By Theodore Shoebat

Exploitation, cruelty and indifference to suffering is something that many migrants have gone through and there are many stories demonstrating this. Just recently, in the UK, two men were found guilty for the manslaughter of 32 migrants. As we read from the BBC:

The migrants suffocated in the sealed container en route from Zeebrugge to Purfleet in October 2019.

Eamonn Harrison, 24, who dropped off the trailer at the Belgian port, and people-smuggler Gheorghe Nica, 43, were convicted by an Old Bailey jury.

Two others were convicted of being part of a wider people-smuggling conspiracy.

The trial examined three smuggling attempts by the gang – two that were successful on 11 and 18 October, and the final trip on 23 October.

Lorry driver Christopher Kennedy, 24, from County Armagh, collected the trailers from Purfleet on the earlier two runs, claiming he thought he was transporting cigarettes.

But the jury found Kennedy and Valentin Calota, 38, of Birmingham, guilty of conspiring to assist illegal immigration.

During the trial, jurors were given a snapshot of the victims – who included a bricklayer, a university graduate and a nailbar technician – and their dreams of a better life.

Many of their families borrowed heavily to fund their passage, relying on their potential future earnings once they got into the UK.

Det Ch Insp Daniel Stoten, from Essex Police, said: “If you look at the method, the way they transported human beings… we wouldn’t transport animals in that way.”

Another two men – Irish haulage boss Ronan Hughes, 41, of Tyholland, County Monaghan, Ireland, and 26-year-old lorry driver Maurice Robinson – had previously admitted manslaughter.

Home Secretary Priti Patel described the deaths as a “truly tragic incident”.

Prosecutors said in the fatal run, the container became a “tomb” as temperatures in the unit reached an “unbearable” 38.5C (101F).

The migrants, aged 15 to 44, were sealed inside for at least 12 hours.

They had used a metal pole to try to punch through the roof, but only managed to dent the interior.

Prosecutor Bill Emlyn Jones said: “There was no way out, and no-one to hear them; no-one to help them.”

A horrifying story took place in Florida last year. A gang of three people — two men and a woman — kidnapped a man, took him to a trailer, tortured him for hours and robbed him. They also told him that he could not go to the police because he would be deported because he was an “illegal alien.” The female member of the gang also threatened him that if he were to ever go to the police that she would just scream that he had raped her. According a report from the Orlando Weekly:

Police arrested three people who were part of a gang that kidnapped, robbed and tortured an undocumented man in South Florida because they believed the immigrant would be too afraid to call the authorities.

“It is believed that this group is targeting undocumented immigrants and robbing them for their cash,” says Davie Police Sgt. Mark Leone, according to the Sun Sentinel. “We believe that they target these undocumented immigrants because they are less likely to report being a victim of a crime to the police.”

The victim told officers that he was driving his Chevrolet Silverado in Davie on Feb. 2 around 9 p.m. when he halted at a stop sign. A man who investigators later identified as Joshua Aaron Greiff, 30, stood directly in front of the vehicle as Natalie Rebecca Williams, 34, came up to the front passenger side, according to the arrest affidavit.

Williams asked the victim if he could give them a ride. When he declined, Williams repeated the question while reaching inside of the truck and attempting to open the door from the inside while Greiff walked toward the rear driver’s side of the truck to sit behind the undocumented man.

The victim, with hesitation, decided to give them a lift. Police say as they started to drive, Williams pulled out a black handgun, loaded the firearm and pointed it at the victim.

They made him drive to a mobile home in Davie, and then Greiff blindfolded the victim, the arrest report says. The victim told police Greiff and Williams ordered him to exit his truck and walk to the mobile home. Once inside, they took off his blindfold, tied his hands behind his back and ordered him to sit in a chair. Police say six men, including Greiff and 31-year-old Andres Rafael, were in the home, as well as Williams, who appeared to be the gang’s ringleader.

