Owner of ICE detention facility sees big opportunity in AI man camps

Posted by monkeydust 1 day ago

Comments

Comment by OJFord 1 day ago

View from across the globe:

> Owner of ICE detention facility [...]

Oh, right, of course these things are privately owned..!

Comment by spiderfarmer 1 day ago

The next time any EU politician visits the US they should bring up human rights, like we expect(ed) them to do when they visit China.

Comment by pimeys 1 day ago

Last time our (Finland) president visited US he was playing golf and shaking hands. Supposedly signed some nice deals...

Comment by consumer451 1 day ago

I am confused, who in the Finnish government wrote the book that PM of Canada quoted at Davos?

Comment by spiderfarmer 1 day ago

Stubb is a realist. He says the rules based world order is gone. We have to hurry and learn how to deal with dictators, because the US is becoming a dictatorship real quick. And that EU countries will have to unite in order to be able to negotiate from a position of strength. It's the only way to survive while staying true to our values (internally).

Comment by antonvs 1 day ago

Also election integrity. It’s past the point where the US needs international observers for its elections.

Comment by cpa 1 day ago

As member of OSCE, they have observers although it’s fairly light.

https://odihr.osce.org/odihr/elections/usa/580111

Comment by u_sama 1 day ago

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Comment by Forgeties79 1 day ago

^that’s bait

Comment by BobaFloutist 1 day ago

No, no, let them talk, I've heard some interesting ideas about only allowing people with passports to vote.

It turns out that when the "voting security" party becomes the "anti -education" party, those two ideals might come into conflict...

Comment by u_sama 1 day ago

In the rest of developped countries you can't vote without an official ID, in local, regional and national elections. I am not american, I don't care about your politics, ID voting is the way to ensure that no party or fringe movement gets to label elections as tricked. How is this such a controversial opinion that I get downvoted, national issued ID is the norm

Comment by BobaFloutist 1 day ago

Because the US doesn't have a default federal ID.

Most people use state-issued drivers licenses (with varying levels of federal acceptance) as their primary ID.

Historically, US States used "poll taxes" to defacto discriminate against recently freed slaves, who obviously had no money, so we have explicit laws against fees for voting, and an ID that you have to pay for is kind of an indirect way of implementing a fee for voting.

There's a lot of complicated history involved, and I totally get why the system feels weird to an outsider, but you accidentally blew a dog whistle that usually belongs to people trying to find sneaky ways of preventing minorities from voting (that as I alluded too, have the potential to backfire in modern times).

Maybe you wouldn't find it interesting, since you said you don't care about our politics, but the history of voting discrimination, voting rights, and the various schemes to try to surpress then while following the law in the US are kind of fascinating and worth digging into if you're genuinely curious.

Comment by u_sama 1 day ago

I will turn the omelette of sorts, I think that it still worth it as a standard to pursue the federal ID as it would simplify a lot of things overall and the whole tapestry of systems (state Ids and such) actually makes everything more difficult for everyone (minorities included) and more falsifiable which adds tension to an already polarized system.

I am familiar with the history, but from an outsider POV it feels like the story of the sheep that got electrocuted once and then never ventured outside, the path dependency is not really helpful in general. Also I followed the law in the US to make ID mandatory at voting, and from what I saw the whole debate around it seemed deranged, if voter fraud and non-citizens voting is inexistent, why did so many people oppose it. Ironically what will happen is that the elderly will be most affected and will stop voting Republican (chat happened in the UK).

Comment by Forgeties79 1 day ago

> Also I followed the law in the US to make ID mandatory at voting, and from what I saw the whole debate around it seemed deranged, if voter fraud and non-citizens voting is inexistent, why did so many people oppose it.

1) because as the other commenter pointed out these systems have historically been used to discriminate. Historically being recent history at that.

2) drilling down on “if voter fraud and non-citizens voting is inexistent, why did so many people oppose it”: If voter fraud isn’t a problem, then it follows we shouldn’t go out of our way to make sweeping, costly, often discriminatory changes to stop a thing that doesn’t really happen. Even Trump’s own team that was looking far and wide in his first term couldn’t find any evidence of meaningful voter fraud. So why should we risk disenfranchising people in an effort to stop a problem that doesn’t really exist, as verified by his own administration and decades of research?

