Jonathan P. Baird

In the just-passed Trump budget bill, Congress allocated $45 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention. That represents a massive increase in detention spending. ICE is getting 13 years of current funding which has to be spent within 4 years. With this money, ICE becomes the largest domestic police force in the U.S..

This windfall gives the agency the money to tremendously expand jailing capacity. They plan to double detention beds and carceral space while hiring 10,000 new agents.

A police state requires material underpinnings and the money is now there for its establishment. The Trump regime is creating a new prison-industrial complex where many thousands will be detained in a national network of concentration camps. They will need to fill the beds and private prison companies have a financial incentive in making that happen.

No legislative or judicial body has put a stop or even a slow down to this emerging behemoth. The failure of checks and balances exemplified by both Congress and the Supreme Court’s acquiescence with Executive Branch overreach has allowed us to reach this point. The Trump regime has been wrongly using private data gathered from federal agencies like the IRS to confirm migrants’ home addresses.

The lines between federal, state and local law enforcement are getting blurred by the Trump regime as all are being recruited to carry out immigration enforcement. Law enforcement professionalism is being replaced by a fascist mentality steeped in xenophobia, sadism and hate. It is common to see ICE agents telling people they stop that they have no rights while demanding access to their devices.

ICE is also increasing its surveillance capacity. The Washington Post has reported that ICE is sharply increasing the number of immigrants they are shackling with GPS-enabled ankle monitors. The goal is to bypass due process, arrest huge numbers and fast track a high quota of immigrants out of the country.

The Department of Defense just awarded a Virginia-based company Acquisition Logistics, a $1.26 billion contract to establish and operate a 5,000 bed short-term detention facility near the Mexican border at Fort Bliss, an Army base in Texas. It would be the largest such facility in the country.

Because they lack the capacity for the detention space they desire, the Trump regime is looking for detention space outside the world of already-existing prisons and jails. They are following the Project 2025 recommendation for the use of “low level temporary capacity (for example, tents) once permanent space is full”.

Alligator Alcatraz is the tent model in practice. Instead of jail structures with walls, floors and insulation, tents will cover chain-link cages crammed full with bunk beds and surrounded by barbed wire.

Fort Bliss is not the only military base where the Trump regime intends to place immigrants. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has told Congress that the Department of Homeland Security plans to use military bases in New Jersey and Indiana for immigration detentions on a “temporary” basis. Trump himself has suggested that 30,000 immigrants could be detained at Guantanamo.

Considering the cruelty of the Trump regime, inhumane conditions for detainees are a reasonable expectation and Human Rights Watch has already released a report showing physical abuse, medical neglect and unsafe living conditions at three Florida detention facilities.

Human Rights Watch found officers at these facilities were often abusive to those being held. In one instance, after a group of detainees waited hours to receive food, officers forced the men to eat while their hands were bound. One man wrote in the report:

“We had to bend over and eat off the chairs with our mouths, like dogs.”

One guard who worked at Alligator Alcatraz and quit after two weeks said:

“The mosquitoes are filling the bathrooms, the showers. You go in the shower, you shower with a million mosquitoes, They give you bug spray but that still doesn’t help.”

The tents at Alligator Alcatraz are flood-prone and sewage back-ups have resulted in cages flooded with feces. Detainees have reported worms in their food. Authorities have been denying media access and have illegally limited Congress people from inspecting. They have not been allowing lawyers to meet with clients. This is a retreat from any constitutional standard.

The idea that these facilities are being set up to protect national security against an invasion is absurd. There is no invasion as the Southern border has been effectively sealed. Trump’s campaign against immigrants is targeted on folks in the interior U.S. and it is based on the Big Lie that immigrants are more likely to be murderers, rapists or violent perpetrators of crime.

U.S. born citizens are far more likely to commit violent crimes than immigrants. Last year, U.S. Border Patrol arrested 17,000 criminal aliens. 29 were for homicide or manslaughter. 221 were for sex crimes. The overwhelming majority were for unlawful entry into the country. They became “criminals” for violation of civil immigration law.

The massive infrastructure being created is for people who have often lived in the U.S. for decades who have committed no crime. They are being scapegoated. They pose no threat to the American public. Many perform essential jobs in agriculture, construction and home care that others won’t do.They also include such evildoers as graduate students and activists who have dared to exercise First Amendment rights.

The whole enterprise of masked agents in unmarked vehicles using ruses and ploys to gain entry into homes to disappear immigrants and perceived opponents violates the First, Fourth, Fifth, Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the federal Constitution. Nothing could be more un-American than creating a police state.