The suspects ordered the undocumented man to empty his pockets and then took turns punching him in his face, neck, head, stomach and back. The victim told police Williams warned the gang they should kill him because he had seen too much, according to the affidavit.

The gang asked for the victim’s bank information, threatening to kill him if he gave them the wrong information. They stole the $1,387 in cash the victim had in his pockets, and left with his debit card and keys to his truck.

Willians and Greiff later returned to the mobile home and again threatened to kill the victim if he notified police, the report says. The undocumented immigrant told investigators that Greiff and Williams said that because he is an “illegal alien,” he would get deported by police. Williams allegedly also threatened to accuse the victim of raping her if he notified the cops.

After about 12 hours had passed, Greiff finally untied the victim from the chair around 8:45 a.m. on Feb. 3, gave him his trucks keys and let him go. After fleeing the area, the man saw the suspects had also taken about $4,000 in tools he kept in the vehicle, as well as damage to the Silverado.

The victim went to a clinic, where he got nine stitches and was treated for heavy bruising on his face, stomach and back, according to the affidavit. He eventually led officers back to the mobile home where they found Williams, Greiff and Rafael.

Williams denied kidnapping and robbing the victim, but she did tell police the undocumented man attempted to rape her. She later said she took him back to the mobile home after the alleged rape and that other people beat him up, according to the report. In a confusing moment, Williams allegedly told police she knew the victim for more than 12 years but couldn’t recall his name. Investigators say she told them the victim voluntarily gave them his debit card and PIN number so they could withdraw money, the report says.

Williams, Greiff and Rafael were charged with felony counts of armed robbery, kidnapping and aggravated battery. All three are currently being held at the Broward County Jail.

She made the false accusation that the victim had raped her because it was part of the criminal’s plan to scream rape to make herself as the victim and her gang as simply her avengers. A report from the Hill confirms this: “Williams added that she would tell police he raped her if he talked to the authorities, the report continues.”

What type of mentality comes up with such a plan?

Its a mentality that perceives that society will automatically believe a woman if she says she is raped, even if she is using her false testimony as a cover for her own crime. The fact that they targeted this guy because they believed that he would not tell the police in fear of being deported, also indicates that this gang of sadists perceived that people would be more likely to believe that the victim really was raped because of the victim’s status of being undocumented.

The story also reveals a reality of how undocumented workers can face horrific exploitation.

While Latin America goes through the travail of being the largest murder sight on earth, politicians in the US use migrants from Mexico and Central America for political leverage. The Democrats use these migrants to gain votes, portraying themselves as caring and compassionate for the migrants in order to get prospective voters. The Republicans on the other hand, use “illegal immigrants” as a way to portray themselves as the defenders of America, as the ones who are going to protect American citizens from ‘invaders.’ Both Democrats and Republicans use migrants to get votes, and thus, they want “illegals” coming across the border since it continues to fuel their propaganda schemes. Its like terrorism: the military industrial complex needs terrorism in order to justify spending on military technology.

The private prison system industry lobbies for more increased legislation to detain illegal immigrants, so that they can profit off of the whole situation. Without “illegals,” they would not be making any money, so thus they want illegal immigration, as do the politicians who they pay to push for more “border security” and the arresting of migrants. In the 1980s, when the state detention centers began to run out of room, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (the precursor to today’s ICE), began to contract out detained migrants to private prisons. The Corrections Corporation of America, which was founded in 1983 and is now known as CoreCivic, is a prison corporation with a very powerful multi-million dollar lobby, and which benefits greatly from putting illegal immigrants in prison.

Between 2002 and 2012, private prison companies — like the Corrections Corporation of America, Management and Training Corporation, and GEO Group — gave over $45 million in campaign funding and lobbying. In a message to their shareholders, the Corrections Corporation of America said: “Our growth is generally dependent upon the ability to obtain new contracts to develop and manage new correctional and detention facilities … The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by … the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws.” In other words, ‘Our profit depends on the word ‘illegal’.”

