Alligator Alcatraz and the American Descent Into State-Sanctioned Internment
Alligator Alcatraz: An American Internment Camp in the Swamps
Deep in the Florida Everglades, hundreds of men sweat in cage-like tents, swatting mosquitoes and praying for relief. They call their prison “Alligator Alcatraz” – a nickname both darkly comic and brutally apt. Inmates report worm-infested food, overflowing toilets, and stifling heat as routine conditions. During a rare tour by officials, one desperate voice shouted, “I’m an American citizen!” while others chanted “Libertad!” (Freedom) from behind the barbed wire. This newly opened detention camp has been denounced as an “internment camp” by those who’ve seen it, and its very existence has cast an urgent, moral shadow over American soil.
Lessons from History: What Makes a Camp an Internment Camp?
The phrase “concentration camp” immediately conjures images of Nazi Germany, but experts warn that we must not dismiss present-day sites just because they aren’t Auschwitz. “Things can be concentration camps without being Dachau or Auschwitz,” explains Holocaust historian Waitman Wade Beorn, noting such camps are simply designed “to separate one group of people from another… [deemed] dangerous or undesirable”. In fact, the core definition is “mass detention of civilians without trial,” as scholar Andrea Pitzer describes it. Not every concentration camp is a death camp – at least not at first. Early on, the suffering often comes from neglect, overcrowding, and cruelty rather than mass execution.
History provides a chilling point of reference. Dachau, opened in 1933, weeks after Hitler took power, was Nazi Germany’s first concentration camp. Initially touted as a facility for “political prisoners” and other “enemies of the state” under emergency decrees, Dachau became the blueprint for a sprawling camp system built on dehumanization. In its first year, it held mainly German dissidents – communists, socialists, trade unionists – but soon expanded to persecute Jews, Roma, LGBTQ people, and others labeled undesirable. Prisoners lived in terror of brutal guards and arbitrary punishment; as early as 1935, a grim jingle captured Germans’ fear: “Dear Lord God, make me silent, that I may not to Dachau come”. Dachau endured until 1945, by which time over 200,000 people had been imprisoned there and at least 40,000 killed through labor, disease, and execution. Its commandant explicitly designed it as a “model” camp for the Third Reich – a model built on the premise that certain groups could be stripped of rights and warehoused indefinitely.
This historical memory sharpens the alarm over “Alligator Alcatraz.” When Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz toured the Everglades camp in 2025, she invoked America’s own shameful precedent – the WWII internment of Japanese Americans – saying “this inhumane camp mirrors” that dark episode. Her warning: the United States once built camps for civilian minorities without due process, and it is happening again.
The Swamp Camp: Inside “Alligator Alcatraz”
“Alligator Alcatraz” is the unofficial name given to a new mass detention center deep in Florida’s Everglades. The site – an isolated former airstrip at the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport – was seized by state officials under emergency powers on June 24, 2025. In a matter of days, Florida’s government erected a sprawling compound of tents, trailers, and chain-link cages, encircled by 28,000 feet of razor wire and patrolled by 400 security personnel. The first detainees arrived on July 3, 2025, just after the camp’s proud inspection by former President Donald Trump. The official purpose of the facility is to drastically expand detention capacity for undocumented immigrants – it can hold about 3,000 people now, with plans to grow to 5,000 imminently. Governor Ron DeSantis and his allies openly tout the remote swamp location and menacing moniker as part of the design: the name nods to the notorious Alcatraz prison, underscoring a message of deterrence through harshness.
Officials tour the interior of the newly constructed “Alligator Alcatraz” detention compound in the Florida Everglades (July 2025). Tents and makeshift barracks like these now confine hundreds of men in sweltering heat.
On paper, Florida authorities promised that detainees in the Everglades camp would have proper care, medical access, air conditioning, recreation, attorneys, and clergy were all assured. In reality, conditions have been nothing short of appalling. Inmates and their families report systemic abuse and neglect: “awful” conditions with maggot-ridden food, overflowing latrines, swarms of insects, and intermittent power cuts to fans or A/C in the South Florida summer. One wife told the Associated Press her husband hadn’t been allowed to shower for days on end. During the lawmakers’ tour, visitors measured indoor temperatures of 85°F with humidity to match, as grasshoppers and flies buzzed around the crowded bunk cages. “These detainees are living in cages,” Congresswoman Wasserman Schultz said – 32 men crammed “wall-to-wall” in each pen, with only three combined toilet-sink units for all of them. “They get their drinking water, and they brush their teeth, where they poop, in the same unit,” she recounted, outraged at the lack of basic sanitation. Privacy is nonexistent: an open shower area is shared by 900 men with only low divider walls between stalls.
