Brianna Nofil

There are sort of countless stories about growers like pulling guns on immigration agents or sort of putting boards with nails around their property to try to kind of puncture the tires of anyone who might try to carry out an immigration raid on their facilities.

And some of the most critical voices of the conditions

at these detention camps are these big agricultural players in south texas and you know i think we should always sort of look a little side-eyed to them like they they're often putting it in really moralistic terms but they have a really strong financial incentive to keep this you know inexpensive labor that they have depended on for decades and decades

I think it's important that we see that the federal government is willing to build its own deportation infrastructure.

they've also realized, I think really notably, that these long-term detentions of Europeans got a ton of sort of, you know, activists, the ACLU is involved, like people are really upset about these folks.

People are not as upset about, you know, thousands of sort of nameless, imagined as like faceless Mexican migrants who are cycling through these sites.

that is seen as sort of not as offensive, I think, to a lot of Americans.

So, you know, for an agency that is trying to figure out the boundaries of what is politically viable, what sort of administrative incarceration can you run without everyone accusing you of like having a gulag?

I think they basically start to realize they have just more wiggle room on the southwest border.

They can build this infrastructure and not have every American outraged about it.

I think it is, right?

And I think the other thing that we start to see that's going to become really important in the years to come is that they start really imagining detention as something that might deter people from coming altogether.

If people know that they're going to come here and they're going to have this sort of miserable limbo period where they are incarcerated, right, where they're going to suffer, that maybe this is a thing we can use to deter migration more broadly.

They say, well, these detentions are really short.

And for the most part, they are really short.

This is not the case at Franklin County, where there's legal action, where you might be able to see a judge, where you might have some semblance of rights.

So most of these people are only going to stay in these detention camps for like, you know, one, two, three nights.

The U.S.

is just deporting more people.

It is more successful in removing people.