Fortunately, such a state is not consolidated. Americans still have some civil liberties as well as some courts that don’t roll over. Resistance remains absolutely necessary however we can all do it. We did not defeat fascism in World War 2 to passively stand by and watch our rights evaporate less than 100 years later.

When the catastrophic flooding happened in Texas along the Guadalupe River, President Trump responded that “nobody ever saw a thing like this coming” and that “this is a once-in-every 200 year deal”. Not to be outdone, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem described the Texas floods as a “1000-year event”.

What is striking about these responses is their lack of comprehension of climate science and climate change. Extreme floods and sea level rise have become almost routine. It makes you wonder if we have all been inhabiting the same planet. It is not like climate science is something new. In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen persuasively presented the risks of climate change in testimony to the U.S. Senate. Since that time, an overwhelming international scientific consensus has supported and reinforced Hansen’s perspective

Global warming has made events like the Texas flood much more common and more extreme. I was struck by the similarities between the Texas flood and Hurricane Helene which devastated North Carolina last year. I also think of the 2023 floods in Vermont. However, instead of seeing the Texas disaster in the context of many other similar events, the Trump regime remains in climate denial.

Trump has called climate change “a hoax”. With his mantra of “drill baby drill”, his administration is actually committed to worsening global warming as quickly as possible. He has increased subsidies for fossil fuels. It is like they are trying to remove climate change out of existence by scrubbing out the words off government websites. Their motto could be: “backwards at warp speed”. It is like a death wish.

The Trump regime accepted no responsibility for the Texas flooding. They did not see the mass layoffs at Federal Emergency Management Agency, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration or the National Weather Service as having anything to do with their lack of preparedness and the government’s inadequate and late response. At least 135 people died from the flood and 3 remain missing.

Since the Texas flood, there has been an assessment of blame going on. On July 3, the National Weather Service issued its first alert predicting rainfall totals of six inches in twelve hours. That initial forecast proved to be an underestimate. The National Weather Service office in nearby San Antonio was missing both a chief meteorologist and a warning coordination meteorologist.

The National Weather Service issued two more warnings early on July 4 but the warnings failed to get through to the residents who lived near the water. The water rose more than 25 feet in 2 hours. There was a lack of coordination between the National Weather Service and the locals. Kerr County Texas locals had tried to get FEMA funding for a flood warning system for years but the State of Texas had turned down the request.

In 2019, the owners of the girl’s camp, Camp Mystic, that suffered so many casualties, had performed a multi-million dollar renovation. For reasons that are unclear, the camp did not move its most vulnerable cabins out of the flood zone. They built more cabins inside it.

Immediately after the flood, FEMA’s response was poor. Homeland Security Secretary Noem didn’t authorize FEMA’s deployment of Urban Search and Rescue Teams until Monday July 7 more than three days after the flooding began. Normally FEMA would have been at the site of the flooding much sooner.

Also, almost inexplicably, Noem fired hundreds of contract workers at FEMA emergency centers on July 5, a day after the flooding started. On July 6 and 7, FEMA did not answer nearly two-thirds of calls to its disaster assistance line. Noem also had recently enacted a new cost-cutting scheme where she had to sign off personally on any expense over $100,000. Noem’s red tape delayed FEMA response time.

While politicians like Texas Governor Greg Abbott attempt to squirm out of responsibility by saying only losers try and understand to assess blame, if we, as a society, want to prevent more such events, understanding matters.

What is crazy is that the Trump regime is actively moving to disband federal agencies that help Americans cope with our ever-more frequent climate catastrophes. Trump has called for the elimination of FEMA “as it exists today” although he has gone back and forth on that. He cancelled a $4.5 billion program that helps protect hard-hit communities from flooding.

He plans to increase the amount of damage a storm has to do before the federal government will declare a disaster. This will make it harder for states to be eligible for federal assistance. This is consistent with his plan to send disaster relief back to states that lack the resources to do recovery.

The Trump regime’s response to climate is rooted in a hatred of science. The climate scientist, Andrew Dessler, has written:

“They hate science because it leads to regulation, so they want to do everything they can to stop science from being used to regulate.”

I think they also hate science because it is the ultimate woke discipline. Science is a repository of secular truths which conflicts with the conspiracy theories and religious beliefs that motivate so many MAGA followers.

Not only does the Trump regime want to dismantle federal agencies that respond to disasters, they want to purge our collective ability to understand climate and weather prediction.

They have fired hundreds of scientists who were working on the next version of the National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated report used to prepare endangered U.S.communities for extreme weather and sea-level rise. They also have taken apart the U.S. Global Change Research Program, a 35 year-old effort to track global climate change that was established by Congress.