Food and water, fundamental to human dignity, have become tools of degradation in “Alligator Alcatraz.” Detainees subsist on meager rations – one described receiving “small, gray” turkey-and-cheese sandwiches with an apple and chips, twice a day. By contrast, staff and guards dine on hot roast chicken and sausages from a separate meal prep area. “Fully grown men are being fed very small portions,” Rep. Wasserman Schultz noted, calling it a deliberate policy of humiliation. State officials insist these reports are false – a Florida Division of Emergency Management spokesperson flatly stated that inmates “always get three meals a day, unlimited drinking water, showers and other necessities,” claiming “the facility meets all required standards”. But such assurances ring hollow when journalists are barred from entering and independent monitors kept away. (When five Democratic state legislators tried to conduct a surprise inspection on July 3, they were turned away at the gate; they’ve since filed suit, accusing the DeSantis administration of impeding oversight.) It was only after mounting pressure that Florida arranged a tightly controlled tour for lawmakers – no cameras or phones allowed – and cherry-picked a few favorable comments from Republican attendees to trumpet in the media.
Meanwhile, the camp’s location in the Everglades raises additional human rights and environmental red flags. This isolated spot lies within a fragile ecosystem, one often called the most endangered national park in America. Indigenous Miccosukee and Seminole leaders say the land is sacred to their people, and conservationists warn that the massive complex (complete with fencing, generators, and constant vehicle traffic) threatens local wildlife and water systems. Even practical safety is a concern: the detention center was hastily built at a low-lying swamp during Florida’s hurricane season. In fact, torrential rains on July 1 flooded the tents just one day after Trump’s visit. Officials scrambled to pump out water and have since claimed the camp can withstand a Category 2 hurricane – but observers note that a direct hit or heavier storm could be catastrophic. “It’s a disaster waiting to happen, for the detainees and for the Everglades,” said one attorney involved in a lawsuit by Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity, which is suing to halt the project on environmental groundsapnews.com. That federal lawsuit, filed in early July, argues that fast-tracking a migrant prison in a protected wetland violates multiple environmental laws. Yet as of this writing, “Alligator Alcatraz” continues to operate, holding roughly 400 migrants and asylum-seekers in conditions that Florida’s own congressional delegation has deemed “really appalling”.
A Political Project of Cruelty and Fear
The emergence of “Alligator Alcatraz” is not a freak occurrence, but the product of a concerted political agenda under Governor DeSantis and the recently re-empowered Trump movement. In many ways, this camp is a physical embodiment of the Trump-DeSantis approach to immigration: maximal hostility, minimal accountability. President Trump has openly vowed to carry out the “largest mass deportation in U.S. history” if given the chance. The Everglades center is intended to make that promise feasible by vastly expanding detention capacity, helping boost the nationwide migrant lockup space from about 41,000 to 100,000 people. Florida’s governor eagerly answered Trump’s call. “Stood up in record time under @GovRonDeSantis’ leadership… Florida is proud to help facilitate @realDonaldTrump’s mission to enforce immigration law,” the Florida Division of Emergency Management boasted in a social media post. Indeed, DeSantis has gone to unprecedented lengths to insert Florida into what is normally federal immigration enforcement.
One key tool is the 287(g) program, an arrangement that deputizes local police and state agents to act as immigration officers. Under 287(g), anyone arrested by Florida law enforcement who is suspected of being undocumented can be transferred into ICE custody for deportation proceedings. Florida has supercharged this program, and the Everglades camp is specifically meant to hold those rounded up under these aggressive sweeps. State Attorney General James Uthmeier (a chief architect of the project) put it bluntly on social media: “Next stop: back to where they came from”. In other words, Alligator Alcatraz serves as a deportation pipeline, a holding pen for fast-tracking the expulsion of migrants that Florida police dragnet from communities. The state even invoked a “general delegation” of federal authority (an arguable reference to 287[g]) to claim it could run this camp without explicit federal approval. In a recent court filing, the Department of Homeland Security distanced itself, noting “no federal money” was spent on the site and that Florida was acting under its own emergency powers. Yet DHS Secretary Kristi Noem praised the camp as “held to the same standard” as federal facilities, and ICE officials reportedly inspected and advised on the setup. This murky dance allows the Trump administration to tacitly endorse and replicate the model elsewhere, while deflecting responsibility for the abuses.
