Hiltzik: With 'Alligator Alcatraz,' Trump and DeSantis define their immigration policy as a tragic farce
Michael Hiltzik
Thu, July 3, 2025
The Department of Homeland Security posted this AI-generated image on X to celebrate the construction of Florida's "Alligator Alcatraz" for the housing of immigration detainees. (Dept. of Homeland Security)More
Just as you may have thought that it was finally safe to think about American politics without thinking about Florida's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, he has slinked his way into the national news again.
The occasion was a tour he hosted Tuesday for Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem of what has become known as "Alligator Alcatraz," a detention camp hastily erected in the Everglades to hold immigration detainees in tents and within chain-link cages.
(Environmental groups already have filed lawsuits about the camp's encroachment into the environmentally sensitive Everglades.)
Individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force, and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from.
Perdomo v. Noem
The day before the tour, DeSantis cackled over the conditions awaiting detainees in the camp located about 45 miles west of Miami amid swamps inhabited by pythons and alligators. “Good luck getting to civilization," he said. "So the security is amazing — natural and otherwise.”
Trump seconded that view during the tour: “We’re surrounded by miles of treacherous swampland and the only way out is, really, deportation,” he said.
DeSantis, whom Trump humiliated during their campaigns for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024 as "Ron DeSanctimonious," basked in his apparent return to Trump's favor.
One could hardly put matters better than Nicole Lafond of Talking Points Memo, who described how DeSantis and Trump came together over their "shared passion: finding creative new ways to dehumanize immigrants, carried out with a trollish flair."
As it happens, the tour took place the day before immigrant advocates and several people swept up in immigration raids described in a federal court filing the behavior of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents conducting the raids, as well as the atrocious conditions in which the detainees are held in an ICE facility in downtown Los Angeles.
That filing documents the continuum of immigration enforcement under the Trump administration nationwide.
In Florida, officials boast of the cruelty of holding detainees in a swamp before their immigration status is adjudicated — Noem stated that detainees would be offered forms to self-deport at the very entrance to the camp.
In California, "individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force, and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from," according to the filing. "If they hesitate, attempt to leave, or do not answer the questions to the satisfaction of the agents, they are detained, sometimes tackled, handcuffed, and/or taken into custody."
Then they're held in the "dungeon-like" L.A. facility, sometimes for days, and often "pressured into accepting voluntary departure."
A Homeland Security spokesperson called the assertions in the filing "disgusting and categorically false." The spokesperson told me by email, "Any claim that there are subprime conditions at ICE detention centers are false."
More on that in a moment. First, a quick review of how DeSantis, like other GOP politicians, has exploited immigration and other hot-button issues for political advantage.
On the national level, this began as a campaign against pandemic lockdowns and mask mandates — at one point while COVID was raging across his state, DeSantis publicly upbraided schoolchildren for wearing masks at a presentation, calling it "COVID theater." He progressed to questioning the safety of COVID vaccines and to trying to demonize Anthony Fauci, then the most respected public health official in the land.
The ultimate harvest was one of the worst rates of COVID deaths in the nation. DeSantis' defenders explained that this was because Florida has a high proportion of seniors, but couldn't explain why its rate was worse than other states with even higher proportions of elderly residents. He pursued attacks on LGBTQ+ people through an "anti-woke" campaign, though judges ruled against his efforts to legislate how teachers and professors did their jobs.
DeSantis tried to take his show on the road via a quest for the presidential nomination, but his culture warfare didn't obscure his maladroit skills on the stump. (I once described DeSantis as having "all the charisma of a linoleum floor," after which The Times received an indignant letter from a reader asserting that I owed linoleum an apology.)
But his policymaking has long ceased to be a laughing matter, especially when it comes to immigration.
In February, DeSantis signed a law making it a felony for an undocumented immigrant to enter the state of Florida. That law was blocked in April by federal Judge Kathleen M. Williams of Miami, who subsequently found state Atty. Gen. James Uthmeier in contempt for indicating to law enforcement officers that they didn't have to comply with her order.
The cruelty-for-cruelty's-sake nature of Trump's immigrant crackdown is vividly illustrated not only by his glee over the Everglades camp, but also the brutality of the ICE raids as depicted by the plaintiffs in the Los Angeles lawsuit.
