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Last week, 40 women detained at the GEO Group Delaney hall facility in Newark, New Jersey, joined a labor and hunger strike launched in May by some 300 men at the same facility. She's been there for a year and five months. Yeah, and they want to send her truck. The women have issued a list of demands, Including better conditions of detention. My name is river coel. I'm here four months. And a release of women under 21. I'm 19. I'm here for 15 days and I have only my mom outside. Those with medical issues and mothers. In a June 11 report, the ACLU noted that there are several current or recent hunger and labor strikes nationwide in immigration detention facilities. Detainees on hunger strike faced retaliation inside. They were threatened, denied access to family, and subjected to abuse. Just so far this year, a Tacoma detention site has had nine strikes. Others launched in the last two months include detainees in Alvarado, Texas, Phillipsburg, Pennsylvania, Baldwin, Michigan, and Adelanto, California. A group of detainees in Delaney hall started sending out these handwritten letters detailing their conditions. Across the country, immigrant detainees are forced to work for little or no pay, talking about the bad food, being forced to work there for wages ranging from a dollar to $4 per day as janitors and cooks and maintenance people. The two biggest US immigrant detention contractors, GEO Group and CoreCivic. I've worked at CoreCivic for 32 years, and this is truly one of the most exciting periods in my career with the company. Have a business model that relies on detainee labor. And since profit comes from the contract minus the cost, these companies. Prof. If they can keep the cost down of caring for detainees. We're joined by Satara Kandahari, advocacy director at Detention Watch Network. And profit they have. GEO Group experienced a nearly eight fold increase in profits between the last year Joe Biden was in office and the first year of Trump's second administration. Yeah, I'm going to say that again to make sure your viewers heard. A 700% increase in profits. I mean, that's really, really unheard of. They are now earning a quarter of a billion dollars in profit annually. I think it's really critical for folks to understand, really, the intricate relationship that private prison companies have with ice. It's a really revolving door. Today I want to do a survey of forced labor in concentration camp settings, looking at why it tends to arise even in cases where it may not be part of the original plan, how it unfolds, and what kinds of resistance against it have arisen over the last century or so in concentration camps and prison Systems alike. First, I want to note that Delaney hall had operated from 2011 through the entire second Obama administration before being closed in 2017. It's been a jail, a halfway house, a rehabilitation facility, but for the last year it's. It's been an ICE detention center. And after its closure, the state of New Jersey tried to ban private detention centers and the site of ongoing clashes between federal law enforcement and the protesters outside. But Corecivic and GEO filed a lawsuit to fight the attempt. Under the Biden administration, there had been ongoing negotiations around expansion. Joe Biden had campaigned against private prisons. Next executive order is reforming incarceration system by eliminating the use of privately operated criminal detention facilities. But after taking office, he broke with his campaign promise and sided with Corecivic in the New Jersey case. We had been keeping an eye on Delaney Hall, North Lake in Michigan, several other facilities that had been under negotiation for new contracts with ICE. The ban was struck down in 2023 by U.S. district Judge Robert Kirsch. We heard throughout the election cycle how excited the private prison companies were about a potential Trump administration coming in. After Trump took office a second time, Delaney hall reopened. I'm now going to read a letter from the strikers. And for more than a year, conditions have been horrific there. To their administrative incompetence, we must add the following injustices and irregularities perpetrated by Ice Geo Food containing worms or in a state of decay. Today's focus is on the fact that part of the strikes there and elsewhere are related to forced labor. Most people have a persistent flu with phlegm that won't go away. Many have conjunctivitis, urinary tract infections, fever and coughs. Labor that is mandatory and often done for very little pay. Detainees are forced to work in most cases without pay or for $1 an hour or pay that is then requisitioned by the detention facility in exchange for providing the bare means of survival. We appreciate the support of everyone who is protesting outside the facility. We want you to know that you give us the strength and the determination to keep going. When most 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. It has to be said, forced labor was the most public, large scale atrocity under National Socialism. At the time, everyone encountered forced laborers as neighbors, as work colleagues, whatever. And in fact, forced labor was a key part of many Nazi camps and sub camps. Starting in 1933, the National Socialists began arresting political opponents, consigning them to do forced labor from early work projects before the Nazi camp system had even hearted