If This Isn't Slavery, Then What Is It?
Years ago (2017), I watched American Crime Season 3 on ABC. That season followed fellow humans surviving forced displacement who crossed the U.S. border, only to be intercepted by people who claimed they were there to “help.” But that help came with a price—immediate and inescapable.
They were charged for food, for shelter in crumbling trailers, for every basic necessity. The labor was grueling. The wages, if any, were a joke. The threats were real. This wasn’t metaphorical. This was slavery—happening in real time, on U.S. soil.
Most of us never saw it because their voices were never brought to the forefront. The system depends on their invisibility. And the rest of us are often too overworked or too distracted to connect the dots between cheap produce and human exploitation.
Now in 2025, the President of the United States is openly signaling what comes next. He said farm owners should be “responsible” for the people being rounded up in ICE raids. Let’s be clear:
This is state-enabled human trafficking at the very least.
And he’s done it before. In 2017, during his first term, there was a Vice documentary that exposed how fellow humans, many of them Pakistani and Indian men, were exploited while building a Trump-branded golf resort in Dubai. They were recruited under false promises, paid poverty wages, and forced to live in shipping containers under inhumane conditions. Trump denied responsibility, claiming it was “the developer’s problem,” despite his name and profit being tied to the project.
And JUST so you know, while you can find writing about this, imagery and video all appear to have been scrubbed and/or made private when it comes to reading from the what appear in top search results (having Tech Oligarch Bros in your pocket really comes in handy). Thankfully, you can find the original Vice content and content from other speaking on it on Youtube.
Now, he’s laying the groundwork to replicate and expand this exact model of human exploitation.
This time, at scale, with government support, and without shame.
So the question is no longer if this is happening.
The question is:
What do we call it now?
If these fellow humans are being abducted…
If they’re being funneled into unpaid labor…
If they’re being charged to survive…
If they’re being silenced, erased, and made invisible…
What do we call that?
We know what American chattel slavery was.
And while not equivalent in brutality or permanence, we know what indentured servitude entailed—limited-term, contract-bound labor often marked by abuse, coercion, and little recourse, but with the possibility of freedom.
And we know exactly what this is becoming.
The only thing left to ask is:
What will be the terms of “labor” THIS time around?
And how long will we allow it to go unchecked THIS time?
Our “Founding Fathers” were slaveowners after all.