The plaintiffs in the class action include five individuals (among them two U.S. citizens) who were detained in the raids, the United Farm Worker and three immigrant advocacy organizations.
Since early June, Southern California "has been under siege," the lawsuit asserts. "Masked federal agents, sometimes dressed in military-style clothing, have conducted indiscriminate immigration operations, flooding street corners, bus stops, parking lots, agricultural sites, day laborer corners, and other places, setting up checkpoints, and entering businesses, interrogating residents as they are working, looking for work, or otherwise trying to go about their daily lives, and taking people away."
The plaintiffs ascribe this behavior to a quota of 3,000 immigration arrests per day set by presidential aide Stephen Miller. "It is practically impossible to arrest 3,000 people per day without breaking the law flagrantly," Mohammad Tajsar of the ACLU of Southern California, which represents the plaintiffs, told me.
The lawsuit cites reporting by my colleague Rachel Uranga that, although the administration describes the raids' targets as "the worst of the worst," most of those nabbed had never been charged with a crime or had no criminal convictions.
Of the five individual plaintiffs, three were arrested at a bus stop while waiting to be picked up for a job, one — a U.S. citizen — at an Orange County car wash and one at an auto yard where he says he was manhandled by agents even after explaining that he is a U.S. citizen.
The agents' refusal to identify themselves and give detainees the reason for their arrest violates legal regulations, the lawsuit states.
As the lawsuit describes the L.A. holding location, the basement of a federal building downtown, it's not designed for long-term detention. It lacks beds, showers and medical facilities. The detainees are held in rooms so overcrowded that they "cannot sit, let alone lie down, for hours at a time." Lawyers and families have often been prevented from seeing them the plaintiffs say.
A 2010 settlement of a previous lawsuit stipulated that detainees would not be held in the facility for more than 12 hours, and that they be permitted to meet with their lawyers for at least four hours a day seven days a week. Some detainees have been held there for days.
The settlement has since expired; the plaintiffs say "the unlawful conditions that led to the settlement more than a decade ago are recurring today."
Make no mistake: None of this is accidental or unavoidable. Trump's comments during his tour of the Everglades camp, and the actions of immigration agents in L.A. — many of which have been documented by onlookers' videos — make clear that sowing fear among people trying to go about their daily lives is high among the goals of what has become a theatrical anti-immigrant farce. It's no less tragic for that.
Get the latest from Michael Hiltzik
Commentary on economics and more from a Pulitzer Prize winner.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
‘It’s fascism’: Critics slam Trump after tour of ‘Alligator Alcatraz’
Ryan Mancini
Thu, July 3, 2025
President Donald Trump’s tour of a migrant detention center for undocumented migrants in the Florida Everglades on Tuesday, dubbed by the administration as “Alligator Alcatraz,” was slammed by critics as “fascism” and called the center a “concentration camp.”
Trump appeared with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis while touring the detention center, featuring chain-linked fence cells with bunk beds.
The detention center was built for “up to 3,000 people with room for additional capacity,” Executive Director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management Kevin Guthrie said Tuesday, according to CNN.
Funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Shelter and Services Program went towards the detention center’s construction, Noem said, according to FactCheck.org.
During his tour, Trump said that the center was intended for “bad people” to be deported, some of whom were born in the United States, he said.
“Many of them were born in our country,” Trump said during a press conference Tuesday. “I think we ought to get them the hell out of here, too, if you want to know the truth. So maybe that’ll be the next job that we’ll work on together.”
At one point during the tour, Trump said his predecessor wanted him in “Alligator Alcatraz.”
“[Former President Joe] Biden wanted me in here,” Trump said. “Didn’t work out that way but he wanted me in here, that son of a [expletive].”
Critics on air and online called out the detention center and Trump’s tour of it.
Human Rights Watch highlighted Trump’s tour and stated that the United States “is expanding a system already rife with inhumane conditions, neglect, and dehumanizing treatment.”
On the online show “Breaking Points,” investigative journalist and co-founder of Drop Site News Ryan Grim called the detention center a concentration camp and said, “it’s fascism.” On June 28 while on a family trip to Florida, Grim took video of a protest against the detention center.
