Are We About to Have Labor Camps in the United States of America?

If you think that’s far-fetched, then you really haven’t been paying attention to what the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress have been up to lately.

ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS/AFP via Getty Images

One aspect of the Republicans’ big, ugly bill that didn’t get enough attention until Rep. 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. On Thursday, right after the bill passed the House, AOC posted on Bluesky:

I don’t think anyone is prepared for what they just did w/ ICE. This is not a simple budget increase. It is an explosion - making ICE bigger than the FBI, US Bureau of Prisons, DEA,& others combined. It is setting up to make what’s happening now look like child’s play. And people are disappearing.

— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@aoc.bsky.social)July 3, 2025 at 2:58 PM

The next day—the Fourth of July, as fate would have it, when President Trump signed the bill into law—historian Timothy Snyder posted a column on Substack under the blunt headline “Concentration Camp Labor.” If AOC’s post and Snyder’s headline sound hyperbolic to you, consider what’s actually in this new law.

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 (ICE); and $45 billion for detention camps.

A little perspective: ICE’s existing annual budget has been around $8 billion, so $30 billion is nearly quadruple. As AOC noted, it will make ICE into a huge police force that will indeed be larger than the FBI ($11.3 billion), the Bureau of Prisons ($9 billion), and the Drug Enforcement Administration ($3.3 billion) combined.

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 hit. 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.

And no—the American public emphatically does not support this. A late June Quinnipiac poll found that 64 percent of respondents said undocumented people should be given a path to citizenship, and only 31 percent said they should be deported. And that 64 percent is up from 55 percent last December, meaning that people have watched six months of Trump’s immigration policies in action and turned even more strongly against deporting everyone.

So that’s what ICE is going to do with its $30 billion. 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.)

Forty-five billion will build a lot of stuff. As a point of comparison: In 2023, the United States budgeted $12.8 billion to build new affordable housing. We’re about to spend nearly four times on detention centers what we spend on housing.

Now let’s turn to Snyder’s thesis. It was, as he acknowledged, mostly conjecture on his part. But think about it. If you’re the type of person who wants to round up thousands upon thousands of people and detain them in inhumane conditions and give them four or five square feet of private space and feed them slop and treat them like animals, isn’t there inevitably going to come a time when you think: Why should these people be sitting around doing nothing all day?

Snyder’s answer to that question goes like this:

What happens next in the U.S.? Workers who are presented as “undocumented” will be taken to the camps. Perhaps they will work in the camps themselves, as slaves to government projects. But more likely they will be offered to American companies on special terms: a one-time payment to the government, for example, with no need for wages or benefits. In the simplest version, and perhaps the most likely, detained people will be offered back to the companies for which they were just working. Their stay in the concentration camp will be presented as a purge or a legalization for which companies should be grateful.

He then notes that Trump himself has discussed something like this. 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?

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