Brianna Nofil

It kind of embodies the, I think, some of like the hypocrisy at the core of this, because the US, you know, invites tens of thousands of Mexican laborers to come to the country during the war, right, to sort of fill these absolutely critical agricultural labor needs.

When it decides it does not need this group of people anymore, right, virtually overnight, they become illegal.

So the Immigration Service is quite intentional.

they're often seen as sort of not really immigrants.

The Immigration Service sees immigrants as people who come and stay permanently, and they see Mexicans as seasonal workers.

They see Mexicans as people who come and go.

But the Immigration Service is able to say, this is like a separate category of person that doesn't really count for what we're doing.

So when they announced plans to build this federal camp in Brownsville, the government is pretty shocked that they get so much pushback from localities.

Some of it is about conditions, some of it is about the morality, but a lot of it is localities saying, listen, we built bigger jails in our communities because the immigration service told us they needed that space.

And then shortly after that, a newspaper in Odessa gives what I think is another just sort of incredibly prescient quote about what was to come.

They say, quote, now apparently these counties are stuck with big jails and nobody to put in them but each other.

The Immigration Service and the Border Patrol prefer a concentration camp of their own.

It's a great question, right?

So they would claim that this is an economically driven decision.

They would claim they are protecting American farm workers.

They would claim that this is critical for the future of agricultural labor.

But I think you see on the ground, in terms of sort of how communities feel about this, it's really contentious.

It's contentious not only because of the questions about

We could be making all this money off our jail.

But many growers in South Texas are incredibly resistant to these mass deportation efforts.