Grim also noted that hurricane season has already begun and, if one were to hit Florida, could cause a “mass-casualty event” at the detention center.
More in Politics
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“Fascism, to bring a concentration camp to the Everglades, where the people are at immediate risk of getting killed if a hurricane comes through,” Grim said. “Say they never fill this camp? Let’s hope.”
In a letter to the editor published in the Los Angeles Times, Santa Monica resident Lorraine Knopf asked, “How did our country sink so low?”
“When I saw the picture of the metal bunks in tiers, my thought was ‘Alligator Auschwitz,’ not Alcatraz,” Knopf wrote. “I find this so horrific I cannot even find words for it. It is beyond disgusting.”
Michael Hiltzik
Thu, July 3, 2025
The Department of Homeland Security posted this AI-generated image on X to celebrate the construction of Florida's "Alligator Alcatraz" for the housing of immigration detainees. (Dept. of Homeland Security)More
Just as you may have thought that it was finally safe to think about American politics without thinking about Florida's Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, he has slinked his way into the national news again.
The occasion was a tour he hosted Tuesday for Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem of what has become known as "Alligator Alcatraz," a detention camp hastily erected in the Everglades to hold immigration detainees in tents and within chain-link cages.
(Environmental groups already have filed lawsuits about the camp's encroachment into the environmentally sensitive Everglades.)
Individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force, and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from.
Perdomo v. Noem
The day before the tour, DeSantis cackled over the conditions awaiting detainees in the camp located about 45 miles west of Miami amid swamps inhabited by pythons and alligators. “Good luck getting to civilization," he said. "So the security is amazing — natural and otherwise.”
Trump seconded that view during the tour: “We’re surrounded by miles of treacherous swampland and the only way out is, really, deportation,” he said.
DeSantis, whom Trump humiliated during their campaigns for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024 as "Ron DeSanctimonious," basked in his apparent return to Trump's favor.
One could hardly put matters better than Nicole Lafond of Talking Points Memo, who described how DeSantis and Trump came together over their "shared passion: finding creative new ways to dehumanize immigrants, carried out with a trollish flair."
As it happens, the tour took place the day before immigrant advocates and several people swept up in immigration raids described in a federal court filing the behavior of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents conducting the raids, as well as the atrocious conditions in which the detainees are held in an ICE facility in downtown Los Angeles.
That filing documents the continuum of immigration enforcement under the Trump administration nationwide.
In Florida, officials boast of the cruelty of holding detainees in a swamp before their immigration status is adjudicated — Noem stated that detainees would be offered forms to self-deport at the very entrance to the camp.
In California, "individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force, and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from," according to the filing. "If they hesitate, attempt to leave, or do not answer the questions to the satisfaction of the agents, they are detained, sometimes tackled, handcuffed, and/or taken into custody."
Then they're held in the "dungeon-like" L.A. facility, sometimes for days, and often "pressured into accepting voluntary departure."
A Homeland Security spokesperson called the assertions in the filing "disgusting and categorically false." The spokesperson told me by email, "Any claim that there are subprime conditions at ICE detention centers are false."
More on that in a moment. First, a quick review of how DeSantis, like other GOP politicians, has exploited immigration and other hot-button issues for political advantage.
On the national level, this began as a campaign against pandemic lockdowns and mask mandates — at one point while COVID was raging across his state, DeSantis publicly upbraided schoolchildren for wearing masks at a presentation, calling it "COVID theater." He progressed to questioning the safety of COVID vaccines and to trying to demonize Anthony Fauci, then the most respected public health official in the land.
The ultimate harvest was one of the worst rates of COVID deaths in the nation. DeSantis' defenders explained that this was because Florida has a high proportion of seniors, but couldn't explain why its rate was worse than other states with even higher proportions of elderly residents. He pursued attacks on LGBTQ+ people through an "anti-woke" campaign, though judges ruled against his efforts to legislate how teachers and professors did their jobs.
DeSantis tried to take his show on the road via a quest for the presidential nomination, but his culture warfare didn't obscure his maladroit skills on the stump. (I once described DeSantis as having "all the charisma of a linoleum floor," after which The Times received an indignant letter from a reader asserting that I owed linoleum an apology.)