So, while politicians gain votes with illegal immigration, industries also make a lot of money from illegal immigration. The US government could solve the illegal immigration problem overnight, but it doesn’t. Why? There is huge profit to be made through the exploitation of illegal workers. As long as these migrant workers are imposed with the title of “illegal,” they are exploitable.

Since the 19th century, Americans have been hiring migrant workers from Mexico. A lot of this began with the building of the railroad network connecting Mexico with the US. Mexico and the US needed Mexican labor to build the railways in both Mexico and the US. When migrants from Mexico arrived at the border, they were met and offered their wages. The Mexico City-El Paso rail line hired workers from the Mexican countryside, and not too long after this, American railroad and mining companies began to send employment agents to Mexico to find workers. The workers would travel by train all the way to El Paso where they would be contracted by an employment agency to build railroads in Kansas. Later, these employment recruiters were getting migrant workers to build a railroad in Fresno, California.

In the beginning, the title of “illegals” was not used, and Mexican workers could easily enter the country to work and get paid and then leave back home after a certain time.  In the 1950s, border security was something of a show. In one incident, in 1954, the Immigration and Naturalization Service urged a number of migrant workers to cross the border from Mexicali. Once they crossed, the US Border Patrol took them to the US side of the border, and then asked them to touch a toe on the Mexican side. Once this was done, US Labor Department officials immediately offered these migrants contracts to sign, and in an instant they were made from “illegal immigrants” to guest workers.

This whole process of making an appearance of “border security” does not stop the reality of the high demand for cheap labor. In 1951, a report to Truman’s Commission on Migratory Labor stated that American farmers “do not care for workers who may voice complaints in regard to working conditions, housing, or sanitary facilities. They want only those people who will go quietly about their work and make no comments or objections. They want the Mexican worker who has just come across the border and is strange to our language and ways of life.”

Once the title of “illegal” began to be applied more frequently to migrant workers, the industry of exploitation began. There is the story of the Hernandez Cruz family. Juan Miguel Hernandez Perez, in the middle of the 20th century, entered the US easily to work, because at the time there was the Bracero Program, which began in 1945 and made it more expedient for Mexican workers to cross the border. But, after the termination of the program in 1964, Juan’s son, Juan Hernandez Cruz, tried to enter the US to work, but he had to do so “as an unauthorized migrant.” When his sister, Samantha, and their mother tried to cross the border, they had to get a coyote (a guide from the criminal underground who brings illegals across the border) who suggested that they use false papers to enter.

The use of illegal methods to cross the border empowers not only the private prison system, but also benefits greatly the criminal underground. Instead of merely crossing the border as workers, they enter in as criminals and in so doing pay, and thus strengthen, the industry of the criminal underworld. American employers, seeking labor that is not expensive, request from the Department of Labor authorization to allow them to recruit H-2 workers. Once authorization is given, these American employers go to a Mexican labor recruiting agency that will work with criminals to get workers from Mexico to the United States. In numerous cases, these workers are actually charged money to pay the employers for the visa processing, for rent in shabby and overcrowded apartments, transportation fees and other things. The money that is paid is then actually taken from the workers’ wages, who is then given a reduced amount so small that it cannot constitute a just living.

In a 2010 study, the United States Government Accountability Office found in six cases that were reviewed: “Employers charged their H-2B workers fees that were for the benefit of the employer or charged excessive fees that brought employees’ wages below the hourly federal minimum wage. These charges included visa processing fees far above the actual costs, rent in overcrowded apartments that drastically exceeded market value, and transportation charges subject to arbitrary ‘late fees.’ Workers left the United States in greater debt than when they arrived. In one case, these fees reduced employees’ paychecks to as little as $48 for a 2-week period.”

