O’er the Land of the Freeeeeee

Forcing immigrant detainees to work for their captors isn’t just exploitative. It’s unconstitutional. The Thirteenth Amendment explicitly prohibits slavery and indentured servitude, except “as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.” But immigration detention is a form of civil confinement. People held in detention centers are simply waiting—behind bars—for the resolution of their immigration cases. This is punitive in practice, but not in law, as they are incarcerated, but not in prison. Only 12 percent of the people who have been detained at Delaney Hall since it opened have ever been convicted of anything. 

— “The Delaney Hall Strike Is Exposing a Massive Thirteenth Amendment Crisis,” Balls & Strikes

And now, from a second article:

One hundred million deportations is a number that gets thrown around by the staffers running the Department of Homeland Security’s social media accounts, as well as Gregory Bovino, former lead agent with the Border Patrol—who was, until recently, the high-profile face of recent abuses unleashed against immigrants. But I try to keep the range of 15 to 20 million in mind, because it’s a concrete goal that’s been announced by key administration officials repeatedly. Removing 100 million people of color from the U.S might be what the administration wants, but 15 to 20 million is they think they can publicly attempt. 

It’s a deportation count that they’re unlikely to achieve, particularly in the two and a half remaining years of the second Trump administration. Deportation is a cruel process in the U.S., and the government’s further degradation of an already bad system is routinely being halted or upset by judges trying to acknowledge at least some immigrant rights. But Trump and his allies are still looking at numbers that would incapacitate the domestic economy in ways that could then could be used as justification for expanding detainee labor. 

Just because they’re unlikely to reach a workforce of millions of detainees doesn’t mean they won’t do tremendous harm along the way. And forced labor will continue to be part of that.

— “Forced labor in concentration camps,” Degenerate Art