Something I wish more people acknowledged when making the Nazi / ICE comparison is that concentration camps were more than just places where people were sent to be imprisoned and/or to await execution.
Like modern prisons, they were also conveniently filled with masses of easily exploitable free labor forces- and this goes for both sides of the war. The German camp that my great-uncle was placed in forced them to repair railroad lines destroyed during the war, and per the War Relocation Act, many Japanese Americans interned here in the US were also forced into hard labour in agriculture & construction.
When Donald Trump says that rounding up immigrants will fix our economy, many people look at those pretty words from a workers perspective and assume he means freeing up American Jobs(tm) for Real American Patriots(tm) to secure. After all, that's the narrative his regime has been spinning. But even beyond the grotesque and racist implications of believing that justification at face value, it's also just fucking stupid to believe him at all. Donald Trump is a billionaire part of the capitalist ruling class which exists solely on the exploitation of workers- as evident by his own slew of lawsuits from workers he refused to pay- so why on Earth would he do anything to benefit them?
No, when Donald Trump says these camps will fix the economy, he is working for the benefit of other billionaires in his class. And only one thing truly benefits them; free or ridiculously cheap labor.
In 2019, folks imprisoned by ICE in California sued GEO Group for forcing them to work under a "voluntary" work program (actually under threat of harm or solitary confinement) so that the company did not have to hire more staff to maintain the detention center. CoreCivic was accused of the same in 2023. These are private companies hired to create and staff these detention facilities & they were also some of the biggest financial supporters of Trump's campaign. Conveniently, these lawsuits tend to die in or out of court, or be drawn out indefinitely. A man who sued GEO Group for forced labor in a Colorado detention center in 2014 is still pending resolution. (Side note but GEO Group also just rejected a shareholder vote to review their Human Rights conduct. Normal behavior when you're definitely not violating human rights.)
Why does all this matter? Because it's exactly how things started in the Holocaust, too. Forced labour was, at first, limited to working within the camp completing everything that needed to be done, as it far exceeded the capabilities of the Nazi workers alone. Easy enough to justify. Only when the war created shortfalls in other work sectors did the Nazi party push this labour to the next level- outsourcing that labour to companies like Volkswagen, who coordinated with Hitler to take control of several of those camps. This is not to say that extermination wasn't always the end goal of the Nazi Party, only that forced labour played an active part in the design of that cruelty, and it GREATLY benefited the German economy. Trust that it is part of the design here, too- and that it always has been. Trump is just one president in a long line to continually expand these operations to their own benefit.
And of course, I would be remiss not to mention it again; poorly-paid, outsourced labor is already the status quo for the American prison industrial complex. If you can justify it once, you can justify it again and again and again... Just something to chew on as ICE detainments ramp up and that untapped labor force keeps growing. Watch for billionaires frothing at the mouth for opportunities to use it.
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