What were you doing the day the president attended the opening of an American concentration camp in the Everglades? Dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” by Republican officials because of the predators living in the surrounding swampland, it has been built to cage thousands of people rounded up by ICE and allied law enforcement agencies as part of President Trump’s mass deportations. “‘Alligator Alcatraz’ is a concentration camp,” Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night, a history of concentration camps, told The New Republic.
That morning, Trump attended the camp’s opening
in Ochopee, Florida, along with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. “We’d like to see them in many states,”
Trump said at a press conference there. “And at some point,
they might morph into a system where you’re going to keep it for a long time.”
He complained about the cost of building jails and prisons, then complimented
his team, who “did this in less than a week.”
For the event, Trump wore one
of his signature red ball caps, this one reading “Gulf of America,” his
jingoistic name for the nearby Gulf of Mexico; Noem wore a
white “Make America Great Again” ball cap with gold stitching. The flimsy camp
offered them some shelter from the punishing humidity, which would later give
way to a downpour. A C-Span camera followed them into one of the massive tents, where
rows of chain-link cages contained numerous bunk beds—for the
moment, empty. Photographers raced ahead of Trump and Noem to get shots of them
entering, taking in the cells, pausing to ask inaudible questions. DeSantis
stood as if he did not know where to put his hands. “They’re going to sweep
this six times to make sure there’s nothing that could be used as contraband,
as weapons,” DeSantis told Trump a bit too brightly, “before the detainees
come in.” He smiled as he told reporters about how soon their
prisoners would “check in.”
The American concentration camp on view Tuesday was erected
within the Big Cypress National Preserve, traditional Miccosukee land. The tribe was not consulted, said Betty Osceola, a member and activist who lives a
few miles from the camp’s entrance. She was one of hundreds of people protesting on the road outside the
camp over the last several days as massive trucks streamed into the site.
“People should be concerned about the secrecy of this,” Osceola told the Fort Myers News-Press. “It’s a big deal.
Our ancestors were laid to rest in this area, and they talk about it like it’s
a vast wasteland. It’s not.”
The site of the camp is also public-owned land, most recently occupied by the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, “a remote facility for promising pilots to practice their touch-and-goes amid disinterested herons and alligators,” according to The Palm Beach Post. An executive order issued by DeSantis cited a nonexistent “emergency” to get around the legal process for building on the site.
Two environmental groups working in the area, Friends of the
Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity, filed a lawsuit Friday “to halt the unlawful construction of a
mass federal detention facility for up to 5,000 noncitizen detainees.” Friends
of the Everglades noted that their group was founded in part to stop construction of a major jetport on the same site.
Members of the Miccosukee and Seminole tribes fought against the jetport too—generations ago. The
state of Florida contended in court on Monday that the “risks” of not locking
up immigrants on the site (on this expedited pseudo-emergency basis) “overwhelm
any incidental environmental harm.” They also claimed the site was “temporary.”
There is no reason to believe any of the claims from the
Florida and federal governments. The same day the concentration camp opened,
ABC News reported that despite Trump’s campaign refrain that
his mass deportations would target “criminals,” “new data shows a recent shift
toward also arresting those who have not been accused of crimes.” This was
foretold by Tom Homan, Trump’s “immigration czar,” who was the face of the mass
deportation plan long before Trump returned to the White House. “No one’s off
the table,” Homan said at the Republican National Convention last
summer. “The bottom line is: Every illegal alien is a criminal. They enter the
country in violation of federal law. It’s a crime to enter this country
illegally.” Every immigrant—every person the Trump administration said was
an immigrant—was a target from the beginning.
On Monday, a reporter asked Homan about an ailing
75-year-old Cuban man who died in ICE custody recently. His response: “People die in ICE custody.” He complained, “The
questions should be, how many lives has ICE saved?” He challenged reporters to
look into ICE’s detention standards. Last week, Wired reported on a chilling pattern of apparent neglect
inside immigrant detention centers, based on nearly 400 calls made to 911 from
the 10 largest ICE facilities. Incidents included seizures, self-harm, and
sexual abuse. Some calls were made by the people caged inside, desperate for
help.
At his press conference at the concentration camp, Trump learned that his massive budget bill had passed the Senate. The funding in the bill will make ICE the largest jailer in the world, with $200 billion at its disposal. As Felipe De La Hoz wrote last month for TNR, the bill “would take everything we’ve seen so far”—the targeting of activists for their speech, masked agents grabbing people off the street, sudden flights to Guantánamo or out of the country, ramping up detentions—and crank it to 11.”
A storm blew through the concentration camp during the press
tour. Florida reporter Jason Delgado captured videos
showing a layer of rainwater blowing across the floor of the cells, while the
soft roof of one tent rippled in the wind. Water pooled at the base of the
American and Florida state flags and around extension cords for lights. “The
state says the sites here are rated to withstand a category two hurricane,”
he posted on X. Two stronger hurricanes that made
landfall last year —Helene and Milton—brought flooding and tornadoes to the area. People in jails
and prisons in Florida were not evacuated.
Outside the concentration camp, when the storm hit, the
protesters were still there. Some had been there for days. No one can say, years from now, that nobody knew
about the camp, or that no one pushed back.
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