History repeats: Forced labor in America’s ICE concentration camps

Last week, forty women detained at the GEO Group Delaney Hall facility in Newark, New Jersey, joined a labor and hunger strike launched weeks ago by some 300 men at the same camp. The women have issued a list of demands, including better conditions of detention and the release of several categories of detainees: women under 21, those with medical issues, and mothers.

In a June 11 report, the ACLU noted several current or recent hunger-labor strikes begun nationwide in immigration detention facilities. So far this year, a single Tacoma detention site has had nine strikes. Others launched in the last two months include campaigns by detainees in Alvarado, Texas; Phillipsburg, Pennsylvania; Baldwin, Michigan; and Adelanto, California.

Across the country immigrant detainees are forced to work for little to no pay. The two biggest U.S. immigrant detention contractors, GEO Group and CoreCivic, have a business model that relies on detainee labor. And since profit comes from the contract minus costs, these companies make more if they can keep the costs of detainee labor down..

And profit they have. GEO Group experienced a nearly eightfold increase in profits between the last year Biden was in office and the first year of Trump’s second administration, now earning a quarter of a billion dollars in profit. Today I’ll do a survey of forced labor in concentration camp settings, looking at why it tends to arise even in cases where it’s not part of the original plan, how it unfolds, and what kind of resistance against it has risen over the last century or so in concentration camps and prison systems alike.

Deep roots

First I want to note that Delaney Hall operated from 2011 through the entire second Obama administration before being closed in 2017. After its closure, the state tried to ban private detention centers, but CoreCivic and GEO fought the attempt. Ahead of the 2020 election, Joe Biden had campaigned against private prisons. After taking office, however, he broke with his campaign promise and sided with private prisons in the New Jersey case. The ban was struck down in 2023 by U.S. District Judge Robert Kirsch.

After Trump’s return to the presidency, Delaney Hall reopened. And for more than a year, conditions there have been horrific. Today’s focus is on the fact that part of the strikes there and elsewhere are related to work on-site—labor that is mandatory and often done for very little pay, or pay that is then requisitioned by the detention facility in exchange for providing the bare means of survival.

When people think of forced labor and detention camps that loom large in history, I’ve noticed that they tend to think of Nazi work camps. And in fact, forced labor was a key part of many Nazi camps and subcamps, from early work projects before the camp system became a means to genocide to later infrastructure work or munitions production for the war effort.

And Nazi forced labor extended far beyond just concentration camps, with millions of civilians who were not even official detainees required to relocate for work in factories. But when detention is added into the mix, it tends to lead to more harrowing conditions of forced labor. This is in part because concentration camp populations are seen as expendable, and in part because the role of detention is so often seen as punishment, even when governments claim that’s not the goal.

But forced labor in camps also happens because those in power can benefit from work done by the detained. And perhaps it isn’t surprising that when faced with a confined, unhappy, and possibly restive population, authorities begin to think of ways to benefit themselves through exhausting detainees via labor.

Sometimes the work is grueling but performative: detainees are made to move boulders or to dig something up, only to undo their work again the next day. But that made-up work is less common than work that more directly benefits the state or companies running the detention facility.

The authorities or overseers take advantage of detainees’ vulnerable or isolated status to violate protections that might otherwise be available to them in civilian life outside. Typically, detainees are assigned the most unpleasant or even harrowing hard labor for little or no pay.

One related category is to undercut labor that the state needs to sustain itself administratively by having prisoners do it for less. But over the last century or so, the most common work at concentration camp sites is performing the physical or administrative labor that maintains and runs the detention facility itself.

Some forms of forced labor in camps existed long before the Nazis ever took power. In the first decade of the twentieth century, the German government tried to bring the Nama and Herero populations in South-West Africa to heel under conditions of war and genocide. Detainees were exiled to the tiny offshore outpost of Haifischinsel, or Shark Island, just off the coast of what is now Namibia.

Sexual assaults, daily beatings, and forced labor were standard, with conditions so bad that missionaries begged colonial authorities to move hundreds of detainees elsewhere. The governor refused, arguing that the very profundity of their mistreatment was such that allowing them to return to the mainland and describe it would increase hatred against colonial rule.

But it wasn’t just Germans who used forced labor early in the twentieth century. During World War I, thousands of Ukrainians in Canada were prejudged as a suspect group, sent to concentration camps as enemy aliens, and forced to work on infrastructure projects in Alberta. Detainees saw much of their wealth confiscated and were paid only twenty-five cents a day for their work, far below the going wage.

The Soviet model

As I’ve mentioned before, the modern concentration camp was an international phenomenon, but the way that camps took root in each country tended to be shaped in part by that country’s history. In Russia before the Revolution, exile and forced labor were routinely used under monarchy. But the development of modern concentration camps allowed a weaponization of that preexisting monstrous system by taking it outside of any legal system or oversight, and removing the little legal accountability that had existed—which led to one of the biggest historic shifts toward forced labor worldwide happening after the Russian Revolution. Once the Bolsheviks managed to seize power at the end of 1917, they pivoted almost immediately from World War I and camps interning enemy aliens to a separate peace with Germany and camps for the Party’s political enemies.

This shift to internal enemies made it possible for the number of camps and detainees alike to expand exponentially in the Soviet era. Daily rations were reduced and turned into a science of starvation. Work quotas ballooned; mortality rates skyrocketed. That initial Soviet camp system took more than a decade to evolve into the GULAG. Once established, it would endure for more than two decades. Meanwhile, the USSR exported a theory of reeducating citizens through forced labor, which spread to many other countries. 

