Mass detentions of undocumented people are set to exploit loopholes in the 13th amendment, enslaving them “for life.”

by Subversas Editorial Board

In Trump’s first week in office, over 7,000 undocumented people were detained, at a rate of 1,000 people being rounded up per day. It is worth keeping in mind that the Trump administration has admitted they call all undocumented people “criminals,” even if they do not have a criminal record. Many major news outlets are incorrectly repeating the administration’s false claims that the people being rounded up are “criminals.” Likewise, the racial targeting has been overt, with Trump encouraging the profiling of immigrants based on the way they look. We can assume that people of color are being targeted. This racialized mass detainment has happened at a rate no one expected due to the quiet re-directing of multiple federal policing agencies to drop their other tasks and start rounding up undocumented people of color, as has been revealed in a leaked memo.

What could be the reason for these mass detainments — with people being detained at a rate much faster than can be deported?

New bills at the state level aim to enslave undocumented people

This week, while everyone was focused on Washington, multiple bills have been brought forth at the state level that would position being undocumented as a felony with a life sentence. Although the 13th amendment outlawed slavery, it has a caveat: slavery is still allowed in the U.S. for incarcerated people. Essentially, these bills would put refugees and other undocumented people into the position of life-long forced servitude. Their only crime: being undocumented.

Here are the bills of this nature that have been brought forward so far:

• Mississippi House Bill 1484
• Missouri Senate Bill 72

Let’s take a look at these bills.

Mississippi House Bill 1484’s Slavery Clause

Again, due to the 13th Amendment’s slavery caveat, we can interpret any law that aims to imprison people for life as an attempt to turn this group into an enslaved labor force.

In the case of Mississippi House Bill 1484, we find the implications of enslaving undocumented people throughout the bill, but these implications come into focus in Section 3, part a of the bill:

You can read through the bill yourself to find how the bill defines each of these terms. It is worth keeping in mind that while there are forms of conditional release written into the bill, the default of this bill would be to imprison undocumented people for life, rendering them life-long enslaved workers due to the loophole in the 13th Amendment. Likewise, this bill also has a provision for bounty hunters, a provision which has tended to distract media attention away from the slavery implications of the bill.

Missouri Senate Bill 72’s Slavery Clause

Again, due to the 13th Amendment’s slavery caveat, we can interpret any law that aims to imprison people for life as an attempt to turn this group into an enslaved labor force.

In the case of Missouri Senate Bill 72, we find less of an effort to hide what is going on. The passages that most obviously imply turning undocumented people into enslaved laborers for life can be found in the very first paragraph of the bill:

You can read through the bill yourself to see the full scope of things the bill lays out. This bill also allows for undocumented people to be imprisoned for life, with the default being that they won’t be eligible for probation or parole. And they will be forced to work due to the slavery loop hole in the 13th amendment.

Why These Bills are A Big Deal

Though these bills have not (yet) passed, they are a blueprint for what the administration has planned. With these bills, those who are behind the “mass deportations” have shown their hand: Their end goal may not be to deport people, but to create a race-based, enslaved, prison labor force. “Immigrants” of color are the ones being targeted here, the irony being that group being must firmly targeted, Brown Latino folks, are Indigenous people of this continent. This is an attempt to turn the people who were on this continent first into an enslaved prison labor force.

In addition to the concerns in this bill, the sheer number of arrests is troubling. They won’t be able to deport these people as quickly as they are arresting them. So they will need to be detained — a process that tends to end hellishly regardless of good intentions. But these bills reveal what might be a plan to avoid deportation at all; this appears to be a legal plan to keep these people in the U.S. as life-long prisoners, subject to the 13th amendment’s prison slavery exception.

The for-profit prison industry has been allowed to metastasize, and the dangerous outcome is unfolding now.

Many are already quite aware that the U.S. already has a racialized prison slavery problem. These new laws targeting undocumented people would simply expand the unethical system that is already in place. Since the passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865, various tactics have been used by supremacist capitalists to incarcerate large swaths of racialized people and leverage the 13th Amendment’s slavery loophole to get free labor from people of color. This horrific system of institutionalized, racialized slavery accelerated during the chain-gang era (roughly 1900-1955) and the “war on drugs” (1971-present), during which racially-targeted drug laws are used to disproportionately fill U.S. prisons with people of color, where they have been forced to work thanks to the slavery provisions of the 13th Amendment.

Prison labor is leased out to corporations, replacing jobs that might have otherwise been held by non-incarcerated workers, driving wages down. In recent years, leased prisoners have been used to fight fires, work at call centers, do agricultural labor, manufacture satellites. Beyond the ethical implications of using the labor of people who are enslaved, these practices drive wages down, reducing the pay for non-enslaved workers doing the same jobs.