But his policymaking has long ceased to be a laughing matter, especially when it comes to immigration.
In February, DeSantis signed a law making it a felony for an undocumented immigrant to enter the state of Florida. That law was blocked in April by federal Judge Kathleen M. Williams of Miami, who subsequently found state Atty. Gen. James Uthmeier in contempt for indicating to law enforcement officers that they didn't have to comply with her order.
The cruelty-for-cruelty's-sake nature of Trump's immigrant crackdown is vividly illustrated not only by his glee over the Everglades camp, but also the brutality of the ICE raids as depicted by the plaintiffs in the Los Angeles lawsuit.
The plaintiffs in the class action include five individuals (among them two U.S. citizens) who were detained in the raids, the United Farm Worker and three immigrant advocacy organizations.
Since early June, Southern California "has been under siege," the lawsuit asserts. "Masked federal agents, sometimes dressed in military-style clothing, have conducted indiscriminate immigration operations, flooding street corners, bus stops, parking lots, agricultural sites, day laborer corners, and other places, setting up checkpoints, and entering businesses, interrogating residents as they are working, looking for work, or otherwise trying to go about their daily lives, and taking people away."
The plaintiffs ascribe this behavior to a quota of 3,000 immigration arrests per day set by presidential aide Stephen Miller. "It is practically impossible to arrest 3,000 people per day without breaking the law flagrantly," Mohammad Tajsar of the ACLU of Southern California, which represents the plaintiffs, told me.
The lawsuit cites reporting by my colleague Rachel Uranga that, although the administration describes the raids' targets as "the worst of the worst," most of those nabbed had never been charged with a crime or had no criminal convictions.
Of the five individual plaintiffs, three were arrested at a bus stop while waiting to be picked up for a job, one — a U.S. citizen — at an Orange County car wash and one at an auto yard where he says he was manhandled by agents even after explaining that he is a U.S. citizen.
The agents' refusal to identify themselves and give detainees the reason for their arrest violates legal regulations, the lawsuit states.
As the lawsuit describes the L.A. holding location, the basement of a federal building downtown, it's not designed for long-term detention. It lacks beds, showers and medical facilities. The detainees are held in rooms so overcrowded that they "cannot sit, let alone lie down, for hours at a time." Lawyers and families have often been prevented from seeing them the plaintiffs say.
A 2010 settlement of a previous lawsuit stipulated that detainees would not be held in the facility for more than 12 hours, and that they be permitted to meet with their lawyers for at least four hours a day seven days a week. Some detainees have been held there for days.
The settlement has since expired; the plaintiffs say "the unlawful conditions that led to the settlement more than a decade ago are recurring today."
Make no mistake: None of this is accidental or unavoidable. Trump's comments during his tour of the Everglades camp, and the actions of immigration agents in L.A. — many of which have been documented by onlookers' videos — make clear that sowing fear among people trying to go about their daily lives is high among the goals of what has become a theatrical anti-immigrant farce. It's no less tragic for that.
Get the latest from Michael Hiltzik
Commentary on economics and more from a Pulitzer Prize winner.
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
‘It’s fascism’: Critics slam Trump after tour of ‘Alligator Alcatraz’
Ryan Mancini
Thu, July 3, 2025
President Donald Trump’s tour of a migrant detention center for undocumented migrants in the Florida Everglades on Tuesday, dubbed by the administration as “Alligator Alcatraz,” was slammed by critics as “fascism” and called the center a “concentration camp.”
Trump appeared with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis while touring the detention center, featuring chain-linked fence cells with bunk beds.
The detention center was built for “up to 3,000 people with room for additional capacity,” Executive Director of the Florida Division of Emergency Management Kevin Guthrie said Tuesday, according to CNN.
Funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Shelter and Services Program went towards the detention center’s construction, Noem said, according to FactCheck.org.
During his tour, Trump said that the center was intended for “bad people” to be deported, some of whom were born in the United States, he said.
“Many of them were born in our country,” Trump said during a press conference Tuesday. “I think we ought to get them the hell out of here, too, if you want to know the truth. So maybe that’ll be the next job that we’ll work on together.”
At one point during the tour, Trump said his predecessor wanted him in “Alligator Alcatraz.”
