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

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?