Private prison corporations like GEO Group also have an incentive to fill as many prison beds as possible, with American taxpayers footing a bill of over $100 per day per person held in prison. These “profits” are slated to balloon through the targeting of undocumented people.

This unethical and expensive system should have been abolished long ago. Because these corrupt practices and legal caveats for prison slavery have been allowed to remained in place, it was only a matter of time before they were exploited like this.

This could turn the U.S. into something that resembles South African apartheid, with concentration camps thrown in.

The “PayPal mafia” saw an opportunity, and ran with it

Perhaps it is not a coincidence that South African billionaires Elon Musk and Peter Thiel are bankrolling this effort. Their families have profited off of apartheid slave labor, and as the Guardian has recently reported, these two bosses of the “PayPal mafia” grew up in a community that venerates Hitler.

It seems the injustices that were already occurring due to the racialized slavery that is endemic to the pro-profit prison system in the U.S. made it easy for these people to step in and “scale up” these atrocities.

Through these inhumane mass detentions, it seems the enslaved, racialized prison labor force could rapidly expand to include the estimated 13 million undocumented people who reside in the United States. This could turn the U.S. into something that more resembles South African apartheid, with concentration camps mixed in.

Now Is the Time to Resist

WIth these proposed bills, the fascists are showing their hand, and if we don’t have resist quickly, they will steer us towards the world that is laid out in these bills. And to not think for a minute that they will limit these activities to immigrants. If history is any indictor, once they have detained a critical mass of immigrants, they will move on to other groups next. How long do you think it will be until they come for you?

These are the things that need to happen:

• End the raids. These raids are harmful and inhumane. They need to stop now.
• Release the detained. Let the undocumented await their immigration hearings at home with their families. There is no reason to keep them detained. This is harmful and expensive to American taxpayers.
• End for-profit prisons. Prisons never should have been a for-profit industry in the first place. They are expensive, and incentivize incarcerating more and more people. Everything happening now is because for-profit prisoners were allowed to exist.
• End the slavery loophole in the 13th Amendment. This loophole has been used historically to create a racialized, enslaved prison labor force. Beyond being inhumane, this drives down wages for all Americans. It is time to fix this.

How to help right now

Should we protest? The knee jerk response is to organize a direct action and or organize a protest, some folks have pointed out that if we take to the streets, this administration might use that as an excuse to declare martial law. That would just make everything worse… So, what else can we do?

Keeping an eye on the Detained. Rigth now there is a need to assemble maps of where the detained are being held. The more we can keep an eye on them, the easier it will be to prevent atrocities.

General strike. If you’re in a union, now is the time to reach out to your union rep. This is, after all, a labor issue: the creation of a massive, incarcerated labor force would drive down wages. What might it look like to have a general strike and to have a coordinated labor stoppage with the demands in the list above?

Strike Support Work. Those who aren’t in a union can support striking workers in a variety of ways. Come visit the picket lines to learn more!

Help spread the word. You can help spread the word by making art, talking with your neighbors, etc.

Please consider sharing this article—or the information in it—directly with 10 people in your life. The mainstream news has been failing to cover the slavery implications of these laws. We absolutely have to get the word out, and peer-to-peer seems to be the best way to do that in this media climate.

Some text you can share with friends

If you want to text or email this info to friends, here’s some text you can use or modify however you like:

• Hi, I’m concerned about some bills that have just been brought forward at the state level that would turn undocumented people into enslaved prison workers for life due. Here is an article that explains the implications of Mississippi House Bill 1484 and Missouri Senate Bill 72: https://subversas.com/defend_the_undocumented/
• These bills include language that would turn undocumented people into life-long enslaved workers due to the 13th Amendment provision that allows slavery in the case of incarcerated people. It appears that the intention may have never been to deport the undocumented, but to turn them into life-long enslaved people.
• We can’t let this happen. Now is the time to hold the line. Please share this information with at least 10 people in your life. We probably need to have a general strike until the mass detainments end and the undocumented folks are freed so they can await their immigration hearings at home with their families.
• This horrible events unfolding now speaks to the need to end for-profit prisons, and to remove the slavery clause from the 13th Amendment. Let’s open our eyes to the reality that racialized enslaved prisoners have been exploited in this country for decades. The time to stand up is now.

Here are the links to these bills if you want to see for yourself:

• Missouri Senate Bill 72 (see the final sentence of paragraph 1): https://www.senate.mo.gov/25info/BTS_Web/Bill.aspx?SessionType=R&BillID=523
• Mississippi House Bill 1484 (see section 3a): https://billstatus.ls.state.ms.us/documents/2025/html/HB/1400-1499/HB1484IN.htm

Let’s get organized!

Now is the time to stand up for the undocumented.
Now is the time to end the ICE raids.
Now is the time to end the pro-profit prison system once and for all.

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This story is a work in progress.

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