The effects of the Cold War

In the wake of World War II, the Iron Curtain went up, dividing Europe and leading to a largely bipolar world of U.S. and Soviet spheres of influence. Which is not at all to say that what happened in the rest of the world didn’t matter, too—several of the largest camp systems of the era were not even in the U.S. or Russia.

Concentration camp use expanded globally, and each system tended to belong to one of two models. What we can loosely call the Western model fought independence movements or Communist revolutions in the second half of the twentieth century by isolating suspects or even whole communities, torturing many and condemning them to camps and forced labor in a reassertion of colonial power. This was the model of the British in Kenya and the French in Algeria and Vietnam, for instance. And a parallel version would be taken up by the United States and South American dictators.

The other model—The Soviet model of reeducation through labor— was adopted in other parts of the world in the wake of communist party rule or revolution. This style of camp was imposed in places like Cuba and Cambodia. But the largest impact of this approach was felt in China, where a widespread system of extrajudicial detention and forced labor endured even after the fall of the Soviet Union. Begun in open emulation of the Gulag, the system adopted preexisting elements from Chinese history, just as every concentration camp before it had taken root in part using local culture.

The unexceptional U.S.

And the U.S. has its own domestic influences, which are now shaping the evolution of ICE concentration camps here at home. The country’s founding amid a genocide of Native Americans—along with its long history of chattel slavery—normalized detention and forced labor as a building block of the national economy and the nation itself. It also created a permanent hierarchy of political and economic power based on skin color.

Even with reforms made during Reconstruction, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution left in place a terrible exception. This amendment lays out an end to slavery and forced labor, “except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted.”

Though chattel slavery was ended, this language allowed the continuation of slave-like conditions post-emancipation for many people. (See the image near the top of this post for a prime example.) Systems of convict labor became a driver of racially targeted enforcement to create work gangs that could be leased out to private companies, generating profits for both the state and those companies.

And today, prison and detainee labor is responsible for much of the cooking, cleaning, laundry, administrative and other work that occurs at detention facilities in the U.S. I’m not one of the people who thinks that the detention issues facing Americans all come from private detention companies, because even without private corporations, there are so many ways for the state or its representatives to benefit from forced labor. And conditions in various kinds of government-run prison facilities are also heinous, though labor issues can play out differently in each.

But whether we’re talking about the state or about private companies running immigration detention sites, when it comes to forced labor, there is one key violation that is definitely happening. As Madiba Dennie wrote for Balls and Strikes earlier this month, gruesome as the existence of the Thirteenth Amendment exception allowing slave labor conditions for convicts may be, this exception shouldn’t apply to ICE detainees at all. People in immigration detention who haven’t been convicted of anything, she notes, “are still being forced to work for nothing.”

A workforce of millions

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. The more we allow the camp system to grow, the larger this potential labor force will be—underpaid or not paid at all, abused and extorted, and along with the lives that are crushed and exploited, damaging the larger economy that becomes more reliant on expanding detention and forced labor.

Fighting back

I’ve mentioned before how detainees managed to call labor strikes even in an Arctic site of the Gulag. A decade ago in the U.S., the Free Alabama movement—a labor strike at several prison facilities in the state—sought to address several issues, including worker exploitation.

In that same Balls and Strikes post I mentioned earlier, you can read about man named Alejandro Menocal who brought a lawsuit in 2014—2014, before Trump was even in office. He filed the suit against a familiar name, GEO Group, over a Colorado immigration detention facility and forced labor there, in which pay was sometimes as low as a dollar a day.

As in the Gulag, where detainees were promised at least a pittance, and accounts created for them to track their earnings—ICE detainees have seen endless delays in payment, if they actually get paid even the minimal wages they were supposed to receive. Just yesterday, ICE updated its rules related to detainee labor, caving to contractors’ demands that the previously required dollar per day of work was no longer required. In addition, the standards no longer mention meeting requirements set forth by local or state governments.

What to do?

But there are things you can do, too, and there’s one particular arena in which most people in the U.S. have much more leverage than worker strikes in prior concentration camp systems do. Since the Trump administration hasn’t yet been able to suppress the ability to dissent in the country (though it’s certainly trying to), those on the outside can call attention to events inside ICE facilities.

We can underline the complete illegality under the thirteenth Amendment of the forced labor happening there. We can likewise hold politicians to their campaign promises about both ICE detention and prisons nationwide, and be more aggressive about primarying incumbents who break their word.

Multiple labor and hunger strikes are underway this very minute—find out if any are happening near you. If so, you can look online to see which community groups are spreading the word about them and find out how to help.

If you don’t locate a strike underway near you, you can look into what conditions are like in the nearest ICE facility and publicize them. Your local elected officials should be monitoring these themselves. But if they aren’t, you can pressure local journalists (where they still exist), as well as state and national outlets. You can find out who is running the facilities, what kinds of labor they’re using, the degree to which they’re cooperating with local police, whether they are in compliance with local law, and what conditions of confinement detainees are facing.

Forced labor that arises in concentration camps, whether by design or by afterthought, is one of the cruelest and unjust parts of this kind of detention. Waking the country as a whole up to what is still happening—what has never stopped happening—in the camps is a first critical step to shutting them down.

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