In the second term of President Donald Trump, the United States is quickly descending into fascism — faster than even the most cynical among us could have predicted. American society and democracy are collapsing so frantically that few people have even noticed that their government appears to already be initiating a system of off-shore, industrialized slavery. 

As planes leave for El Salvador, and we see the images of people, heads shaved, violently shoved into cages, with no trial, no due process, in flagrant contravention of a judge’s order, serious legal and human rights questions are being asked. The detainees, who are not from El Salvador, are being kept in a detention centre for “terrorists,” condemned to hard labour for at least the next year. This is not deportation. This is something else.

And we can see where it is heading. 

Trump is doing this by reaching back into history and invoking the “Alien Enemies Act” of 1798 for the first time since the Second World War, granting him sweeping powers under a centuries-old law to deport people. Many of the detainees seem to have been singled out, not because they had prior criminal records or known gang ties, but simply because they had tattoos. 

Now Trump is suggesting that American citizens be sent to serve prison sentences outside the country, referring to those charged with vandalizing Teslas. In Washington, DC, police say they’re investigating the defacement of Teslas as potential hate crimes, and the FBI has created a “Tesla threats task force” and seems to be ready to charge people with terrorism.

What is the logical next step here? If it’s acceptable to call for Americans to be sent to a Salvadoran prison practicing forced labour, then how long would it be before we see political dissidents shipped to domestic prison camps for slave labour? The Thirteenth Amendment already allows for the use of slave labour for those charged with a crime. 

Will we see undocumented workers being returned to the fields on which they once worked making slave wages — this time as actual slaves?

Of those who carry out the farm labour in the U.S., nearly 70 per cent are born outside the country, and more than 40 per cent are undocumented. The fear of ICE raids, detention, and deportation has already had a chilling effect on immigrant farmworkers.

“The problem of labor shortages in agriculture is not new, and whenever the demand for cheap, disposable labor has outstripped available workers, the U.S. has historically turned to another vulnerable group: incarcerated people,” Matthew Zuras recently observed in The New Republic. “Over a century ago, the practice of convict leasing arose as a way to fill labor gaps by using incarcerated Black men as free labor for agricultural and industrial work. It eventually evolved into the system of prison farms, where prisoners — often poor and disproportionately Black — were put to work growing food for both the prison system and, at times, private interests.

“With mass deportations threatening to strip the agricultural workforce, it’s not impossible to imagine that states could once again tap incarcerated workers to fill the gap.” 

Everything we consume is the product of someone’s labour, and without the value that labour provides, society — as it’s currently constituted — collapses. This is why Elon Musk is fixated on “declining population.” The father of 14 children is a proponent of pronatalism, a white-supremacist movement deeply concerned with declining birth rates. Pronatalists are focused on encouraging population growth to prevent “white replacement,” rooted in “fears that certain populations were out-breeding their betters.”

There are many reasons for a declining birth rate, including that people are choosing to not have children because we are on the verge of an apocalyptic climate crisis that almost certainly guarantees that future generations will endure enormous suffering. Of course, there are also more immediate causes — including that the cost of living is the highest it’s been in the modern era, and in the U.S. there’s almost zero support at all for new mothers, many of whom die as a result of the attacks on reproductive health.

Meanwhile, corporations see fewer babies being born as an existential crisis. Even with technological advancements, many companies will still need workers. There are already labour shortages, especially in agriculture, retail, service, and factory work – the kinds of jobs with long hours and low pay, extremely hard work disproportionately done by immigrants.

Vice President JD Vance has made numerous references to birth rates and questioned the morality of people without children, suggesting they don’t have a “direct stake” in the future of the country; he’s described babies as “economically useful.”

So with fewer babies being born, and “billions” of immigrants being deported, that leaves the question to those in power: who will replace the workforce? Bodies are needed to keep the capitalist machine functioning and the ruling class living its prosperity dream. 

But the prosperity of the general public has never been the priority. That was never part of the dream.

Slave labour is not only foundational to American history; it is still used legally throughout American society to this day through the prison population. 

The prison pipeline has been strategically engineered to disproportionately populate prisons with Black and brown bodies. They’re paid pennies a day to risk their lives fighting extreme wildfires – an increasing issue as the climate crisis worsens and budgets for municipal fire-fighting are cut.

Inmates are also contracted out to work in numerous other industries, often in factories and agri-food.