“[Former President Joe] Biden wanted me in here,” Trump said. “Didn’t work out that way but he wanted me in here, that son of a [expletive].”
Critics on air and online called out the detention center and Trump’s tour of it.
Human Rights Watch highlighted Trump’s tour and stated that the United States “is expanding a system already rife with inhumane conditions, neglect, and dehumanizing treatment.”
On the online show “Breaking Points,” investigative journalist and co-founder of Drop Site News Ryan Grim called the detention center a concentration camp and said, “it’s fascism.” On June 28 while on a family trip to Florida, Grim took video of a protest against the detention center.
Grim also noted that hurricane season has already begun and, if one were to hit Florida, could cause a “mass-casualty event” at the detention center.
More in Politics
Fact Check: Trump's children will not be affected by his birthright citizenship executive order
Snopes
“Fascism, to bring a concentration camp to the Everglades, where the people are at immediate risk of getting killed if a hurricane comes through,” Grim said. “Say they never fill this camp? Let’s hope.”
In a letter to the editor published in the Los Angeles Times, Santa Monica resident Lorraine Knopf asked, “How did our country sink so low?”
“When I saw the picture of the metal bunks in tiers, my thought was ‘Alligator Auschwitz,’ not Alcatraz,” Knopf wrote. “I find this so horrific I cannot even find words for it. It is beyond disgusting.”
Post by DHS ghouls celebrating Alligator Alcatraz with, "Coming soon!"
Photo by Department of Homeland Security (sic)
Abby Zimet
Jul 02, 2025
COMMON DREAMS
Plunging to new lows of "cartoonish cruelty" in our fascist reality show, MAGA just voted for our "most deeply immoral piece of legislation," depriving millions of food and health care as their fuehrer celebrated the launch of a scorched-swamp, mosquito-infested concentration camp - "Let's feed people to alligators!" - to detain millions more for overlooking the paperwork in their search for a better life. And there's merch! Fact: "Snakes in the Everglades got nothin' on the vermin in our government."
The Senate's barely-there approval - fuck Shady Vance - of Trump's heinous 900-page bill represents the largest transfer of wealth to the rich in U.S. history along with the largest cut to Medicaid and food assistance, all in the obscene name of (partly) funding a $975 billion tax break for the already richest 1%. The bill, "a tipping point between normality and fascism," also pours over $170.7 billion into "a campaign of extermination against immigrants that evokes the greatest human rights atrocities of the past," funding the hiring of vastly more Nazi thugs to terrorize, humiliate and put in cages millions of brown people who do much of this country's work.
It will kick about 16 million people off health insurance by cutting over $1 trillion from Medicaid, because who needs health insurance. It will throw millions of poor families, veterans, the elderly and disabled off SNAP by cutting $285 billion in food assistance, because who needs food. It will cut funding to rural hospitals, nursing homes, student loans, wind and solar energy - electric bills will soar 30% - costing millions of jobs and adding almost $4 trillion to the national debt, to be paid by our children and grandchildren, one of many excellent reasons it's said to be the most unpopular legislation since passage of the economically disastrous Embargo Act of 1807.
Bernie Sanders calls it, "The most dangerous piece of legislation in the modern history of our country.” Decrying the GOP's "obsession" with stripping people of health care, Maine Sen. Angus King calls it "disgusting..I have never seen a bill this irresponsible, regressive and downright cruel." To longtime Sen. Chris Murphy, it's "the most deeply immoral piece of legislation I have ever voted on in my entire time in Congress." Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse said passage of a bill "cooked up in back rooms, cloaked in fake numbers (that) loots our country (for) the least deserving people you could imagine feels (like) a crime scene...When I first got here, this chamber filled me with awe and wonderment. Today, I feel disgust.”
The bill is so bad the GOP delayed cuts to Medicaid until after the mid-terms, and had to bribe its own members with perks to pass it; Alaska's Lisa Murkowski won the I Got Mine, Jack award by getting exemptions for her state and then complaining about how bad the bill is. To many, even worse than its craven kowtowing to oligarchs is its grotesque billions bestowed on a brutal, unprecedented white nationalist drive to dehumanize, criminalize and rip apart millions of families deemed undesirable by the color of their skin - and, eventually, likely their political persuasions - by making ICE, America's SS, the highest-funded law enforcement agency in a now-barbaric federal government.