into a machine for genocide, to later forced labor doing infrastructure cleanup and repair or munitions production for the war effort. The invasion of Poland in 1939, triggering the start of World War II, marked the next stage of that system. And forced labor extended far beyond even camp populations, with millions of civilians who weren't even in camps, required to move and work in factories. First came the armed forces, then the Nazi bureaucracy. It affected everyone who was able to work. The Nazis viewed occupied lands as a reservoir of workers. But when you add detention into the mix, it tends to lead to more harrowing conditions of forced labor. Democracy Now's Maria Ines Teresina was outside Delaney Hall Tuesday and filed this report. This is in part because the population is seen as expendable. Those who have been on strike have been isolated, retaliated against, have had pepper sprays in their units and then had the doors closed. And in part because the default role of detention is so often seen as punishment. Even when governments claim that's not the point. There's also, you know, temperature dysregulation. They said they often like, will crank up the air conditioning so that everyone's free freezing, which often really feels like kind of direct retaliation. But it also happens because those in power can benefit from the labor of the detained. Inside Nielsen Barona's bag are hundreds of pieces of papers pertaining to the time he spent at two ICE detention centers here in Georgia. And perhaps it isn't surprising that when faced with a detained, unhappy and possibly restive population, authorities begin to think of requiring them to work. This is a trauma that I might gonna have to live with the rest of my life. Usually takes one or more forms. Sometimes the work is grueling but performative. So detainees are made to move boulders or dig something up, only to undo their work again the following day. You were only supposed to be here for a year on your tourist visa and you overstayed. Why shouldn't have you been taken into ICE custody? How would you answer that question for the people that may be wondering that? But that made up work is less common than work that more directly benefits the state or companies running the detention facility. First of all, immigration detention are for those is created for those who are at flight risk. More often across history are camps in which detainees are assigned the most awful and unpleasant hard labor for little or no pay. He says while there, he witnessed medical neglect, bad food and forced labor. The authorities or overseers take advantage of detainees vulnerable or isolated status to violate the kinds of protections that might otherwise be available to them in civilian life outside. Another 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 labor done in concentration campsites is. Is performing the labor that maintains and runs the detention facility itself. We run detention centers, the inmates, the people inside. We are the ones that do the laundry. We are the ones that do the cleaning. We are the ones that do everything inside. Some of these forced labor conditions existed in cruel form long before the Nazis ever took power. This small island off the coast of Namibia has a past that is even darker than its landscape. In the first decade of the 20th century, as the German government tried to bring the Nama and Herero populations in southwest Africa to heal under conditions of war and genocide, the only thing that stands as proof is a small memorial made of marble that looks like a grave marker. The Nama people were exiled to the tiny offshore outpost of Heiferstensol, or Shark island, just off the coast of what is today Namibia. Shark island is a lonely, empty spot that feels like Mars because it is so far away from the rest of the world. Sexual assaults, daily beatings, and forced labor were standard, and conditions were so bad that missionaries begged to move hundreds of detainees elsewhere. People were tortured, starved, and forced to work hard to improve the port and lay a railroad track. 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 of the colonial authorities. It was a sign of the coming flu of horrible crimes that was fascism in Europe. But it wasn't just the Germans who used forced labor in the early 20th century in camps. This documentary is called that Never Happened. We have the filmmaker Ryan Boyko in studio with us this morning. During World War I,000, thousands of Ukrainians in Canada were prejudged as a suspect group and sent to concentration camps as enemy aliens. A lot of people, including many Ukrainian Canadians, did not know that this is part of our history. Why is that? And forced to work on infrastructure projects In Alberta in 1954, the government actually destroyed the records, all personal records that were for any individuals who were in these camps. Detainees saw much of their wealth confiscated and were paid only 25 cents a day for their work, far below the going wage at the time. It's called Canada's first National Internment operations because we did it two times, and we've actually invoked the War Measures act three Times in our history and a reminder for people that meant that all rights are stripped. One of the biggest historic shifts toward forced labor in camps happened after the Russian Revolution. I'm imonwhistler on Twitter and Instagram. Once the Bolsheviks seized power at the end of 1917, their stated aim was to liberate the working class and transform imperial Russia into a worker's paradise. They pivoted almost immediately from the war and its internment camps with enemy aliens. Things quickly went wrong. To making a separate peace with Germany and setting up concentration camps for the party's political enemies at home. In the early days, hundreds of thousands of political prisoners were detained in work camps and then distributed to one of the dozens of way stations between Moscow and the mineral rich wastes of Siberia. 