Soon we’ll be shipbuilding

Is it worth it?
A new winter coat and shoes for the wife

And a bicycle on the boy’s birthday
It’s just a rumor that was spread around town
By the women and children
Soon we’ll be shipbuilding

Well I ask you
The boy said, “Dad they’re going to take me to task
But I’ll be back by Christmas”
It’s just a rumor that was spread around town
Somebody said that someone got filled in
For saying that people get killed in
The result of this shipbuilding

It is spring at the Big Box. We are, once again, “in season” — stacking and re-stacking pallets of mulch and racing to keep up with Chester County’s demand for grass seed and topsoil and weedkiller and deer repellent and lawnmowers and power tools. We’re busy.

All that means a change in my schedule to cover the weekend overnights for seasonal “recovery” as well as the usual weekday nights unloading the trucks swollen with all the freight we need to keep up with our busiest business of the year.

That freight comes from all over the world — from China, Malaysia, Taiwan, Mexico, Canada — the shipping labels on our boxes reads like a roll call at the UN. A lot of what we sell is also Made in the USA. Like the Lasko fans we sell that are made right here in Chesco, in a factory that’s only about three miles away from the store.*

But even such all-American products like those fans will be affected by the tariffs of Trump’s Global War on Trade. They may be manufactured just up the street by our literal neighbors in West Chester, but they include materials and components that aren’t from around here. So prices are likely to go up even for those all-American fans just as they’re going to go up for the thousands of products and materials we sell from everywhere else in the world.

I don’t know what the company’s plan is for dealing with that. It seems hugely consequential for our business model — as massively significant a threat to our business as the mass-deportation scheme that threatens the construction and landscaping businesses that rely on us just as we rely on them.

My guess is that big retailers, including my employer, are hoping to persuade the administration to include them somehow in the “flexibility” and “exemptions” Trump has been dangling:

Trump was asked specifically if he would consider “exempting” some larger U.S. companies that have been hit especially hard by the new tariffs, and the president said he would consider it.

“I’ll take a look at it as time goes by. We’re going to take a look at it,” Trump responded. “There are some that have been hard — there are some that, by the nature of the company, get hit a little bit harder, and we’ll take a look at that.”

When asked how he would determine which companies might receive such an exemption, Trump responded, “Instinctively.”

Those instincts, is seems, are likely to involve a quid pro quo — some concession or donation or obligation yielded in exchange for some exemption or relief. But I have no idea how any of that will play out in the retail sector.

All of this is just to say that I have some sympathy for the folks at Deployed Resources as employers — as people running a business that employs other people and needs to keep that business going to preserve the livelihoods of all of those workers.

But there are limits to that sympathy, and Deployed Resources and its workforce definitely seem to be on the far side of a bright red line that no one should ever have crossed: “From Lollapalooza to Detention Camps: Meet the Tent Company Making a Fortune Off Trump’s Deportation Plans.”

In June 2005, a former employee from the Federal Emergency Management Agency toured the grounds of the Bonnaroo music festival in rural Tennessee. He wasn’t there to see the headliners, which included Dave Matthews Band and the lead singer of the popular jam band Phish. He was there to meet the guys setting up the toilets for the throng of psychedelics-infused campers in attendance: Richard Stapleton, a construction industry veteran, and his business partner Robert Napior, a onetime convicted pot grower, who specialized in setting up music festivals.

The meeting, described in court documents, offered the pair’s fledgling company, Deployed Resources, a key introduction to players doing government contract work for the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that oversees not only the nation’s disaster responses but also its immigration system. Over the next two decades, Stapleton and Napior hired more than a dozen former agency insiders as they turned their small-time logistics business, which had helped support outdoor festivals like Lollapalooza, into a contracting giant by building camps for a completely different use: detaining immigrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Now, as the government races to carry out President Donald Trump’s campaign promise of mass deportations, Deployed is shifting its business once more — from holding people who are trying to enter the country to detaining those the government is seeking to ship out.

This ProPublica investigation by Jeff Ernsthausen, Mica Rosenberg, and Avi Asher-Schapiro isn’t just a story of a company gradually being co-opted by authoritarians. It also involves allegations of pure corruption:

Deployed has continued to win federal business even after the spending on the company’s contracts was criticized by government watchdogs and a whistleblower.

A review by Congress’ Government Accountability Office of one no-bid CBP contract that the first Trump administration awarded to Deployed found that the company’s 2,500-person facility in Tornillo, Texas, averaged just 30 detainees a night in the fall of 2019 and never held more than 68 during the five-month period it was open. It also found that CBP paid Deployed millions for meals it didn’t need to feed people it wasn’t holding. Deployed agreed to reimburse $250,000 for meals not delivered, the GAO said.

… Last year, Dan Bishop, a former Republican congressman from North Carolina, held up a Deployed Services contract in Greensboro, North Carolina, as an example of waste during a hearing on unaccompanied migrant children. The company was paid nearly $40 million to help operate a facility for immigrant children, Bishop said, but it stood empty for over two years.

Deployed nonetheless had workers there full time, according to interviews with three former employees familiar with the facility, tasking them with playacting as if they were providing care. Case managers invented case details and Deployed workers would role-play as students in classrooms, even asking for permission to go to the bathroom, according to the former Deployed workers and social media posts of former workers describing the surreal situation.

“I have no idea why they were doing that with government money,” said one former case manager, who recalled inventing elaborate backstories for fictional children, filling out make-believe statements and other paperwork for hours each day. The case manager spent about a year in Greensboro, living in housing paid for by Deployed from its government contract.

So it’s “Shipbuilding,” except this company isn’t even really building the ships.

There’s a huge fortune to be made manufacturing tents and barbed wire and shackles and chains for the authoritarian regime. Any company morally corrupt enough to pursue that fortune is also going to be corrupt enough to skim as much additional graft and fraud as they can out of the process.

* It’s always a little strange to unload those fans from our trucks. Those trucks arrive every day from the company’s regional distribution center up in the Lehigh Valley.

So the fans are made and packaged just a little ways down the street, where they get palletized and loaded into trucks that take them a hundred miles away to the warehouse. There those pallets are broken down and hand-stacked onto different trucks that drive a hundred miles back this way, which is where my crew takes over. Jalen wades into that truck and loads those fans onto a conveyor belt so that Richard can take them off the belt and stack them onto a pallet that Tony will later wrap and tag and shoot up into the overheads of our store until it’s warm enough to bring those pallets down, break them down, and stock them on the shelves from which, eventually, they will be purchased by people who live just down the street from the factory.

They’re good fans, though.