The bill boosts the ranks of roaming Nazi henchmen by nearly 50%, with $8 billion slated to hire 10,000 more over five years (with signing bonuses!). ICE detention will get $45 billion more, a staggering 365% increase; "removal" gets $14.4 billion, a 500% surge; enforcement (see henchmen) almost $30 billion, up threefold, but we definitely can't afford to feed hungry kids. Billions more will build new camps, ramp up flights, double beds to 100,000, and round up more (hungry) terrified kids to meet a goal of 3,000 arrests a day. Of those, despite the absurd, enduring claim of targeting "the worst" violent criminals, maybe 8% have committed crimes; even ICE data shows over 93% are guiltless of anything but crossing the border.
The rabid stalking of migrants has given Republicans "license to be as openly racist as possible." Moving on from pet-eating Haitians, Scott Bessent sneered New York is turning into "Caracas on the Hudson"; on an image of its new mayor Zohran Mamdani eating with his hands, Texas' Brandon Gill, who's evidently never met a burger, sniped, "Civilized people in America don't eat like this - go back to the Third World"; and Trump already threatened to arrest "communist" Mamdani, blathering, "A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally." (Not.) Witless Tommy Tuberville called the residents of sanctuary cities "inner-city rats" we should "send back home"; Paul Krugman, home-grown but Jewish with a bi-racial wife: "We’re all rats now."
Thus do we have once-vibrant Hispanic communities from New York to L.A. now largely shut down, with frightened residents carrying passports to the corner store, keeping their kids inside until dark, or not venturing out at all for fear of abduction by masked gangs. Farmworkers across the country, up to 80% foreign-born and perhaps half undocumented, are also staying home: "If they show up to work, they don’t know if they will ever see their family again." In California, which grows much of our fruit and vegetables, those crops can go bad in one day as farmers struggle to harvest what they've grown. Experts say that many, already barely breaking even, will likely fold.
Meanwhile, ICE's daily atrocities - and the ensuing trauma - go on apace. A 75-year-old Cuban man here for 60 years died in custody, the 13th death this year; Tom Homan shrugged: "People die in ICE custody." Jacked-up stormtroopers assaulted workers at Home Depot and a woman selling tacos, tossing tear gas as they peeled away. They arrested the wrong mother of two as her kids tried to stop them. In Texas, they detained a preschool teacher with her three-year-old outside a courtroom. In L.A., they took a Honduran mother at a hearing with two children, one a six-year-old with leukemia; they've been held in Texas for weeks, the sick boy getting sicker, and she's filed the first lawsuit challenging the carnage.
And so, because it's still not enough cruelty for these ghouls, to Alligator Auschwitz, a steamy, "sadistic one-stop deportation shop" of tents filled with cages of bunk beds soon thronged with humans in a predator-replete swamp, a "concentration camp without the culpability of execution chambers" pitilessly "designed to enact suffering,” and help sick racists feel good about their whiteness. Set on a disused "shit-hole airstrip" in Florida's vast Everglades, the "bloodcurdlingly-monikered," built-in-8-days "Alligator Alcatraz” is surrounded by swampland brimming with alligators and Burmese pythons in a flood-prone, bug-plagued area where summer temps routinely top 100 degrees, rendering it "a calculatedly provocative celebration of the dystopian."
Tents in an environmentally treasured nature preserve often hit by floods, tropical storms and hurricanes at a time the regime has decimated the agency that warns about those events, operated by a likewise-decimated FEMA and commanded by haphazardly- deputized, wildly ill-qualified members of the National Guard serving as "deportation judges" - what could possibly go wrong? Set to cost almost half a billion dollars a year - but no, we really can't afford to feed hungry children - the barbed-wire re-invention of World War ll Japanese Internment Camps, with a fresh touch of El Salvador's CECOT, evidently fulfills Republicans' most fervent wet dream: To feed immigrants to animals.