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 and culture. By the 1930s, the gulag system consisted of hundreds of internment and forced labor camps extending from European Russia to Siberia. In Russia before the Revolution, exile and forced labor in camps had grown under monarchy. But the development of concentration camps allowed a weaponization of that pre existing monstrous system. By taking it outside of any real legal system or oversight and removing the little bit of accountability that had existed. These troikas were essentially kangaroo court proceedings in which members of the state security apparatus summarily tried and sentenced millions to hard labor sentences of 10 to 20 years. And so it was that the number of camps and detainees alike could expand exponentially in the Soviet era. Among the many projects of the Gulang system, the Dead Road is the most notorious and bitterly ironic. Daily rations could be cut and turned into a science of starvation. The idea was to connect the Trans Siberian Railroad to the Arctic Ocean, where deep water ships could be loaded with minerals for sale. Daily work quotas ballooned and mortality rates skyrocketed. However, work began some two years before the Gulf of Obob was adequately surveyed. And it was discovered that it was too shallow to house a deepwater port. That system took more than a decade to evolve into the institution that would eventually gain the name Gulag Workers were then ordered to build an additional rail line from railheads in the Ural Mountains to the Aanaisai River, 250 kilometers, 155 miles away. And after the establishment of the Gulag, it would stay in place for more than two decades. The problem with building anything on permafrost is that permafrost moves, moves a lot in fact, within two years, the rail line was completely impassable. Meanwhile, it would spark a theory of re educating citizens through forced labor. And that idea would spread to many other countries. And then, in the wake of World War II, the Iron Curtain went up, physically dividing Europe and leading to a largely bipolar world of US 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 many Kenyan workers were poorly treated by settlers, and flogging was commonly used to discipline them. In fact, concentration camp use expanded globally in this era. After years of marginalization, injustice and inequalities perpetuated by the British. A resistant movement called the MAU MAU was born in 1950. And the theoretical models for them tended to belong to one of two concepts. In 1952, the British declared a state of emergency and began military operations against the Ma. What we can loosely call the Western model fought independence movements or communist revolutions in the second half of the 20th century by isolating suspects or even whole communities, torturing them and condemning them to camps and forced labor to reassert colonial power. Historians initially said 80,000 Kikuyu were detained, but recent studies suggest that the number may be as high as 160,000 to 320,000. The British branded them as rehabilitation camps that encouraged good citizenship and re educated the MAU MAU away from their nationalist views. 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. Perhaps as many as 10,000 Argentines or more. Men, women and children who were labeled left wing terrorists were kidnapped off the streets by the military regime, tortured and killed. The other model, that Soviet model of re education through labor was adopted in the wake of Communist Party rule or revolution. The term laogai is an abbreviation for laodongai zhao, which could be translated as reform through labor. This kind of camp system 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 in camps and forced labor endured even after the fall of the Soviet Union. The laogai system comprised an extensive system of detention centers, penal labor camps, farms, mines and factories on mainland China, for a total of up to 1100 facilities. Begun in open emulation of the gulag, that system adopted pre existing elements from Chinese history and culture. The gulags has been well documented for decades, thanks to declassification of records following the fall of the Soviet Union and especially thanks to the publication of survivors memoirs. Chief amongst them, the Gulag Archipelago. Just as every concentration camp system before it had taken root in part using elements of the native soil in each place. On the other hand, the Laogai system is less documented and less well known. This is mainly due to the fact that the ccp, still now in power in Beijing, is not exactly happy to put it in writing, let alone discuss any official documentation about its camps. And the United States had its own domestic influences which are now shaping the evolution of ice concentration camps here today. Just how many buildings and monuments in Washington D.C. were built by