In eight cases that were reviewed, “employers were alleged to have submitted fraudulent documentation to Labor, USCIS, and State to either exploit their H-2B employees or hire more employees than needed. Employers and recruiters misclassified employee duties on Labor certification applications to pay lower prevailing wages; used shell companies to file fraudulent labor certification applications for unneeded employees, then leased the additional employees to businesses not on the visa petitions; and preferentially hired H-2B employees over American workers in violation of federal law.”

As long as these workers have the label of “illegal,” they remain exploitable, whereas before, when Mexicans were allowed to enter in as workers who were known by companies to be coming in for certain jobs, there was no room for a criminal industry to abuse them and gain profit through exploitation. Again, the US government could easily get rid of this problem, but it doesn’t. Why? Because there is money to be made, either through the criminal underground — which sends drug money across the border and deposits the cash in American banks –, or through the private prison system, which has rivers of money flowing into its pockets as long as migrant workers are coming across the border with the label of “illegal” imposed on them.  The industry of exploitation is so strong, that it is a very difficult task to make a system by which to legally process workers coming into the country.

In 2004, the Farm Labor Organizing Committee or FLOC, a farm-workers’ union in the United States, made an agreement with North Carolina farmers to let migrant workers get their visas processed in an office in Monterrey, in order to also monitor the recruitment process, so that workers wouldn’t have to go through nefarious entities who would just exploit them. On September 9th, 2007, the director of the FLOC, Santiago Rafael Cruz, was found tied up, tortured and murdered. The Farm Labor Organizing Committee suspected that the ones behind the murder were insidious labor contractors, upset that a legal process was impeding their industry of exploitation. According to one report:

Mr. Cruz was found dead at FLOC’s Monterrey office, the victim of a gruesome murder. His hands and feet had been were bound and he had been beaten to death, leaving blood spattered across the walls and floor.

For union officials, the motive was obvious: Mr. Cruz and FLOC had been successfully working to protect Mexican migrant laborers from extortion by corrupt recruiters south of the border, and in doing so had stepped on the wrong toes. Mr. Cruz’s murder was meant to intimidate organizers into stopping their work, union officials maintain.

Now, more than four years after Mr. Cruz’s death, his mother and FLOC members are still waiting for justice. Mexican authorities in the state of Nuevo Leon, of which Monterrey is the capital, have jailed one man in relation to the incident. But Baldemar Velasquez, FLOC’s president, said three other suspects are still at large.

Probably the most famous example of how migrant workers have been exploited in the US, is that of Shalom Rubashkin, who had numerous slaves from Latin America to run his kosher meat packing plant in Postville, Iowa. Accordong to one Jewish news publication:

Waterloo, IA – A former underage worker cried Monday while testifying she was exposed to harsh chemicals at an Iowa slaughterhouse where she and other teens worked 12 hours a day, six days a week.

Yesenia Cordero Mendoza, now 18, was one of two former underage workers to testify against former manager Sholom Rubashkin, who faces 83 child labor violation charges stemming from a May 2008 raid at the plant in which 389 illegal immigrants, including 31 children, were detained. It’s the second trial for Rubashkin, who awaits sentencing in a separate federal financial fraud case that followed the raid at the former Agriprocessors slaughterhouse in Postville.

Mendoza began crying while testifying about the raid and the arrest of her boyfriend and other workers.

“I don’t want to remember it,” she told prosecutors through a translator.

She testified she was 15 when she used false documents to get hired at the slaughterhouse. It was common knowledge that the plant hired minors, so she forged documents that gave her age as older, and plant officials never asked for any other identification to verify it, she said. When government inspectors came to the plant, underage workers were sent home, she said.

Mendoza and Rony Ordonez Capir, who was 16 when hired, said the work involved harsh chemicals that burned their eyes, hands and throats.

Ordonez said he cut meat using hooks and knives and washed down conveyor belts with bleach and chlorine. Mendoza testified she measured the temperature of meat packaged with dry ice.

