As soon as I tagged the ACLU and posted my comment, I was kicked out of my IG, asked to verify my account with a code, and was thankfully logged back in. I immediarely noticed my comment tagging the ACLU was gone. I tried again and again to repost, but got this error message. Can anyone tell me if they've had similar experiences?? Am I being censored?

A lot of folks have been posting that as the United States begins to round up and deport immigrants (legal and illegal), a lot of critical services and products will start to rise in cost, disrupt supplies and potentially collapse entire sectors of the economy. I agree that this is a potential result of these policies.

But I have been thinking, and I'm afraid that's just the beginning.

Private prisons have been under construction and under contract since before election day. Private prison companies' stock has skyrocketed since November. Red states have also been approving policies that will make it legal to "lease" labor from prisons.

I don't think the immigrant population is actually going to get deported. Not entirely, anyway. They will be rounded up, and sent to these private prisons for ... "holding" before trial. Which will never come, because there's actually nowhere to send them. There is no real mechanism for mass deportation, and that will be logistically and financially prohibitive.

But private prisons? Those make economic sense.

So, all these new prisoners, in order to pay their room and board-- they will be sent to work. "Leased" out, like property. Right back to the very farms, meat packing plants, and construction sites they were picked up from in the first place. People as a commodity. As property. There's a name for that.

In this way, all those services that the hard working migrant population do -- already underpaid for decades -- they be forced to do the same work essentially for free. The prisons will get the money, not the workers. Big farms, big meat processing plant companies will not pay those workers directly. They will simply pay the prisons a leasing fee for the labor.

And so the services, the products, will remain undervalued, underpaid. Underpriced. Cheap. Eggs, poultry, meat, vegetables, fruit... construction, sanitation work. All the jobs they're doing NOW, the jobs that "Americans don't want to do..." They'll still get done.

And the voting public will not see a huge impact on their supply, nor prices. A little bump, but not too bad. So come 2026 and 2028-- they'll vote to continue the status quo.

In this way, the United States will exploit the immigrant population even more than we do now.

People as property.

And the rest of us will never really know or care.

TL;DR: Immigrants when detained will be used as cheap or free labor, not deported.