The voter fraud “concern” (politically speaking, some non-politicians believe it’s a large issue because they have been lied to) is fueled by the fact that he can’t possibly believe he lost. He even did it in 2016 when he won, because he couldn’t stand losing the popular vote, going so far as to claim the exact number of fraudulent votes was the number he lost by in the popular vote (as usual with no evidence). I just don’t understand why anyone would think this kind of initiative is in any way legitimate or otherwise in good faith.

1. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/politics/report-trump-commi...

2. https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/disb...

3. Fun fact I just noticed, the linked executive order disbanding the group investigating alleged voter fraud (at this point we can just call it a lie) has been removed from the WH site, and in typical Trump admin fashion there’s no explanation given so I will have to assume it’s another example of their removing stuff they think makes them look bad despite the information being clearly in the public interest. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-or...

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Comment by u_sama 1 day ago

This is exactly how every EU country conducts their elections, it is crazy to paint this as some bait or crazy thing

Comment by Forgeties79 1 day ago

So every EU nation uses an EU-issued ID to vote? Or does each country, most of which are comparable to US states in size/population, have its own identification?

To be clear: I am not against a national ID for voting. In fact, I think the best compromise is that the federal government should issue a free identification card to every US citizen, which can be replaced once (maybe twice) a year with no fee, that every state then recognizes (in addition to current identification forms) as a legitimate form of identification for voting. That sounds like a great idea to me as it could even help voters and imposes no fees to vote, but I can also tell you that it’s nothing like what the Republicans are proposing, even though it makes total sense.

It’s pointless expense if you ask me. But if you believe voter fraud is a real problem then this seems like a reasonable solution.

Comment by u_sama 19 hours ago

Brazil and China, which are as big as the USA in land (both) and population (China) have IDs as well. All IDs are issues by the nation-state but usable in other EU countries.

I mean yeah, not free but a minimal fee like 20$ or something, doable in an easy place., the problem is not really the ability or will, but political polarization that makes even reasonable propositions become weaponized.

It's not a pointless expense if it is integrated into other systems like healthcare, driving licence, and for example, online identification to do taxes and such. You cannot meaningfully digitalize bureaucracy without standard IDs.

Comment by Forgeties79 16 hours ago

Why should it cost anything?

It should be free and easy to acquire. No fee, no DMV nonsense. There is no reason to charge. Trump’s ridiculous crusade to “prove” voter fraud cost US taxpayers half a billion dollars directly. We could’ve easily given every person voting age an ID card with that money.

You have to bear in mind that voting is opt-in here and you are already required to show ID to register to vote. On top of that, even states that don’t require an ID each time to cast your vote do require it the first time you vote. So nobody in the US can 1) register and then 2) vote without identification in any state, despite the republicans’ often misleading (through being incomplete) claim that you can vote without an ID. There are 3 barriers: not able to me vote by default, 2 times proving identification with a legal ID, and an ID every time you vote in 38/50 states. That is plenty to stop voter fraud, as clearly evidenced by the handful we see per election

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Comment by ratrace 1 day ago

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Comment by spwa4 1 day ago

Would that be the politicians that organized these things?

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/E-10-2025-0014...

I'm not clear on who owns them, but they USED to be owned by private parties and I can't find anything on a purchase ... so ...

Oh and a recent addition: asylum proceedings DO NOT stop the deportation process in Europe anymore. Court proceedings "can proceed", but potentially after actual deportation. Oh and winning the court case gets you the right to stay ... NOT the right to enter. So if governments now just defund immigration courts ... oh they did that long before this new law came into being. Welcome to the new Europe!

Do not worry. I am a European, and I'm 100% positive such details will not stop any Europeans from criticizing everyone else. In fact they're very unlikely to even know about their own laws, especially recent changes.

Comment by JohnTHaller 1 day ago

So our a lot of our prisons. One of the reasons Republicans keep voting to keep marijuana, etc illegal.

Comment by iainmerrick 1 day ago

I’d like to recommend Kate Beaton’s book Ducks to get a vivid feel for what these “man camps” are like. That book is about camps attached to oil fields in Alberta, but the “AI camps” described here sound very similar.

Comment by Lerc 1 day ago

The existence of temporary accommodation for workers in construction projects should not be the issue. It seems like this is a necessary and sensible thing.

The problem is with the quality of that accommodation.

It is also worth noting that there should not be an issue due to the fact that the accommodation provider also supplies accommodation for asylum seekers, because they should be providing acceptable accommodation to those people too.

You can probably add prisons to that list too.