enslaved people? We talked to some local historians to try and find an answer. The country's founding amid genocide of Native Americans, along with its extensive history of chattel slavery. We know for a fact that enslaved Africans were used in the construction of the U.S. capitol and the White House normalized detention and forced labor as a building block of the national and the nation itself. We have the receipts where slave owners were paid for the rental of their slaves to build those two buildings. It also created a permanent hierarchy of political and economic power based on skin color. There's something wrong there. So the genetics are not exactly. Well, they're not exactly your genetic. It's one of those problems. Brian Even in the wake of U. S Civil war and reconstruction, the 13th Amendment left in place a terrible exception. Some might wonder how indentured servitude is still legal in the U.S. the amendment lays out an end to slavery and forced labor, quote, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted. Jennifer Turner is a researcher at the American Civil Liberties Union. If you are in law enforcement, you may be wearing a bulletproof vest or in a car that's been serviced by incarcerated people. Even though chattel slavery was ended, this language allowed the continuation of slave like conditions post slavery for many people. And if you go to the supermarket, you may be buying milk that came from cows that were milked and raised by incarcerated people. Convict labor, particularly for black Americans, became a driver of what looks very much like targeted enforcement to create labor gangs that could be leased out to private companies, generating profits for both the state and those companies. An AP investigation last year found that a lot of prison work, especially in states where it isn't paid, can be dangerous and demeaning, like picking cotton in the blistering sun or working in unsafe facilities with minimal training. 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. according to Turner's research at the ACLU, incarcerated labor produces at least $2 billion worth of goods and at least $9 billion worth of services every year. I'm not one of the people who thinks that the only issue is these private detention companies, which some people are very upset about, because even without private companies, there are so many ways for the state or its representatives to benefit from labor. Not to mention the impact on the labor market, where a prison crew, say fighting wildland fires in California will always be earning less money than a group of non incarcerated firefighters driving wages down potentially. And conditions in various kinds of government run facilities are so heinous. It's just that the labor issues tend to play out in slightly different ways 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's happening. As Medeva Deni wrote for Balls and Strikes earlier this month, gruesome as the 13th amendment exception allowing slave labor conditions for convicts is, this exception shouldn't apply to ICE detainees at all. As she wrote, people in immigration detention haven't been convicted of anything and they're still being forced to work for nothing. Now, 100 million is a number you can hear thrown around by the folks running the Department of Homeland Security social media accounts. Mass deportations are not occurring. There are no mass deportations occurring in the United States right now. So those Maga voters, those 80 million that came out to vote for him in the polls, are not happy campers right now. Or Greg Bevino, former lead agent with the Border Patrol. We go now to Vienna, Austria to speak with the reporter Charles Davis, who runs the Redoubt, who was until recently the high profile face of abuses unleashed against immigrants around the country. Greg Bovino, when he was criticizing the Trump administration. You know, I'm less interested in his sour grapes and more in the fact that he spelled out that he thinks there are 100 million illegal aliens in the United States. But I try to keep in mind the range of 15 to 20 million because that's a concrete goal mentioned by key administration officials repeatedly. And I think that speaks to the fact that they're not just trying to get people out based on pure legal status. You have to view it in the context of trying to eliminate birthright citizenship and rolling back the 20th century. Removing 100 million people of color from the US might be what the administration wants to do, but 15 to 20 million is what they think they can do and seem to be planning to try to do. Most credible experts would tell you There are 12 million, tops. Even that is a number they're unlikely to achieve, particularly in the two and a half years that are remaining in the second Trump administration. Deportation is a cruel process in the US and their degradation of an already bad system is routinely being halted or upset by judges who are trying to acknowledge at least some immigrant rights. A federal judge in Rhode island has struck down a series of Trump administration policies that were delaying the immigration process for hundreds of thousands of applicants. But the administration is looking at numbers that would incapacitate the economy, ones that would cry out for detainee labor use for the people who are then absent from the regular economy. Nationwide and across the Lone Star State, the construction industry is facing a worker