On a hot Saturday in June in Southeast Georgia, family members stood outside the Folkston ICE Processing Center, surrounded by a chain-link fence at least 20 feet high, waiting to visit their loved ones detained inside. The indoor waiting area was full, so families, including elders and babies, had to wait outside on a 10-foot by 10-foot slab of concrete with no shade. The exit was controlled by a GEO Group guard sitting in the lobby.
Folks waited anxiously in the heat until their detained loved one's name was called, signalling that it was time for their visit. When a guard opened the lobby door to confirm the names of detained people with visitors, a young man, who appeared to be no older than 20, waded through the crowd to the front of the cage and told the guard, "Excuse me, ma'am, I'm here for my job interview."
Throughout the afternoon, at least two other people were heard telling GEO Group guards that they were there for a job interview or to fill out hiring paperwork. Following the corporation's announcement to expand the Folkston facility, GEO Group, the private prison corporation that operates the Folkston ICE Processing Center, was hosting a hiring week. The expansion is said to increase the total number of beds from 1,118 to about 3,000, making it the largest ICE detention center in the country.
As the young man was leaving the facility, a volunteer with the Campaign to Shut Down the Folkston ICE Processing Center pleaded, "You don't have to work here! You don't have to be part of the deportation machine!" A woman whose husband was detained shouted to him, "Have fun working at the concentration camp!"
In recent months, the U.S. military has played a growing role in immigration enforcement, from the National Guard assisting ICE at detention centers across the South to people being detained in military facilities. Having grown up in South San Diego, a city with large military and immigrant communities, I am the daughter, sister, and friend to several military servicemembers and veterans, and I have seen firsthand the many ways the military preys upon vulnerable communities for recruitment.
ICE and the private prison corporations it holds contracts with are not just collaborating with the U.S. military; they are adopting the military's recruitment playbook—exploiting low-income people in the process, subjecting them to moral injury, and sowing deeply entrenched divisions among communities—all while failing to deliver on their promises of benefits and economic liberation. Working people deserve better than the false choice of (a) living in poverty, or (b) taking a job incarcerating people or becoming a service member of the imperial war machine.
Carceral economies do not create healthy communities
Human rights abuses are endemic to immigration detention. People detained in ICE facilities are fed moldy, maggot-infested food; their medical needs are often ignored or neglected; they have been subjected to physical, sexual, and psychological abuse; and many have died in custody.
Not only do ICE detention centers harm the people who are detained inside them, but they also harm the communities where detention centers are located.
Many of the country's ICE detention centers are located in rural areas, especially in the American South. When private prison corporations set up shop in a rural town through an intergovernmental service agreement with ICE and the local government, they promise job opportunities and economic investment in the local community. In a recent press release, Republican Congressmember Buddy Carter (R-GA) asserted that the recently announced Folkston ICE Processing Center expansion would bring 400 jobs to his constituents in South Georgia.
But the promise of economic development often doesn't come to fruition, as has been the case for the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia.
The Stewart Detention Center began detaining people through a contract with another private prison corporation, CoreCivic, in 2006. Stewart County, a rural community located about 45 minutes outside of Columbus, receives nearly $3.3 million from ICE each month to detain people at the detention center. In the nearly 20-year-long period the facility has been in business, that money has yet to make its way into the hands of the county's people. From 2019 to 2023, Stewart County was the sixth poorest county in Georgia, with 25.9 percent of residents living below the poverty line.
Charlton County, Georgia, where the Folkston ICE Processing Center is located, has a similarly high poverty rate, with 22.9 percent of residents living below the poverty line during the same period. In 2013, the only public hospital in Charlton County shut down, taking almost 100 jobs with it. Under these conditions, GEO Group's moving into the county in 2017 to run the Folkston ICE Processing Center can only be described as predatory.
Today, an entry-level position as a detention officer with GEO Group at Folkston pays about $23 an hour, or about $48,000 a year, while a Lieutenant position, which requires a little more than a high school diploma, pays about $60,000 a year. These are desirable salaries for a town where the median household income is $45,000 a year. In exchange for a paycheck, Folkston detention facility workers pay a substantial moral price. These lucrative jobs involve separating people from their families, serving them inedible food, and keeping them in cages for as long as ICE and its private contractors feel like it.
Like other rural communities targeted by private prison corporations, the populations of Lumpkin and Folkston are majority Black (not counting those detained in the detention centers). Many of the guards and other detention center staff at Stewart and Folkston are Black and many are Black women. Given other options, many would not choose to work in a prison for immigrants. But the very presence of a prison in a community often serves as a disincentive for other employers to invest in the local area and provide other types of jobs.
Not only do ICE detention centers harm the people who are detained inside them, but they also harm the communities where detention centers are located.
It remains to be seen whether the Folkston expansion will actually boost the local economy. If Stewart is any indication, the prospects of an economic boom in Folkston are doubtful. Charlton County will receive only $200,000 in annual revenue under the new contract. Initial news reports about the deal said that the City of Folkston would receive $600,000 a year in revenue from the water and sewer services it will provide to the ICE facility, but this number is a projection and is not supported by available public records. In contrast, GEO Group is getting $47 million every year, while the people of Charlton County continue to have their basic needs unmet. In August, Charlton County administrator Glenn Hull called the Folkston expansion an "economic lifeline."
