keep those employees while he attempts to keep the promises he made on the campaign trail.
His solution? Slavery.
You may think I’m being hard on our Commander in Chief. So let’s look at what he actually said:
“We have a lot of cases where ICE would go into the farm, and these are guys that are working there for 10 to 15 years, no problem…The farmers know them. It’s called ‘farmer responsibility’ or ‘owner responsibility,’ but they’re going to be largely responsible for these people.”
Let’s demystify what the man said. He is saying with his whole chest that in order for the illegal immigrants who work in these spaces to stay in the country, the farmers and hotel manager that employee them must personally take responsibility for them.
They will essentially oversee them, hence the President using the phrase ‘owner responsibility.’ Let’s talk about why this is a terrible idea.
Trump is saying that his solution to the concerns raised about his hardline illegal immigration policy is a situation where the people who employee them must take responsibility for them being in the country. This could result in a horrific situation where people are scared to leave their current job for a higher paying one because they are afraid they would be deported from the country.
But let’s go further. Who would put it past these employers, now that they have all this power, to start cutting back their employee’s pay? Or to demand the work longer hours for the same amount of pay? Who could the workers turn to in that situation?
[Trump] knows it’s slavery. And just like with slavery, he is proposing a system where illegal immigrants would be treated not like people. But like property.
TITLE: Trump Budget Bill Turns ICE Into A Superpredator
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/07/07/trump-budget-bill-turns-ice-into-a-superpredator/
EXCERPTS: ICE is now the largest law enforcement agency in the United States — the recipient of nearly $70 billion to fund work it doesn’t really even need to be doing. As CBP data shows, the flow of migrants into the country has slowed to a trickle. The people being hunted down by ICE’s Gestapo-esque squads are generally just people who work hard, pay taxes, respect laws, and are a net gain for this country. The criminal element has largely been removed already and whatever’s left simply isn’t enough to justify raids of businesses, neighborhoods, and public gatherings. All that’s doing is fluffing ICE’s detainment stats. And the only people who care about those numbers are the bigots currently serving as un-elected officials in the Trump Administration.
And this means that ICE will continue to be this terrible long after Trump leaves office (assuming, of course, he decides to respect this particular law). Once the money becomes part of an agency’s budget, it takes a concerted effort to roll back the expected annual funding. And from what we’ve seen of the federal government pretty much since its inception, funding only gets cut if it scores political points. Since ICE is part of the DHS and the DHS is still pretending it gives a single shit about homeland security, all it will take for ICE to remain the largest US law enforcement agency is periodic assertions about its national security-related efforts, even if those efforts are just regular-ass racism the agency pretends makes this country safer.