shortage, and experts say one of the big reasons is because of immigration enforcement. And just because they're unlikely to end up with a workforce of millions doesn't mean they won't do tremendous harm along the way. And forced labor will absolutely continue to be part of that. The more we allow camps to expand, the larger this potential labor force will be underpaid or not at all abused, extorted, and along with the lives that are crushed and exploited, this will do damage to the larger economy that is composed of and dependent on detention facilities and forced labor itself. I've talked in previous episodes about how people manage to do labor strikes even in an Arctic site of the Gulag. The Vorkuta uprising began as a passive labor strike in early July 1953. Solzhensyn later claimed that an influx of Ukrainian political prisoners still hungry for freedom sparked the Revolt. And in 2016, the Free Alabama Movement, a labor strike at several prison facilities in the state sought to address numerous issues, including worker exploitation. The Free Alabama Movement says they're calling on inmates to stop working starting February 8th, and the group has a list of demands that they say are necessary to making Alabama inmates and the state better. And in that same balls and strikes post that I mentioned earlier, you can read about a man named Alejandro Menocal who brought a lawsuit in 2014. Gio's argument boils down to the claim that Yearsley is an immunity from suit for contractors who can't show that history and policy warrant immunity. That doesn't make sense as a matter of common sense. 2014, before Trump was even in office, the GEO group argues they have immunity from any litigation because they are government contractors. Just as in the Gulag, where detainees were promised at least a pittance and accounts listed for them, ICE Detainees have seen endless delays in payment if they actually get paid, even the minimal wages that they were told they would receive. Geo group in 2022 tried to get that Menocal case dismissed, but a February 2026 opinion from the Supreme Court did not go its way. Geo's argument boils down to the claim that Yearsley is an immunity from suit for contractors who can't show that history and policy warrant immunity. That doesn't make sense as a matter of common sense. So the larger case is still making its way through the system. I've mentioned before that the city of Newark is suing for the closure of Delaney hall while also demanding access and adequate services there. Here outside Delaney hall, ice prison day 25 of ongoing activity protests I'm told that there's still some, not many, some prisoners inside that are on either a hunger or labor strike. As I mentioned earlier in this episode, the ACLU has already been tracking a number of facilities holding ICE detainees where hunger strikes and labor strikes have also arisen. The original units, 2A and 2B, that were the basically the spark of these inside the hunger strike, they've been retaliated against by the Go group by basically being transferred out to a variety of prisons across the country, including Arizona, Louisiana, Colorado and Pennsylvania. But there are things that you personally can do too. There is one particular arena in which most people in the US have much more leverage than worker strikes in prior concentration camp systems. Since the Trump administration has not yet suppressed the ability to dissent in the country, most Americans, people on the outside can call attention to what is happening inside ICE detention. My name is Gabriela Soto. I am the wife of Martin Soto. He is a participant in the hunger strike, but they retaliated against him. They're singling him out. We can underline the complete illegality under the 13th Amendment of the forced labor happening there. The first question they asked him if we release you now, will you tell your wife to stop the protest outside? This was a form of retaliation. We can likewise hold politicians to their campaign promises about both ICE detention and prisons nationwide and be more aggressive about running candidates against those who break their word. But we are not going to stop this because we are going to make change happen it. Multiple labor and hunger strikes are underway this very minute. Find out if any of them 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 find a strike underway near you, you can look into what conditions are like in the closest facility to you and publicize them, I guarantee you they will be terrible. 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, and what other conditions of confinement detainees are facing. In the wake of Bovino's departure, Trump and his allies have leaned much harder into the private terrorist it's inflicting on immigrant communities nationwide, while backing down on the public terror they were performing to intimidate all Americans. Forced labor that arises in concentration camps, whether by design or by default, is one of the cruelest and most 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 critical first step to shutting this down. And that's it. Thanks for listening to Next Comes what? Please share this with one person who's looking for ways to survive this mess. To support this podcast, please become a paid subscriber@Andreapitzer.com and consider giving Next Comes what? A five star review where you get your podcasts. Yet another upbeat and exciting day here at Next Comes what.