The coercive nature of jobs within the immigrant detention industrial complex—whether at privately-run ICE facilities in economically disinvested areas or with ICE itself—is not so different from the coercion that drives people to join the military. Under both systems, people may find themselves economically entrapped to become complicit in institutions whose sole purposes are to destabilize communities and restrict people's liberty around the world, all in the name of maintaining American hegemony.
Low-income youth: Drafted by the economy, targeted by the military industrial complex
Since the military transitioned from a conscription or draft system to an all-volunteer system in 1973, active duty enlistment in the military has been steadily declining. To attract recruits, the military offers subsidized benefits such as healthcare, education, housing, and signing bonuses of up to $50,000.
The military's number one target for recruitment? Low-income, predominantly Black and Latinx youth on high school campuses in disinvested neighborhoods. Military recruitment officers set up tables on public high school campuses, promising signing bonuses in the tens of thousands of dollars to minors who may feel they have few other options in life, thereby creating a de facto draft not instituted by a conscription order, but by economic necessity.
Beyond the manipulative tactics recruiters use to trick young people into joining the military is the added element of some public schools requiring students to be enrolled in JROTC, which disproportionately impacts Black and Latinx youth.
The propaganda around the benefits that one can obtain by joining the military often upstages the significant amounts of violence and disruption the U.S. military inflicts on communities around the world, and the moral injury visited upon the servicemembers complicit in the military's operations. When it comes time to exit the military, however, many veterans are denied the benefits they were promised, with Black veterans being denied benefits the most.
ICE has now taken a page out of the military's recruitment manual. In August 2025, ICE announced that it was offering $50,000 signing bonuses and would forgive all student loan payments for anyone who joins the agency.
The military industrial complex and the immigration detention system are mutually reinforcing
Increased collaboration and adoption of the other's recruiting practices are just the most visible ways that the military and the immigrant detention-industrial complex overlap. On a broader scale, they also feed into one another, and indeed, mutually reinforce each other through imperialism.
The military exploits low-income, working-class people in the U.S. to commit gross atrocities overseas and engage in "missions" that destabilize other countries' governments. Since 1991, the U.S. military has launched at least 250 military interventions in the vast majority of countries around the world. This destabilization drives people to migrate in order to flee violence and other forms of repression. By the end of 2024, there were an estimated 123.2 million displaced people worldwide, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Migrants who flee to the U.S. to seek asylum (escaping conditions the U.S. military has caused) may find themselves in a privately-run ICE detention center, where their incarceration brings revenue to the private prison corporation every day they are detained. If they're not detained and can avoid detection by ICE long enough, they may join the military to obtain U.S. citizenship, where the cycle of imperialism by the U.S. military and the profiteering of ICE's private contractors begins again. In FY24 alone, over 16,000 military servicemembers became naturalized citizens, with the top five countries of birth among those naturalized being the Philippines, Jamaica, Mexico, Nigeria, and Ghana.
A particularly egregious individual case illustrating the interplay of the military industrial complex and the immigrant detention system is that of Alma Bowman. She was born in the Philippines in 1966 and has lived in Macon, Georgia for almost 50 years. She had a Filipina mother and an American citizen father who was a military veteran. They met while her father was stationed in the Asia-Pacific. Under the immigration laws in effect at the time, her father's U.S. citizenship should have passed on to her, but for decades, the American government has refused to recognize her as an American citizen, despite the fact that his name is on her birth certificate.
From 2017 to 2020, Bowman spent three years in ICE detention, including in the Irwin County Detention Center, where she saw a doctor who was accused of performing medically unnecessary and nonconsensual gynecological procedures on immigrant women detained there. The ICE contract for the Irwin County Detention Center was terminated in 2021, resulting in a victory for the Shut Down Irwin campaign. But Bowman was re-detained in March of this year. In August, she filed a habeas petition arguing that her detention in the Stewart Detention Center is unlawful.
Bowman's case cannot be divorced from the fact that the Philippines was a U.S. colony. The U.S. committed genocide against the Filipino people, and the U.S. military maintains an overwhelming presence in the Philippines to this day. We see through Bowman's case, once again, how the military industrial complex drives immigration detention and makes all of us unsafe, including U.S. citizens.
Another world must be built
Earlier this year, I was visiting someone detained in ICE custody at the federal prison in Atlanta, which ICE started using to detain people in March. After I went through security, the guard said, "You must be busy lately."
"We sure have."
"That's good. Busy is good."
"Not always," I said, wincing.
"Well, at least it's job security," he replied.
What might it look like to create job security that isn't dependent upon locking people up? To have free education, health care, and housing without having to spend months away from family, or going on missions that expand the American imperial project?
The people caught in the dragnet of the military and immigrant detention industrial complex—which includes the people who join the military, who work at the detention facilities, the people detained inside them, and the people around the globe resisting American military presence in their homeland—have so much more collective power than the capitalist American empire does. The cracks in the existing systems are becoming clearer every day, and when the fault lines finally give way to demands for collective liberation, working people around the world must be prepared to build it.