The Trump plan will cause forecasting havoc and it will lead to needless death. They are looking to close the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorological Laboratory, the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, the National Severe Storm Laboratory and the High-Impact Weather Research and Operation. Without question, reducing accurate and timely weather warnings endangers the public.

Humans are heating up the planet, melting the vast ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica. We can expect many more Texas-style disasters which I guess we are supposed to meet with an Alfred E. Neuman “what me worry” response. Disaster relief has become a passe concept.

It would be easy to think that the second Trump presidency is unlike any other period in American history but that is not the case. The second Trump presidency resembles the historical period after Reconstruction. In both periods the reality of racism was denied. White supremacists sought to regain political power after periods where people of color had made economic and political gains.

Our current period might be called the New Redemption. The original Redemption was the post-Reconstruction effort by the former slaveholders and their allies to oust the Radical Republicans and to restore white supremacy. Throughout the South, the Redeemers saw the Republicans of that era (who were the anti-racists then) as corrupt.

The Redeemers focused on cutting government spending. They eviscerated voter registration laws to strip Blacks of their ability to vote. They reduced support for public education which had been newly created under Reconstruction governments. Before Reconstruction, there was no interracial public education.

The Redeemers relied on the Supreme Court just as MAGA forces do now. In both cases, the Supreme Court indulged the denial of racism and support for the structural inequality which was racism’s trademark.

The 1896 case of Plessy v Ferguson is well-known for its disgraceful “separate but equal” ruling but it was only one decision among a flurry of cases cementing the dominance of white supremacy. There are quite a few that deserve mention.

In 1883, the Supreme Court nullified the Civil Rights Act of 1875 which had outlawed discrimination against Black people using public accommodations like hotels, theaters and railroads. When 10 of 11 Southern states passed new disenfranchising state constitutions, the Supreme Court went along. In the 1898 case of Williams v Mississippi and the 1903 Alabama case of Giles v Harris, the Supreme Court gave its blessing to poll taxes, literacy tests and residency requirements which almost entirely removed Blacks and poor whites from the voting rolls.

Although Reconstruction had led to significant Black representation in southern state legislatures and in Congress, the Redeemers drastically changed the whole political landscape. Congress became completely white in 1901 and stayed that way until 1929.

The Southern oligarchy of the post-Reconstruction era used its economic power to organize the Klan and other terrorists to create slavery by another name. Former slaves were made into serfs. Lynchings stoked fear. The Southern ruling class brought back racist ideology cloaked in a scientific guise. They argued for the natural superiority of some races over others using Darwinian ideas of natural selection and survival of the fittest.

There was a religious dimension to the 19th century Redeemers. They called the time “Redemption” because they saw the restoration of white supremacy and the imposition of racial segregation as correcting the sins of Reconstruction. Their Christianity was white supremacist.

In our era, backsliding on racism has been going on since the decline of the modern civil rights movement of the 1960’s-1970’s. Before the second Trump presidency there were notable reversals like the Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby County v Holder which weakened the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Court’s 2023 decision ending affirmative action in college admissions but Trump 2.0 has taken things to a new level of backwardness.

The war against DEI is a rebranding and a cover for the promotion of racism. In Trump world, diversity equals incompetence because only white men pass his meritocratic test. Any effort to rectify our history of racism is considered discrimination against white people. Trump’s many Executive Orders are all in that vein whether it is about repealing birthright citizenship, stopping the Department of Justice investigations into police misconduct against African Americans or pardoning vicious white supremacists who were part of his January 6 shock troops.

The Supreme Court has provided an ideological justification with its repeated arguments defending colorblindness, These arguments could have been made by 19th century Redeemers. Also both eras have their fervent evangelical backers who see promotion of white supremacy as a religious duty. One difference between the two Redemptions is that MAGA doesn’t rely on lynchings and the Klan but they don’t need to. They control all three branches of government.

Racism has been an essential part of American capitalism from the first seizure of Native American land and the enslavement of African Americans in the early 1600’s. The labor of slaves was an important source of the accumulated capital which fueled the takeoff of the U.S. economy in the first half of the 19th century. Taking land from Native Americans and Mexicans provided the territory for dynamic economic expansion.

Belief in the superiority of the white race developed, in large part, as a justification for these acts. They were done in the name of white America’s mission to civilize and control allegedly inferior people.

Where racism is concerned, the Trump regime is like a long-time alcoholic with a relapsing alcohol problem. They say they don’t have a problem but the evidence shows they are not stopping. Whatever they say, they keep drinking. Anti-racists of all races, religions and nationalities have a responsibility to raise awareness and oppose racism as forcefully as possible.