On Tuesday, touring this "beyond horrifying" showcase of ruthlessness - initial intake 1,000, ultimately 5,000 - the cartoon villains who created it proudly paraded in: Nazi Barbie, Stephen Goebbels, Ron DeFascist and Trump with a botched make-up line that made him look like The Joker. He delightedly handed the floor to "our superstar," the sociopathic Miller, who praised the use of "novel legal and diplomatic tools," along with building death camps and letting ICE goons rampage through terrorized communities, to "deliver on a 50-year hope and dream of the American people to secure the border," at least on the repulsive planet he inhabits, and we wish he'd go back to.
On her foul planet, replicating her photo-op before CECOT's shaved-head detainees in her illegal $50,000 Rolex, ICE Barbie is still somehow celebrating her imaginary "going after murderers and rapists and traffickers." Tuesday she even added an alleged cannibal they'd put on a plane home who "started to eat himself," arguing he was "the kind of deranged individuals on our streets (that) we're trying to get out of our country because they are so deranged, they don't belong here." Hmm. Ever hard-core, she's also busy menacing one patriot for a nifty ICE Block app: "This sure looks like obstruction of justice - if you obstruct our brave law enforcement, we will hunt you down."
Just before her visit, her "reptile-run Gestapo" shared an AI-generated Alligator Alcatraz image featuring smirking alligators in ICE caps; Noem giddily posted, "Coming soon!" Americans recoiled. "Have you ever wondered what it would have looked like if Hitler's SS had social media?" asked one. Many suggested putting the people who built the atrocity in it; others decried MAGA's dehumanized trolling about concentration camps: "History is repeating - just with better branding." One: "Posting memes that boast about the manner in which people will die if they try to escape the undoubtedly inhumane conditions that will become the norm in a facility (gives) major "Alligator Auschwitz" vibes."
The visit came exactly a year after SCOTUS declared Trump above the law. Standing before cages in a dumb Gulf of America cap, the eternal victim sneered "Biden wanted me in here, that son of a bitch," but "it didn't work out that way." He called Noem "elegant" and "an unbelievable horse person" (umm) before happily noting "they have a lot of cops in the form of alligators" to "keep people where they’re supposed to be." He praised his grotesque cohorts - “It’s really government working together, I'm proud of them" - made zigzag moves with his pudgy hands - "We’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator" - and opined, "A little controversial, but I couldn’t care less.”
A dead-eyed, servile DeSantis outlined the task - "intake, process, then deport" - and hailed the camp about to hold human beings who did nothing wrong: "This is as secure as it gets." He added, “This is a model, but we need other states to step up." Meanwhile, his state's party of zombies is so into it they're selling depraved merch - t-shirts, drink cozies - for "Florida’s gator-guarded prison for illegal aliens...It's a one-way ticket to regret." One appalled observer: "That's some Idi Amin stuff right there." Much like Trump on Fox, extolling his latest grotesquerie and airily explaining on potential migrant escapes, "They'll just get eaten by wildlife. I guess that's the concept."
There's more. Amidst performative acts of political intimidation, he's mused, "We also have a lot of bad people that have been here for a long time...many born in our country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here too" - maybe including Musk: "We'll have to take a look." He's selling $249 perfume, "a rallying cry in a bottle...They're all about winning, strength and success." He's musing about nationwide alligator-themed camps: "They might morph into a system where you're going to keep it for a long time,” citing facilities to "handle (some) of the most vicious people on the planet." Observers: "Consider the Alligator Alcatraz gear on sale (before) deciding who are the most vicious people on the planet."
And he's losing what's left of his putrid mind. Asked about a timeline for detainees, he raved: "In Florida? I'm going to spend a lot. This is my home state. I love it." He "fixed up the little Oval Office, I make it - it's like a diamond," he has "a nice little cottage to stay at," he pays lots of fictional taxes, everyone in New York is leaving. "I'll be here as much as I can," he ended. "Very nice question." Lawrence O'Donnell on "the banality of their cruelty," the "utter emptiness of his mind," notably on the virtually ignored day USAID ends, with its expected millions of deaths, its "worldwide campaign of cruelty in their name." Others: "But her emails. I didn't like her laugh. Biden was too old." Now here we are: "A more loathsome fuck never walked the earth."
And on Wednesday, Alligator Alcatraz already began flooding.
