The huddled masses headed to ICE lockup this July 4th

My family arrived in the 1950s and 1960s, and the jobs they performed to carve out middle-class lives were of the 20th century variety — carpenters (for most of the men), teachers, clerks, a hairdresser, a grocery manager, a retail clerk, a religious book publisher and an IRS agent.

One later came to the U.S. off-the-books and worked as a nanny and bartender before returning, giving us a hint of illegality.

In the first months of Trump 2.0, there has been an almost theatrical version of immigration enforcement, of sending out teams of heavily armored — and masked — agents to very publicly round up foreigners.

The efforts are meant to scare immigrants living here without legal permission (even those who have forged otherwise solid American lives) and to soothe voters who are angry that immigrants have jumped the fence and may be taking something that is theirs.

Credit: AP

Credit: AP

There are an estimated 11 million immigrants here without legal permission. That sounds like a bunch, although there were more living here before the 2008 economic crash, which sent many back home.

The latest steps in the lock-em-up and toss-em-out movement are to hire more ICE agents and build more gulags. The most obnoxious is Florida’s Everglades Alcatraz, an effort by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to get on the bandwagon and create a 5,000-bed detention center there.

The meanness and brutality are the point. It’s hot, swampy, humid and filled with mosquitoes, snakes and alligators. The last place anyone wants to be.

To some, that’s hilarious. Some entrepreneurs are peddling Everglades Alcatraz merch. So, for the price of a $27 ball cap, you can let the world know what a horrible human being you are.

Recently, Georgia Congressman Buddy Carter, who hopes to one day be a Trumpy U.S. Senator, lauded the feds for agreeing to triple the size of the Folkston ICE Processing Center to 3,000 beds. He said it will create 400 jobs and that it would be the largest ICE facility. (Or at least the largest, most permanent one.)

It’s in an isolated region in Charlton County near Florida’s border and an alligator crawl from the Okefenokee Swamp.

Across the state in Southeast Georgia sits the Stewart Detention Center. It’s currently the second busiest ICE jail and has been running over its 1,752-detainee capacity with people sleeping on concrete floors.

Stewart and Charlton counties have something in common: They are among Georgia’s poorest counties, according to the feds. Prison location has always had a common theme — put them where people are hard up and need jobs.

Locating ICE jails in faraway places like these is a twofer: They provide jobs and put the detainees in places that make it hard on them, far away from their families and lawyers.

But in recent years, prison jobs everywhere have been very hard to fill. Many facilities have guard vacancy rates of 65%.

And despite what Gov. Brian Kemp says about “hard-workin’ Georgians,” lots of people don’t seem to want to work. A U.S. Chamber of Commerce study in December found only 72 available workers in Georgia for every 100 open jobs, among the widest gaps in the U.S.

Again, immigrants often fill the jobs Americans don’t want. And the cruel irony here is the cottage industry of creating jobs for ICE agents, and ICE jails are meant to arrest and detain more immigrants, which will further widen the shortage of available workers.

“They build these things on purpose in the middle of nowhere,” said Marty Rosenbluth, an attorney who for years has worked immigration cases at Stewart. “They do it to increase the isolation and as a litigation strategy: (The detainees) will agree to leave (the country) if they can leave this hellhole.”

Most of his clients, he said, are not criminals and have been scooped up for infractions like traffic tickets; they are not the “bad hombres” President Trump once said he is targeting.

Rosenbluth says the job creation is “nonsense.”

“Most of the jobs are performed by detainees — laundry, maintenance, kitchen, cleaning — for a couple dollars a day,” he said. “A lot of the residents living near the prison don’t qualify for the jobs. They don’t have high school diplomas or have small criminal records.”

In 2022, detainees at the Stewart facility sued CoreCivic, which operates the private facility, alleging the company ran a modern-day slavery operation by forcing prisoners to work. It was later settled when CoreCivic agreed to give each prisoner a list of their rights. The company called the allegations “baseless.”

I also spoke with Meredyth Yoon, who has worked to close the ICE jail in Folkston (the one that is being expanded). “My understanding is there is a high turnover there and they are not great jobs,” she said.

GeoGroup, which runs the Folkston facility, did not get back to me.

A spokesperson for CoreCivic noted correctional facilities in general have experienced “staffing challenges.”

The spokesperson added that “CoreCivic does not enforce immigration laws, arrest anyone who may be in violation of immigration laws or have any say whatsoever in an individual’s deportation or release.”

It’s just a company doing its job.

What a country.