Slavery never went away (Part 3)

Beneath the performative made-for-TV moments, mass deportation hides a much deeper and darker intent to fuel profit.

In case you want to catch up on this series: PART ONE | PART TWO

As we approach the end of a year of tyranny, which has delivered an economy on the edge of potential disaster, masked thugs abducting people from the streets, an affordability crisis, 1.1 million job losses, and catastrophic reputational damage on the world stage, America has a president living in a fantasy world in which none of the aforementioned is true.

I find myself living with the knowledge that Trump’s grip slips a little more each day, but also the frustration that it’s of little comfort in this moment. Mike Johnson's refusal to bring a vote to the floor on ACA subsidies, amid a failing economy and accelerating job losses, brings into sharp focus the dangers for incumbent Republicans next year. There is no question that, if you are a Republican strategist right now, Trump is looking more toxic by the day.

I am mindful that for far too many, relief from this nightmare seems like an eternity away and putting a basic meal on the table for Christmas will be a challenge. This will be unlike the abundance of glad tidings that will appear on the tables of those who have abandoned the vulnerable in service of Mad King Don. I can’t begin to imagine the level of mental anxiety in the broader community, as a result of promises made by a felonious president who has delivered so little to a huge swathe of the population. You can’t pay the bills with lies and false promises.

Historically, no president would have been allowed to get away with what Trump has. The mere thought of an 18% tax increase on imported consumer goods, which would affect everyday essentials, would have led to violent unrest. Yet, Trump has managed to manipulate the narrative to convince millions not to believe their own lying eyes. He’s managed to do this by scratching the itch of immigration that has fomented like a festering wound and bled into all walks of society. This was clearly a result of the highly successful campaign by Trump and the current administration, once again demonising immigrants and blaming them for all of America’s problems.

Immigrants are and always have been an easy target for the right-wing think tanks and politicians, despite there being little evidence that immigrants have a detrimental impact on the US economy. The truth does not match the narrative, and I believe that, encouraged by Stephen Miller, Trump has electorally overplayed his hand on the issue. Most people would agree that Uncontrolled immigration helps noone. Not because it’s overtly damaging to the economy, but because it introduces unnecessary inefficiency to the economic engine.

Immigration needs to be viewed outside the lens of political polarisation. As ever with Trump, he’s taken a divisive political approach, which paints him as a strong man expelling all these people he asserts are damaging America. If you’re looking for why Trump and many before him have got it wrong, look no further than the 9 to 10 million undocumented workforce that pays $96.7 billion in state and federal taxes, for little in return for their contributions.

These people can only work because there is a demand for their labour from AMERICANS. It’s a little like the war on fentanyl; the sale of all illegal drugs is primarily driven by demand from within the US. This is classic free-market supply-and-demand economics; it’s merely convenient to lay responsibility for a social breakdown at the feet of malign foreign entities, because fixing a broken society is viewed as prohibitively expensive. One can’t help thinking that if Trump were getting a cut from the supply of fentanyl, it would not have been declared a weapon of mass destruction.

As I’ve discussed many times, undocumented workers account for 14% of the US workforce. This is a structural economic fact of life that Trump has decided to ignore in the service of political ideology. There is no financial upside to throwing away $96.7 billion in tax revenue and the spending of close to 10 million people with US businesses each year. These are not people shipping their income to offshore accounts in tax havens; they are spending it in the communities in which they work.

This segment of the workforce has long been economically enslaved in America. They live and work in the shadows, receiving no benefit for the significant contribution they make to society. Trump talks about the danger they represent when the truth is that they are the ones in danger, as unscrupulous Americans exploit them in search of cheap labour and a better bottom line, while abusing them with impunity. They are the hostages of a society that they work hard to serve, a society which gives them little to nothing in return. It’s already proven that they are far less likely to be arrested or convicted of a crime than native-born Americans, because the last thing they want to do is draw attention to themselves.

In relation to their earnings, most undocumented workers pay a larger percentage of their wages in taxes than Trump and the wealthiest cabinet in American history. This has nothing to do with removing ‘the worst of the worst’. If it were about an insistence that immigrants do the right thing, then why is ICE camped outside immigration courts? If it were about them being lazy and scroungers, why are ICE raiding workplaces? Before anyone claims they are taking American jobs, I’d advise a read of a report by the Economic Policy Institute from 2024, written by Daniel Costa and Heidi Shierholz, who note:

Claiming that immigrants are making things worse for U.S.-born workers is often used as an intentional distraction from dynamics that are actually hurting working people—such as weak labor standards and enforcement, anti-worker deregulation, weak labor law that fails to protect workers’ rights to unions and collective bargaining in the face of coordinated and well-funded attacks, and other dynamics that result in too much power in the hands of corporations and employers.

The current situation sees the government spending $127 billion to mass deport 14% of the US workforce. Given that the budget is for 4 years, the treasury is forgoing around $386.8 billion in tax revenue, including payroll taxes that fund Medicaid and Social Security. In 2022, data shows they paid $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes and $6.4 billion in Medicare taxes. Of course, the amount of lost tax revenue would be lower depending on how many were deported each year, because you wouldn’t be losing the entire $96.7 billion until they were all deported. However, it would likely be a loss of at least $250 billion over 4 years, plus the billions in wages they spend in the economy.

