Are there no forced labor camps?
You may have heard that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is devoting a portion of its outsized persecution budget to create more detentions centers for the persecuted (Bloomberg):
Despite protests in small towns and cities across the US, the Trump administration is pushing ahead with the purchase of warehouses it plans to convert into immigration jails in what could be the largest expansion of such detention capacity in US history.
The cost for acquiring two warehouses alone was $172 million. A third in El Paso, Texas, could be among the largest jails of any kind in the country if completed as envisioned, with 8,500 beds. The deals mark the latest turn in US Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s plan to use as many as 23 warehouses for detaining thousands of immigrants arrested by federal agents in Minneapolis and other cities. Those aggressive enforcement actions have ignited clashes with protesters and led to agents killing two US citizens.
On Jan. 16, the administration paid $102 million for a site near Hagerstown, Maryland, according to a local court filing. A week later, the government paid $70 million in cash for a warehouse in Surprise, Arizona. The price tags — roughly in line with the industry average for the warehouse market — cover just the acquisition of the sites, which are currently empty shells. ICE still has to pay companies to outfit the buildings with toilets, showers, beds, dining and recreation areas and then run them as detention centers.
Place your bets. Once built, there will be a sunk-cost argument for keeping these camps open even if Shadow President Stephen Miller’s anti-immigrant pogrom flames out. Now let’s see, who else might private contractors make bonuses housing there?
People like this?
Perhaps ICE’s private-sector partners will extract more profit from prisoners by turning ICE detention centers into forced labor camps?
Trump 2.0 and its partners no longer care about public opinion or the optics. They’re working hard to render public opinion irrelevant by November 3.