'Dangerous and outrageous': Veterans erupt at Trump after he sends 200 Marines to Florida
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks next to U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, during a press conference at a NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands June 25, 2025. REUTERS/Yves Herman
On Thursday, U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) — which oversees U.S. military operations in North America – announced that it would be deploying approximately 200 U.S. Marines to Florida and other states to assist with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations. Multiple military veterans are now sounding the alarm.
According to USNORTHCOM's official statement, the Marines will be sent from the Marine Wing Support Squadron 272, Marine Corps Air Station in New River, North Carolina. In addition to Florida, USNORTHCOM indicated that Marines would also be headed to Louisiana and Texas. The Marines are reportedly only going to "perform strictly non-law enforcement duties within ICE facilities." The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 explicitly prohibits the U.S. military from being used for civilian law enforcement activity.
"Their roles will focus on administrative and logistical tasks, and they are specifically prohibited from direct contact with individuals in ICE custody or involvement in any aspect of the custody chain," the statement read.
The news of Marines assisting immigration officials within U.S. borders provoked condemnation from several prominent military veterans on social media. Former Ukrainian Armed Forces veteran John Jackson said the use of the military within U.S. borders suggested that President Donald Trump's administration was "trending in such a bad direction." Army combat veteran and podcaster Fred Wellman called the deployment "incredibly dangerous and outrageous."
"Combat Marines do not belong anywhere in the United States supporting ICE," Wellman wrote on X. "This is not their mission."
Army National Guard veteran Chris Purdy of the Chamberlain Network — an advocacy group led by military veterans — also condemned the use of military personnel to assist with immigration-related operations on American soil. Purdy insisted that in a democracy, the military "defends the nation" and "doesn't police its people."
"The [National] Guard is especially vulnerable here, because the Guard is different, because they live in communities they're being asked to patrol now," he said. "They're going to see the same families at the grocery store, at the kids' soccer game and church. Members of the Guard, they have library cards. And when they're patrolling their own communities for political partisan purposes, that crosses a line that we should never ask them to do."
AlterNet reached out to USNORTHCOM by phone for comment.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks next to U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, during a press conference at a NATO summit in The Hague, Netherlands June 25, 2025. REUTERS/Yves Herman
July 03, 2025
ALTERNET
On Thursday, U.S. Northern Command (USNORTHCOM) — which oversees U.S. military operations in North America – announced that it would be deploying approximately 200 U.S. Marines to Florida and other states to assist with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations. Multiple military veterans are now sounding the alarm.
According to USNORTHCOM's official statement, the Marines will be sent from the Marine Wing Support Squadron 272, Marine Corps Air Station in New River, North Carolina. In addition to Florida, USNORTHCOM indicated that Marines would also be headed to Louisiana and Texas. The Marines are reportedly only going to "perform strictly non-law enforcement duties within ICE facilities." The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 explicitly prohibits the U.S. military from being used for civilian law enforcement activity.
"Their roles will focus on administrative and logistical tasks, and they are specifically prohibited from direct contact with individuals in ICE custody or involvement in any aspect of the custody chain," the statement read.
The news of Marines assisting immigration officials within U.S. borders provoked condemnation from several prominent military veterans on social media. Former Ukrainian Armed Forces veteran John Jackson said the use of the military within U.S. borders suggested that President Donald Trump's administration was "trending in such a bad direction." Army combat veteran and podcaster Fred Wellman called the deployment "incredibly dangerous and outrageous."
"Combat Marines do not belong anywhere in the United States supporting ICE," Wellman wrote on X. "This is not their mission."
Army National Guard veteran Chris Purdy of the Chamberlain Network — an advocacy group led by military veterans — also condemned the use of military personnel to assist with immigration-related operations on American soil. Purdy insisted that in a democracy, the military "defends the nation" and "doesn't police its people."
"The [National] Guard is especially vulnerable here, because the Guard is different, because they live in communities they're being asked to patrol now," he said. "They're going to see the same families at the grocery store, at the kids' soccer game and church. Members of the Guard, they have library cards. And when they're patrolling their own communities for political partisan purposes, that crosses a line that we should never ask them to do."
AlterNet reached out to USNORTHCOM by phone for comment.
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