As noted by Americans for Tax Fairness in March 2025:

• According to ProPublica’s released tax data from the 400 highest-income individuals, undocumented immigrants paid a higher effective tax rate than five of the richest Americans.

• Undocumented immigrants also paid a higher effective tax rate than 55 mega corporations. Here is a list of the Fortune 500 corporations that paid less that same year. These corporations had a combined pre-tax income of nearly $200 billion but paid just $3.7 billion in federal income tax, 90% less than undocumented immigrants.

In short, there is no economic benefit from mass deportation, the report continues:

Deporting millions of undocumented workers would shrink the economy by $1.1 to $1.7 trillion, a more devastating contraction than what happened during the 2008 financial crisis.

I’ll conclude with this point from the report:

It is estimated that $40 to $137 billion of additional revenue could be generated each year if these people were granted work authorization. This is because a less exploitable workforce would be paid higher wages (thus pay more taxes) and tax compliance by both employers and employees would increase.

Just to recap, the US government is using masked thugs, permitted to disregard the law to hunt down, assault and abuse people before detaining them in inhumane conditions, denying them food and medical assistance. They are then deported, often to countries they have not lived in for decades. Many of those being deported pay a higher effective tax rate than five of the wealthiest Americans.

It makes no sense because it’s not about the economy; it’s about white Christian nationalist ideology in the service of their false prophet. As a result, every American taxpayer is funding a cruel and VERY expensive act of economic self-harm. The really disgusting thing about this mass deportation program is that it is built on the Nazi model used in the 1940s on the Jews in Europe. They, too, were rounded up and sent to detention camps across Europe. It’s an identical ethnic cleansing operation that will soon see green card holders subject to further scrutiny. Those who do not fit the America First profile will face detention and deportation. Just because Trump doesn’t intend to gas the deportees doesn’t win him any bonus humanity points.

As noted, detention centres are being built across the country. These primarily involve partnerships with sympathetic red states and private providers, CoreCivic and GEO Group being the primary players. It should not escape people’s attention that this massive expansion appears to have already factored into their budgets ’ ‘voluntary labour’ within their operational costs. To clarify, for ‘voluntary’ read ‘forced’. While 76% of those currently detained for deportation have NO CRIMINAL RECORD, they appear to be caught up in a loophole provided by the 13th Amendment of the US Constitution, which explicitly allows involuntary servitude as a form of criminal punishment. This has been consistently interpreted by courts to mean incarcerated individuals are not protected by typical labour laws, including minimum wage or the right to unionise.

Overwhelming evidence shows that the word ‘voluntary’ is not part of the equation when it comes to detainees. The use of detainees as a pool for cheap labour has long been part of the core business models of these private facilities. As reported by Azadeh Shahshahani in a piece in the Guardian in 2018:

CoreCivic’s abuse and exploitation of detained immigrants’ labor as part of its profit-making schemes constitute a contemporary form of slavery as we detailed in a submission to the UN special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (which the US has ratified) states, “slavery … in all [its] forms shall be prohibited,” and that no one, including detained immigrants, “shall be required to perform forced or compulsory labour.

These practices align with recent statements from detainees and their lawyers and are almost certainly consistent with the companies' profit forecasts. It will likely be some time before we establish the extent of forced labour being used, given claims of operational security and other commercial barriers to uncovering the truth. But be in no doubt, just as with the Nazi’s, this is an industrial-scale detention and deportation operation involving a scale of abuse from food deprivation to extortion, to grossly inadequate medical assistance. The extent of the abuse is likely to take investigative journalists years to unravel, if they ever manage to do so at all, given the protections afforded to these companies by the government.

Let’s not forget detention is not just for adults; an estimated 3,800 minors, including 12 infants, are currently being held in detention. Many for longer than the law allows. The Marshall Project, in a piece filed on December 17th 2025, noted that:

“…analysis counted over 1,300 children who have been held in detention longer than 20 days this year. ICE told the judge overseeing the Flores settlement that it is minimising the detention of children, writing in a report filed this month that its “primary goal is to ensure that minors are discharged from custody as quickly as possible.”

However, Scott Shuchart, who was the former head of policy at ICE under President Joe Biden, told The Marshall Project.:

“You have that spike around 20 [days] where they’re trying to hold people as much as possible. They want to be able to hold families indefinitely, and remove them or pressure them to give up.”

The administration is awake to the impact this has on its narrative relating to the detention of children in breach of the Flores settlement. In a South Texas Family Residential Centre in Dilley (detention centre), as reported by Whitney Curry Wimbish in The American Prospect on December 10th:

A for-profit virtual education company accused of defrauding investors and other harms is set to run a new school at an immigration prison in Texas, according to job advertisements.

The clear intention here is to sanitise the long-term detention of minors who are not guilty of any crimes. This whole operation is about creating a massive for-profit network of companies to exploit the abject misery of the immigrant population. The economic model is designed to siphon tens, if not hundreds, of billions of taxpayer dollars, delivering absolutely no financial or social benefit to the American people. It’s simply cruelty on steroids for the pacification of an uneducated base that believes immigrants are stealing American jobs and houses. No matter which way you look at it, this makes no economic sense at a time when the US is drowning in debt.

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