Incarcerated workers in the U.S. produce more than $11 billion in goods and services annually, and $9 billion worth of prison maintenance services, but receive just pennies an hour, according to the ACLU. Sometimes the compensation is withheld entirely. 

These workers can be found in the slaughterhouses that feed into the supply chains of giants like McDonald’s and Walmart, and, in Alabama, major companies including Best Western, Budweiser, and Burger King are among the hundreds of businesses that lease incarcerated workers.

“Some prisoners work on the same plantation soil where slaves harvested cotton, tobacco and sugarcane more than 150 years ago, with some present-day images looking eerily similar to the past,” the Associated Press wrote in a bombshell 2024 report outlining a complex web linking prison labour to major private food corporations.

The U.S. private prison system is big business. In fact, private prisons are traded on stock exchanges. Family fortunes continue to be made through this genocidal industry.

Now, under Trump that system is being further exploited and expanded. Private prison firms contributed millions to Trump’s reelection; they’re presumably expecting a return on their investment.

In 2023, Stephen Miller, now White House deputy chief of staff, predicted that “mass deportation” would be a boon for American workers, who would have opportunities to fill the many vacant agricultural jobs but with higher wages and benefits. 

But wages are unlikely to rise, particularly in an industry that often operates on narrow margins with virtually no rights for workers. “Instead,” Zuras speculates, “the focus may turn back to prisons, where cheap labor has historically been a solution to agricultural worker shortages.”

It’s clear that Trump is not at all offended by — and is perhaps even comfortable with — the idea of slavery. He’s honoured one of its champions, Andrew Jackson, calling him “an American hero who represents the best of the American spirit.” Last year, Trump even suggested Abraham Lincoln should have reached a settlement with the South, which was fighting for slavery to remain legal.

America’s unfinished democratic project arguably didn’t begin until slavery was finally abolished, and now that project is being unwound.

We are witnessing the death of something many people thought was unshakable. People still want to trust that institutions will hold and opposition leaders will act, and eventually things will self-correct and return to normal. However, both history and the present show us otherwise.

Institutions have already failed to be courageous. Columbia University in New York, and so many others, have already bent the knee to Trump. 

So how to resist? Rallies and marches are great. I’ve been truly inspired by the crowds that Bernie and AOC have attracted. But the most powerful thing that could happen now would be for all Americans to just stop. Stop working. Stop having babies. Stop buying things. Stop participating in the economy as much as possible. Strike, in any way you can. 

Direct action would also be a logical next step, but that would almost certainly result in Trump declaring some version of martial law. That is what he is waiting for. He wants a reason to keep filling up prisons with more potential workers. 

We are seeing the beginnings of the criminalization of dissent. A man, critical of American foreign policy, was recently disappeared: Mahmoud Khalil, a legal green card holder, was taken into custody in front of his wife and has still not yet been released. Trump even vowed his arrest “will be the first of many.”

Yesterday, a doctoral student at Tufts University was detained for pro-Palestinian advocacy that apparently included co-authoring an op-ed critical of her university’s position on Israel.

Democracy — at least our idea of a functioning liberal democracy — must involve the people’s ability to hold governments accountable. That is what is now being taken away.

It’s time for BDS for the United States. It’s time for a global boycott.

BDS is a Palestinian-led human rights movement promoting boycotts, divestments, and economic sanctions against Israel, modelled after the successful campaign against Apartheid South Africa.

Trump’s threats to annex Canada, seize Greenland, and capture the Panama Canal should be taken extremely seriously by Americans, and on our current trajectory will almost certainly result in a new colonial war for natural resources and access to the Arctic. (Treaties be damned.)

WorldPride, scheduled to be held in Washington, D.C., in June, should be cancelled immediately. It is not safe for queer and trans delegations from across the world to travel there. The Olympics and the World Cup, both scheduled to be held in the U.S. in the coming years, should also be cancelled.

This American regime will keep seizing more and more power, and oppression will become more and more normalized. Autocrats dismantle institutions, erode democracies, and control through fear. Society will either collapse, or fascism will be actively fought and resisted. Refusing complicity is now a moral necessity. 

There’s no normal to return to. The only thing that matters is what we collectively do next. 

The longer people wait, the harder resistance becomes.

Andrea Houston is Ricochet Media’s managing editor and instructor of journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University.