Workers, immigrants, and prisoners all deserve reasonable living conditions. Why people are being housed in a place is irrelevant.

The AI link in this story seems to be simply because there are construction projects involving AI, that seems rather spurious. They wont be the first or last construction projects. Those workers deserve (and probably don't get) the support they need whether they are building a data center, a Casino, or a hospital.

Comment by Aurornis 1 day ago

Or you could click the link in the article where they talk about the temporary housing for data centers, including the perks they’re including like “free steaks” and golf.

Oil fields in Alberta are a very different situation than high budget AI data centers in the US.

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Comment by iainmerrick 1 day ago

What makes it very different? It sounds quite similar to me. Each is a lucrative business that requires lots of physical infrastructure to be built out, and therefore needs a large but temporary influx of construction workers and engineers.

Comment by Aurornis 1 day ago

How is it not different? These aren’t remote oil fields. The workers could commute to the data centers if they didn’t want to stay at temporary housing.

The article and the one it links to say that the temporary housing is a perk that they’re offering to try to entice workers. It includes gyms, nice food, and activities like golf.

The comparison above to bad oil fields in Canada is arbitrary. Not all temporary housing must be like oil field accommodations in remote Canadian oil fields.

Comment by iainmerrick 1 day ago

Well, hang on, the brief TechCrunch article we're discussing here links to two different Bloomberg articles. The first is from 2018 about "housing for men working in remote oil fields", the second from 2026 about a data center in Dickens Country, Texas.

I think you're getting overly fixated on "remote Canadian" here. West Texas is plenty remote. Those temporary workers in Dickens County must far outnumber the local population. If people wanted to commute, where are they going to commute from? The closest big city is Dallas, four hours away. (Edit: I tell a lie, Lubbock is closer if that counts.)

It sounds like you're maybe envisaging a Googleplex, a cool campus where young college hires will want to come and hang out with like-minded peers (and work for long hours as a convenient side-effect). I definitely think it's going to be much more like an oil rig -- people will be paid well, and a decent amount of money will be thrown at entertainment and benefits, but fundamentally it's a place to house hundreds of men who have no reason to be there except that the work has to happen at that specific site.

This article and the linked ones specifically talk about "man camps", not even something like "company towns" where they're maybe trying to establish an actual long-term community.

Comment by Aurornis 1 day ago

> It sounds like you're maybe envisaging a Googleplex

No I’m envisioning what the article is describing combined with my experience with construction projects. You’re the one injecting other stories about Canadian oil fields to the story about something completely different.

Comment by iainmerrick 1 day ago

I'm confused about how we can be interpreting the same short article so differently. It says: "This style of camp was popularized as housing for men working in remote oil fields." So the living conditions in Canadian oil fields seem perfectly relevant.

Comment by semiquaver 1 day ago

Did not expect to see that excellent book mentioned here, but I co-sign.

Comment by mikkupikku 1 day ago

Flagrant clickbait, flagged. Headline makes it sound like concentration camps with AI wardens, but actually it's just normal temporary housing for construction workers building data centers.

Comment by duncan-donuts 1 day ago

The key distinction here is that the temporary workers would presumably be people who are in federal custody and currently housed in ICE facilities. The temporary housing isn’t the issue.

Comment by numeri 1 day ago

No, that's what the headline implies, and the body of the article doesn't support at all. It's (currently, and with no indication of intent to change this) two separate branches of their business.

Comment by mikkupikku 1 day ago

That the headline could be read to suggest such a thing is due to it being clickbait.

Comment by Aurornis 1 day ago

The article does not say this in any way.

It’s just temporary housing for construction workers.

Comment by antonvs 1 day ago

There’s no suggestion of that in the article.

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Comment by Aurornis 1 day ago

They tried to fit a lot of ragebait into this article and headline, but the TL;DR appears to be that this company wants to build temporary housing near construction sites so workers don’t have to commute as far if they don’t want to. The only actually criticism of the temporary housing is that it’s “gray” but they note it has access to a gym. Clicking a link to the other article describing them says they have “free steaks” and access to golf.

My cousin works in construction and some times gets job where the money is great but he has to drive 2 hours to the site and 2 hours home or even more. Temporary housing seems like it would be helpful while doing those jobs.

Comment by dustractor 1 day ago

I like steak as much as the next guy but there's no way I'd eat the free "steak" offered to me by someone who owns an ICE facility.