Ordonez, who is now 20, said he received no formal training and learned how to do his job by watching his co-workers. He said he was cut and injured several times on the job, and workers frequently slipped and fell because of animal fat and grease on the floor.

He said he began work at 4 a.m. and would work 12 hours or more. When asked why he didn’t complain about the ill-effects from the chemicals he used, he said, “If I told them, they wouldn’t listen.”

Each child labor charge is a simple misdemeanor that carries a potential penalty of $625 and 30 days in prison.

Most of the workers were from two villages in Guatemala — El Rosario and San Jose Calderas — and 75% were undocumented. These slaves were made to work, untrained, with machines designed to cut through bone and flesh. Many injuries took place, and people were even at times amputated. Workers were continuously abused about how they were not working hard enough. According to another American Jewish publication:

One of those workers — a woman who agreed to be identified by the pseudonym Juana — came to this rural corner of Iowa a year ago from Guatemala. Since then, she has worked 10-to-12-hour night shifts, six nights a week. Her cutting hand is swollen and deformed, but she has no health insurance to have it checked. She works for wages, starting at $6.25 an hour and stopping at $7, that several industry experts described as the lowest of any slaughterhouse in the nation.

Juana and other employees at AgriProcessors — they total about 800 — told the Forward that they receive virtually no safety training. This is an anomaly in an industry in which the tools are designed to cut and grind through flesh and bones. In just one month last summer, two young men required amputations; workers say there have been others since. The chickens and cattle fly by at a steady clip on metal hooks, and employees said they are berated for not working fast enough. In addition, employees told of being asked to bribe supervisors for better shifts and of being shortchanged on paychecks regularly.

In May of 2008, ICE agents raided the Kosher meatpacking plant in what was “the largest single-site operation of its kind in American history.” (1) 389 laborers, out of 900 workers, were arrested. The United States government charged, en masse, 297 of the undocumented workers of “aggravated identity theft”, since they used false papers that were given to them through the criminal industry that illegally processes undocumented workers in conjunction with American employers and Mexican employment agents. Prosecutors pressured the undocumented workers to acquiesce to a plea bargain for a lesser charge of misuse of a Social Security number. But the poor workers had no idea what these charges signified. They were duped by a system of exploitation that promised them work. One of the Guatemalan peasants, weeping, recounted how he got to the United States, how he “walked for a month and ten days until I crossed the river. …I just wanted to work a year or two, save, and then go back to my family, but it was not to be. …The Good Lord knows I was just working and not doing anyone any harm.” These workers were either detained or placed under house arrest to await deportation. (See Aviva Chomsky, Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal)

What America witnessed in the “kosher meat packing plant” was utter evil slavery. But who freed this monster, Shalom Rubashkin? Donald Trump, the very president who gained mass popularity by bragging about how he was going to throw illegals out of the country. While Trump made himself out to be the guy who did not want illegals taking the jobs of Americans, he freed a man who enslaved and exploited illegal workers. As we read in a report:

Washington – U.S President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday that he is commuting the prison sentence of Sholom Rubashkin, the former head of what was the largest Kosher meat company in the United States, Agriprocessors. Rubashkin was sentenced in 2010 to 27 years in jail for 86 counts of financial fraud, however will now finish his sentence after serving only eight years.

The White House distributed a statement explaining that the decision was supported by former senior officials in the Department of Justice and by members of Congress from both the Democratic and Republican parties.

Rubashkin’s family was known in the past for making major donations to political campaigns. Rubashkin himself also contributed thousands of dollars to political campaigns, mostly on the Republican side.

Another report reads:

The White House wrote the commutation was “encouraged by bipartisan leaders from across the political spectrum, from Orrin Hatch to Nancy Pelosi”, and was “based on expressions of support from Members of Congress and a broad cross-section of the legal community” though the action “is not a Presidential pardon. It does not vacate Mr. Rubashkin’s conviction, and it leaves in place a term of supervised release and a substantial restitution obligation, which were also part of Mr. Rubashkin’s sentence.”

