Jonathan P. Baird

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.