When Alligator Alcatraz opened this last week in the Florida Everglades, it provided a window into the future. MAGA wants to build many more of these concentration camps across America. Of course, this is not your typical concentration camp. It is a place where 3,000 people could be locked up indefinitely with no due process in an isolated swampland populated by alligators and pythons.

Donald Trump has long wanted to use alligators and snakes to keep immigrants from crossing the Southern border. In his first term, his former aide Miles Taylor said that Trump called Kirstjen Nielsen, his prior Homeland Security Secretary, to inquire into the possibility of stocking a 2000 mile moat along the Southern border with alligators and snakes. He was told it would be illegal.

There was delight in the MAGA world at the creation of Alligator Alcatraz. Trump, Ron DeSantis and Kristi Noem flew in to celebrate the opening. Trump said he wanted to see such camps in many states. FOX commentators joked about prisoners getting eaten by alligators. They said those being held would beg to be sent to El Salvador. They thought the location would be a fine place to deport home-grown American prisoners too.

The Republican Party of Florida was selling Alligator Alcatraz merchandise You could get tee-shirts, hats and beer koozies. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) wanted South Carolina to have its own Alligator Alcatraz. She posted:

“Dear DHS: We’ve got a swamp and a dream. Let’s talk. South Carolina’s gators are ready. And they’re not big on paperwork. If I was Governor, we’d be bringing Alligator Alcatraz to South Carolina.”

To say this is sick doesn’t express the degree of dehumanization in which MAGA world is indulging. They treat it as an amusement or entertainment but even the Nazis didn’t glorify their concentration camps. They tried to hide them. There is a loss of any sense of humanity celebrating a spectacle of cruelty and sadism.

If we step back, it is apparent that the mass deportations being carried out as well as those looming are being conducted entirely outside of the law. There is an extensive body of immigration law, particularly asylum law, being shelved in favor of speedy deportations with no due process.

People are not getting their day in court or any legal process. ICE picks up people and they disappear. No distinction is being made between those with meritorious asylum claims and these who don’t have such claims. Whether someone has deep roots in the U.S. and has lived here for decades is being ignored. Nor does it matter if any alleged crime committed was a 20 year ago minor traffic offense. Immigrants are being grossly stereotyped as “criminal aliens”.

Dehumanization makes this possible. Trump has called immigrants “vermin” who “poison the blood of the nation”. When people are considered sub-human, crimes will be more likely to be committed against them. Hate becomes super-charged.

MAGA is following the authoritarian playbook. In the American case, brown-skinned immigrants are playing the role of the Jews. First you call them demeaning names. Then you treat them as less than human so you can do awful things to them. You don’t consider the circumstances that led them to seek refuge in the U.S..

One way that Alligator Alcatraz is an improper name is that the federal prisoners who were held on Alcatraz Island went through a court process and received due process. Now MAGA just categorizes those being deported as “the worst of the worst” even though it is more likely they committed no crime but were picked up in an ICE raid at a Home Depot or some other workplace. The public is supposed to trust the credibility of masked unidentified agents who disappear people like a Latin American death squad.

With the budget bill that just passed, Congress made ICE the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in history with almost $75 billion provided for ICE detention and removal. This profligate spending feeds a prison-industrial complex that profits off of more bodies. Expect to see masses swept up by ICE gestapo. It is highly likely ICE will be mistakenly deporting many U.S. citizens who get wrongly caught up in their dragnet without needed identification.

One weird aspect of Alligator Alcatraz is that FEMA funds were used in its creation. It has been built at the start of hurricane season and officials say the tent city could withstand a category 2 hurricane. However, Florida has been more frequently seeing far bigger superstorms than that due to climate change. What will happen to prisoners if there is a category 3, 4 or 5 hurricane?

Not surprisingly, the Trump regime failed to follow environmental regulations in their haste to construct the camp. They did no environmental impact analysis, including sewage and water, and they didn’t give the public a chance to weigh in. Both environmental groups and Native American tribes oppose Alligator Alcatraz and have filed suit against it.

The camp is located in the Big Cypress National Preserve. Environmentalists in Florida have spent decades trying to protect the ecology there. The Seminole Tribe has ancestral ties to the land at issue. For cultural insensitivity and environmental cluelessness, the Trump regime is top dog.

The use of alligators against people of color is not a new thing. During slavery and in the Jim Crow era, African American babies were used as alligator bait. There is a historical resonance to what MAGA does now. It carries on racist tradition.

Alligator Alcatraz reminds me of an Allen Ginsberg poem, Birdbrain. The poem begins “Birdbrain runs the world…” It could have been written today.