Comment by sebastiennight 1 day ago

This just in: the facility just got bought by Soylent, LLC. They now offer smoothies as well as free steaks

Comment by red-iron-pine 1 day ago

that sounds like misery. similar uses of nutraloaf have been ruled cruel and unusual punishment in the prison system

Comment by sebastiennight 22 hours ago

I was sarcastically making a combination of Soylent (the meal replacement company), and its inspiration, the fictional Soylent Green [0], which secretly made its food products from processed human bodies.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green

Comment by yardie 1 day ago

Airlines regularly change the operating base of their flight and cabin crew. Then the crew is either forced to uproot their lives or rent a "crashpad", usually a small apartment stacked full of beds near their airport base.

Comment by Aurornis 1 day ago

What does this have to do with construction workers and their temporary housing in this article?

They can’t change the location of a construction site midway through building a structure.

Comment by jollyllama 1 day ago

If it's like fracking, the man-camps will become a hub for trafficking of camp-followers.

Comment by geremiiah 1 day ago

>AI man camps

Anyone who studied Engineering or Computer science already knows what this is like, lol.

Comment by kashunstva 1 day ago

I wonder how long it will take them to link the dots to join their businesses.

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Comment by dkackman11 1 day ago

Over/under on "all of these 'detainees' are sitting around doing nothing" converging with this?

Comment by samrus 1 day ago

Saint peter dont you call me cause i cant gooooo

I owe my soul to the compary stooooore

Comment by vrganj 1 day ago

Work in a camp run by the people that also run concentration camps for undesirables, what a tempting proposition...

Comment by apothegm 1 day ago

So a company town by any other name?

Comment by myrmidon 1 day ago

To me, company town implies that the thing hosts whole families and provides a wider spectrum of infrastructure (roads, stores, entertainment).

I'd classify man camps as worse (even more bleak and dystopian than a company town).

Comment by adolph 1 day ago

  This style of camp was popularized as housing for men working in remote oil 
  fields.

Its kinda weird to not see temporary workforce housing as some recent phenomena, especially given a recent TV show (I havn't watched it) about a particular railroad construction camp. Work that occurs in remote places requires holistic logistics for the workforce, similar to expeditionary warfare.

  Hell on Wheels is an American Western television series about the 
  construction of the first transcontinental railroad across the United States
  [...]
  chronicles the Union Pacific Railroad and its laborers, mercenaries, 
  prostitutes, surveyors, and others who lived, worked, and died in the mobile 
  encampment, called "Hell on Wheels", that followed the railhead west across 
  the Great Plains.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell_on_Wheels_(TV_series)

Comment by nahuel0x 1 day ago

Arbeit macht frei

Comment by mothballed 1 day ago

These man camp style minimal housing seem like a good solution to the housing crisis, but my guess is some bean counter has made it illegal to use these economical SROs for anything other than despotism.

Comment by gmerc 1 day ago

Feels like one of the solutions to get rid of poor people as a whole?

https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%209/EFTA011569...

Comment by vrganj 1 day ago

Class warfare is very real.

The oligarchs are the only ones fighting right now. Maybe that should change?

Comment by red-iron-pine 1 day ago

luigi mangioni made an attempt

Comment by Kipters 1 day ago

What kind of dystopian horror is this?

Comment by markus_zhang 1 day ago

Is it some sort of the camps in the Terminator movies? /s

Comment by 999900000999 1 day ago

Obviously they'll force detainees to build data centers in due time.

This is the ultimate dream of Late Stage Capitalism. The vast majority of detainees are non violent, most aren't even 'criminals' aside from overstaying a visa. There's a parallel with California's prison firefighter brigades.

In order to pay the merciful State for your own imprisonment, you shall work on the data centers. Oracle demands it. Sure on paper it's a voluntary program, but Oracle as promised better food in exchange for work .

It's not completely out of the realm of possibility for a detainees to end up manning these detention facilities as well. You'd be surprised at how many skilled workers, many of which actually have status, end up getting detained anyway.

Comment by sigwinch 1 day ago

Could be that the temporary housing for construction workers transitions into detainment. Having an AI data canter close to a detainment facility streamlines security. Will the whole facility run on diesel and StarLink? Independent of the surrounding community and conveniently-failure-prone power and Internet?

Comment by Lerc 1 day ago

I'm not sure what part of that classifies it as Late Stage Capitalism.

The Hulks Act was passed in 1776.

The 13th amendment in 1865 explicitly carves it out "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for a crime"

Comment by vee-kay 1 day ago

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