Rubashkin was freed, not because he was innocent, but because he gave lots of money to politicians and was thus a part of the Jewish political elite that is well connected with government and the powers that be. Once Rubashkin was freed, the entire Orthodox Jewish community celebrated for this devil:

When Muslims elevate a terrorist, we condemn it. But when Jews elevate a tyrant and a slave master, we say nothing. Political correctness reigns on all sides. But not all Jews celebrated Rubashkin. Moty Raven said:

“I want a community who stands up for justice and fairness, not one who parades around a man who violated child labor laws, mistreated thousands of workers, [de]frauded many, and who repeatedly flaunted the law in many other ways.”

As one rabbi on Twitter said, the commutation of Rubashkin’s sentence is “a win for anti-immigrant and anti-worker forces.”

To have so many people celebrating over the freeing of an evil criminal who abused slaves from Guatemala and Mexico, signifies one thing that nobody wants to say: there is an underlying satanic and racist desire for superiority amongst many Jews. As Hilaire Belloc wrote:

“The Jew individually feels himself superior to his non-Jewish contemporary and neighbor of whatever race, and particularly of our race; the Jew feels his nation immeasurably superior to any other human community, and particularly to our modern national communities in Europe.” (Belloc, The Jews, ch. 5, p. 108)

As Christ Himself told the Jews:

“You are of your father the devil, and the desires of your father you want to do.” (John 8:44)

In the United States there is a horrendous exploitation that has been taken place upon migrants, in which migrants are made to be put through detention centers where they work for $1 a day, or at times for no money at all, all so that private prison systems can make maximum profits. They say slavery was banished in the United States. Think again.

Migrants work cleaning the facilities, doing laundry and doing construction work to expand the size of the facilities. There was the case of Mbah Emmanuel Abi and Desmond Ndambi who were working for a dollar a day at the Cibola County Correctional Center which is operated by CoreCivic, one of the two biggest private prison corporations in the US (the other is GEO Group). Ndambi worked as a janitor for three hours a day, seven days a week, and then as the facility’s librarian for eight hours a day, five days a week. He was usually paid a dollar a day, and in several occasions the facility did not pay him at all. Ndambi would use his pay to buy basic hygiene necessities for which money was deducted to his account. When he was released from the detention center, the remainder of his account was paid to him. Abi worked as a cook in the facility for six hours a day, at least five days a week, for only 50 cents an hour (around $15 a week). Abi and Ndambi eventually launched a lawsuit against the Cibola Country Correctional Center, making them the first immigrants to sue a private prison.

In the document, Ndambi v. CoreCivic, Inc., it reads that while CoreCivic relied heavily on migrant labor which it pays little for, it also hires locals living in the area around the facility. While the migrants were paid slave wages, by law non-detainee workers have to be paid in accordance to minimum wage standards:

“CoreCivic owns and operates Cibola, a prison complex that has faced several recent scandals for mistreatment and inadequate care of prisoners and civilly detained immigrants. CoreCivic profits from its operation of Cibola by relying heavily on a captive workforce of civilly detained immigrants, including Plaintiffs_, to perform labor necessary to keep Cibola operational and provide the services it is obligated to provide under the terms of its contract with Cibola County, New Mexico. The work includes tasks such as preparing and serving meals, cleaning the facilities, performing other janitorial tasks, performing laundry services, and operating the library and the barber shop. CoreCivic sometimes hires non-detainees who live in the surrounding community to perform the same work. If Plaintiffs did not perform this Work, CoreCivic would have to hire more people from the surrounding community to keep Cibola operational and pay those additional workers the legally mandated wages, which would be substantially higher than the wages actually paid to Plaintiffs. … Despite the importance and necessity of Plaintiffs’ work to CoreCivic’s business, CoreCivic has always paid them less than the legally required wage for their work, and sometimes as little as one dollar per day.”

