Industry of Deportation

 

JEFFREY ST CLAIR 

+ ICE is opening a new private prison in Michigan for noncitizens (maybe even citizens, given ICE’s recent track record) rounded up by Trump’s raids. The North Lake Facility in Baldwin used to be a private federal prison. It was closed in 2022 and then acquired by the GEO Group, which expects to rake in more than $70 million in yearly revenue. Ka-aching! (The German company Topf und Söhne, which described itself as just “an ordinary company,” made millions selling crematoria and ventilation systems for gas chambers to the SS. Their full role in the Holocaust wasn’t uncovered until 1980. The companies complicit in the ethnic cleansing of the US can be found on the stock exchange.)

+ John Sandweg, who served as an acting director of ICE during the Obama administration.“If your goal is to increase the number of deportations, you can’t hit big numbers of removals without focusing on the non-criminal population.”

+ DHS Secretary Kristi “the Puppy Killer” Noem has ordered polygraphs at DHS to hunt down staffers who’ve leaked to the media about ICE raids. If everything’s perfectly legit and exactly what most Americans who can trace their ancestry back to the Mayflower (or Pretoria, South Africa) want, why are they concerned about “leaks”?

+ Even the NYT’s rightwing columnist Ross Douthat sees the problem with this: “As in the War on Terror, a theory of sweeping executive power over suspected enemies will allow for executive practices that sweep up people who may not be enemies at all.”