“Alligator Alcatraz”: Trump’s New Concentration Camp is Open for Psychological Torture

A.D. Nachalo

Read our editorial on mass deportations here, and the ongoing struggle against it here.

On Thursday (July 3), the hastily developed immigrant detention center in Florida received its first batch of abducted workers. The torture facility will concentrate 5,000 immigrants in southern Florida’s undeveloped swamp. The location and nickname “Alligator Alcatraz” are designed with the intention of invoking maximum terror, which has reached a new level of absurdity. The ultra-reactionary right-wing extremist and chief of US imperialism Donald Trump has promoted the farce of deputized alligators and pythons to provoke fear not only among detainees but the general population. The real terror—due to the fact that wildlife fear and would rather avoid humans—is implicit in its poorly and hastily developed facilities unfit for human beings.

Prisoners will be held in trailers and tents, the only protection from high temperatures and the impending hurricane season, which forecasters have warned will be above-average once again. A video of the facility shows flooded floors, bunk beds in cages, and barbed wire surrounding the compound.

The reactionaries intentionally selected the site not only due to the misguided fear of wildlife but as a further assault on the indigenous people who consider the land sacred to their assailed culture. This is the real similarity with Alcatraz, which has been a battleground between indigenous groups fighting for people’s rights and the federal government. Trump has floated the idea of reopening that torture center on numerous occasions.

The facility deep in the Florida Everglades was constructed in only 8 days amid mass protests which spanned the highway. Florida law allows police to interrogate immigrants in violation of their civil rights and detain them without due process for deportation, insuring the facility will exceed capacity and face overcrowding.

The Everglades is a fragile ecosystem which will be negatively impacted by the influx of prisoners and guards, and the heat and mosquitoes offer an element of torture beyond the scare tactics of alligators and pythons. The area is prone to flooding and hurricanes, which impose a serious risk connected to the hasty construction. The sewage system, along with other utilities, are provided by mobile equipment, posing a risk of contamination to the surrounding marshlands and aquifer that is a source of freshwater for 8 million people in the region.

All of this follows the reactionary old-state’s shift into increased terror tactics—in this case to impose “self-deportations”—which are desirable to the government because they provoke less of a rebellious response from the broad masses and cost the state nothing to circumvent legal battles for the people’s rights.

Trump introduced the camp following his general bombastic and populist style with a propaganda poster depicting himself alongside computer-generated alligators adorned with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) hats. The obscenity has been monetized through the sale of merchandise such as hats, t-shirts, and beer koozies.

Photo: A picture posted by the White House Instagram account shows Trump standing in the entrance of a housing compound in “Alligator Alcatraz”, with crammed bunk beds caged off in the poorly built facility.

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