The American Right thinks its great that migrants are detained in these facilities, and when mistreatment is mentioned, they simply reply with something to the likes of: ‘They should have thought of that before entering the country illegally.’ In other words, God-given rights to a fair wage is thrown out and replaced with their perspective on the Constitution, and thus God-given rights are deprived of constitutional rights in this particularly warped mentality. But these same people who express outrage against migrants are also those who complain about how migrants get low wages and thus lower down the cost of labor. But, these very private prison systems who contract with ICE to hold migrants in their facilities are paying these same workers slave wages (as opposed to hiring American citizens to do the maintenance and construction for the detention facilities), and yet we don’t hear the Right-wing claptrap complaining about this, because it involves migrants being imprisoned and given slave pay. These aren’t isolated incidences. The same document states that “there are hundreds of similarly situated current and former civilly detained immigrants at Cibola who have been subjected to the same unlawful conduct that the Plaintiffs challenge herein.” One man even died as he was using a jackhammer and it hit an electrical wire, as we read from the New York Times:

Workers in immigration custody have suffered injuries and even died. In 2007, Cesar Gonzalez was killed in a facility in Los Angeles County when his jackhammer hit an electrical cable, sending 10,000 volts of direct current through his body. He was on a crew digging holes for posts to extend the camp’s perimeter.

The migrants who are detained in these facilities are those who have not been charged with any criminal violations. These particular migrants are kept in these facilities for the purpose of making sure that they stay in the US during their immigration process or that they are available for deportation if they are not eligible to remain within the country. Migrants who are allowed to stay in the US have permission to work. These are what have been called “civilly detained immigrants.” Thus, the migrants who are allowed to work legally within the detention facilities are owed a fair pay. In the words of Ndambi v. CoreCivic, Inc.:

“Civil immigration detention is not punitive or corrective, it does not reflect a determination that detained immigrants have violated any laws of the United States, and it does not determine the outcome of their immigration cases. By law, civil detainees are the sole owners of the labor they provide.”

In the case of the detainees within the Cibola detention facility, they were paid a dollar a day or at times nothing at all. “On some occasions,” writes Ndambi v. CoreCivic, “Plaintiffs and those similarly situated were not paid at all for their work. ln all cases, Plaintiffs and those similarly situated were paid less than the minimum wage required”.

In 2017 there was the case of Shoaib Ahmed, a 24 year old Bangladeshi immigrant who was detained in the Stewart Detention Center in the state of Georgia where he was put through slave labor. The Stewart immigration center is ran by CoreCivic, and not surprisingly, he was working for 50 cents an hour and was eventually owed a $20 check for his labor. When his check wasn’t given to him, Ahmed got upset and told the other workers that they shouldn’t work. As punishment, Ahmed was made to endure solitary confinement for ten days. The Stewart detention center gives inadequate food to detainees, according to one report. One Mexican migrant said that he believed that the reason why such little food is given to detainees is to compel them to buy food from the center:

“I believe the reason why the facility gives the detainees so little food is so we will have to buy food from the commissary. Everything in the commissary is expensive. I spend $80/week, $320/month, in the commissary.”

In fact, conditions in Stewart have been known to be so poor that mortality data from ICE states that detainees are about 47 times more likely to die at the Stewart Detention Center than in ICE detention in general. Wilhen Hill Barrientos, a detainee in a privately ran detention center, said in a lawsuit against CoreCivic that you “either work for a few cents an hour or live without basic things like soap, shampoo, deodorant and food”.

CoreCivic is not the only biggest private prison corporation. The other is GEO Group, and it also is involved in slave labor, paying workers lower than minimum wage. Duglas Cruz, a migrant from Honduras who fled his country after gangs tried to recruit him and he refused to join, was one detainee at the Adelanto facility ran by GEO. The food given to prisoners were not enough to satisfy hunger, and so Cruz decided to work in the facility’s kitchen to buy extra food. But he was only given $1 a day, and this wasn’t enough to buy simple food products. For example, a can of tuna was sold for $3.25, more expansive than the average cheap can of tuna you get at the grocery store. A stick of deodorant? $3.35, more than three days wages at the migrant facility. “If I bought that there wouldn’t be enough money for food,” Cruz recounted. The strategy behind this is to maximize their profits. 

