Guys you need to understand that the intersection of citizenship, ICE detainment, and the prison industrial complex is not about deportation. It is about slavery and labor. When somebody is arrested by immigration agents they are not immediately put on a plane and sent home. They stay in an interment camp where they must wait for a hearing by an immigration judge. There are not many of these judges and so people WILL be waiting for months if not years in these facilities.
The government is, and has for the past quarter century, been constructing the framework it needs to enslave noncitizen residents in America and force them into the private prison industry where their labor can be sold to companies for base production tasks. The goal here is to provide a fallback for when American global trading hegemony ends (because it will) and we no longer have access to cheap foreign labor markets. We are manufacturing cheap labor markets domestically by arresting immigrants and toying with citizenship status.
What’s happening NOW and TODAY is just a piece in a process that has been ongoing for decades, under both Democrats and Republicans. This is not new, it’s just being marketed to the public differently now that an R is in charge so that the public can feel absolved of guilt.
The immediate goal of the Trump policies now are to overwhelm the immigration judiciary to accrue a stockpile of detained people lacking documentation. Once there are so many (we are here) the government will say “we can’t handle all of this! there aren’t enough judges!” But it will not supply more judges to actually deport these people. This stage is all about normalizing the presence of hundreds of thousands of detained immigrants under your nose.
The next step is allowing these facilities to more easily sell and exploit their labor. I forsee this administration using environmental crises to do so - look at the LA wildfires. They are often fought by incarcerated firefighters. We will see more of this as crises escalate - the government will begin using more carceral labor to deal with the aftermath of hurricanes, landslides, and wildfires. This will normalize carceral slavery in the eyes of the American public.
Once this step is accomplished it will be incredibly simple to further the normalization in moments where there is not an acute crises. Then, we will be having people in these camps making our textiles, picking and packaging our food, slaughtering cattle. After years of this you may even see carceral labor enter the service and entertainment industry. By 2035 you may even be able to call up CoreCivic and lease a cook or a maid! The hard working white woman needs household assistance, after all she is too busy girlbossing to do *those* things. Plus, it’s not her fault her slave decided to be a Criminal.
But it seems like most Americans are not conscious of this framework nor do they care. They engage with this from the perspective that “everyone is welcome here! don’t deport my friends!” hon your friends are not going to be deported, they are being enslaved. Begging you to use your fucking eyes. Your damn Senators are investing in GEO Group and CoreCivic for a reason! Because these companies have a great business plan! Enslaving immigrants already is a billion dollar industry and its potential for growth under post imperial late stage capitalism is mind-numbing!