There was a lawsuit that was done by the state of Washington in 2017 against GEO Group over the horrendously low pay it was giving to migrant workers for their labor in the Northwest Detention Center (NWDC) in Tacoma. The lawsuit was filed by the Attorney General of Washington, Bob Ferguson, and it got GEO to come up with reasons to have it blocked. For example, GEO accused the Attorney General of “bad faith” and stated that “The Attorney General’s claims are politically motivated”.  But, in May of 2019 the U.S. District Judge Robert Bryan backed the Attorney General to have the “affirmative defenses” of GEO blocked. According to a 2019 report from the Seattle Times, the judge pointed out that “the state has known of the $1-a-day practice since at least 2014”.

The Obama administration tried to reduce the government’s use of private prisons. The Trump administration has put in efforts to reverse this policy and give more leeway to private prison corporations. The day after the 2016 election, the value of the stock rose significantly, with CoreCivic’s stock going up to 43% and Geo Group’s increased 21%.

This is profiteering through exploitation of migrants. “You must not exploit or oppress a foreign resident, for you yourselves were foreigners in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 22:21) Jesus’ struggle was a struggle between an established national law and God-given law. The Jewish elites broke divine law when they exploited worshippers in the Court of the Gentiles by making people who wanted to worship God in the Temple exchange their Roman coins with a Temple currency. Currency manipulation was the means by which to exploit people, and what did Christ do? He did not tolerate such evil, but rather He took a whip and drove the thieves from the Temple which was meant to be a house of prayer for all the peoples (Isaiah 56:7), and drove the thieves who prostituted the holy place out. Christ was a Warrior for liberation against the sinister system of exploitation which sought to take advantage of people; He did not tolerate such wicked actions, but yet, with vibrant and ardent zeal and an endless love for humanity, used the physical force of a whip to instill in the hearts of the enemies of everything holy and sacred, and drove out such evildoers.

The rights given by God surpass national law and are thus international, and should not be rejected merely because a person’s status is ‘non-citizen.’ Humans are more valuable than a status written on a piece of paper; a person’s humanity should not be determined by what a piece of paper says. Fellow members of the family of humanity need not be victim to the ravenous hands of private corporations, merely because a stamp of approval has not yet been bestowed to them. The struggle of Christ is not for the praise of some border wall, but for vanquishing of evil and for the advancement of good, and that good entails not the exploitation of people for maximum profits, but the harmony of the human family, and not the justification of slavery and using people like tools for money for the cause of some national identity.

Now, I must ask the question: if such private corporations are willing to exploit people because they are non-citizens, imagine what they would do to citizens if they could get away with it. Put away your delusional mentality of ‘well we are citizens and they are non-citizens and they should have thought about this before coming here illegally,’ and think for a moment here. The reason why these corporations take advantage of these migrants is because they are not citizens and thus their universal rights are not seen as protected by the American constitution. Thus, they mistreat these people because they can, because they can get away with it. Now, imagine if they could get away with exploiting American citizens, and get away with it. What would happen if some major terrorist attack occurred in the US and the government declared a national emergency and certain citizens were deemed not American enough? Remember that the 13th Amendment says:

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

And what if people are deemed as ‘criminals’ for being political dissent against despotism? Such people could be forced to slavery or even work camps and people would be indifferent because they have been given the label of ‘criminal.’

Such people would be made to suffer through being forced to be imprisoned as the masses deem them as ‘enemies’ of the state. This is why excessive nationalism is dangerous. It makes you into a robot that just follows and accepts, never questioning what evils may be being done under the banner of your flag.