Governor DeSantis, for his part, has spent years turning Florida into a laboratory for hardline anti-immigrant policy. Back in 2019, he signed SB 168 – a law banning “sanctuary” policies and forcing local jails to honor ICE detainers, even though no Florida city was refusing to cooperate in the first place. He also staged high-profile stunts like using state funds to fly planeloads of migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard in 2022, manipulating vulnerable families to score political points. In 2023–24, as Trump’s rhetoric intensified, DeSantis and Florida’s GOP-dominated legislature doubled down. They created a state “removal force” under the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and passed a slew of new measures to criminalize undocumented people. The most extreme was SB 4-C (2025), which sought to make it a state-level felony for undocumented immigrants to set foot in Florida. This law essentially criminalized the act of being an unauthorized immigrant in the state, mandating jail time without bond for anyone caught, even those with clean records. Immigrant rights groups warned that SB 4-C would turn Florida into a police state for immigrants, and even U.S. citizens could be profiled and arrested under the vague provisions. (In fact, one U.S. citizen’s arrest under a similar policy was part of the lawsuit challenging the lawaclu.org.) A federal court swiftly blocked SB 4-C in April 2025, finding it “encroaches upon an exclusively federal power” and likely violates the Constitution’s Supremacy Clause. The judge’s scathing order noted that Florida’s leaders “sought to criminalize people for simply moving within the United States”. Yet even in defeat, SB 4-C revealed the mindset behind Alligator Alcatraz: an “extreme…inhumane” vision (in the ACLU’s wordsaclu.org) of state-level immigration crackdowns, taken to whatever lengths necessary.
Hand in hand with militarized policy has come media manipulation and dehumanization. DeSantis and Trump allies have not been subtle about the Everglades camp’s propaganda value. On right-wing talk shows and social media, state officials giddily shared AI-generated images of alligators wearing ICE agent hats guarding a prison yard. One meme circulating in pro-Trump circles joked that “alligators and pythons are waiting” for anyone who tries to escape the camp’s perimetertruthout.org. Far from treating this facility as a somber necessity, the Florida GOP turned it into a merchandising opportunity – selling “Alligator Alcatraz” T-shirts and beer koozies emblazoned with a cartoon gator jailer. This grotesque levity serves a purpose: it sends a signal that the people inside are less than human, figures of menace to be contained and mocked. The use of the Everglades itself as a backdrop plays into old frontier myths – casting migrants as dangerous outsiders thrown into the wilderness, out of sight and mind. Such tactics reflect what scholars call the “deliberate choice to inject the framework of war into society”, blurring the line between military enemies and civilian populations. By treating immigration as an active battlefield, officials justify exceptional abuses. They count on public indifference, aided by the camp’s literal isolation and the controlled trickle of information.
It is telling that when lawmakers finally glimpsed the truth behind the PR, even some hardened politicians were shocked. “Vile…disturbing…this place needs to be shut the hell down,” said Rep. Wasserman Schultz after touring the cages. Another visitor, Rep. Maxwell Frost, struggled to process the sight of men chanting for freedom behind fences on American soil. Yet Florida’s Republican legislators emerged from the orchestrated tour parroting the official line – that conditions were just fine. Governor DeSantis dismissed critics and denied independent media access, clearly calculating that a battle of narratives will be won by flooding sympathetic outlets with rosy accounts and memes while keeping real evidence hidden. It’s a cynical strategy that relies on the broader public to look away.
Parallels Between Early Dachau and “Alligator Alcatraz”
To truly grasp the stakes, it’s useful to compare the early days of Dachau (as it operated in the 1930s) with this Everglades camp in 2025. The parallels are striking – and chilling:
It must be stated: “Alligator Alcatraz” is not (yet) Dachau – no one is alleging systematic murder or torture. But as the above comparison shows, the underlying formula is eerily familiar: a government targeting a marginalized group, stripping away their civil rights, and corralling them into remote camps under inhumane conditions, all while justifying it as necessary for security or order. The early chapters of history’s worst atrocities often began with such camps. The question is whether Americans will heed those warnings or rationalize away the cruelty unfolding in the Everglades.
“Never Again” Means Now: A Call to Action
The story of “Alligator Alcatraz” should stir the conscience of every person who believes in human rights, the rule of law, and basic decency. In a nation that once swore “Never Again” to the internment of innocent people, we are witnessing a modern-day internment camp operate in plain sight. The men languishing behind the mesh fences in the Florida swamps are not abstractions – many are fathers, sons, and husbands who came to America seeking safety or a better life. Some may even be U.S. citizens mistakenly caught in the dragnet. None of them has been given a day in court. As in World War II, they have become prisoners of politics, locked up not for what they’ve done but for who they are.
This is a moral emergency that extends beyond partisan lines. Even those who support strict immigration enforcement should recoil at the abuses reported at these camps – squalid conditions, denial of due process, and blatant profiteering off misery. “The immoral treatment of human beings on this Florida site unmistakably echoes a similarly despicable chapter of history,” Rep. Wasserman Schultz observed, imploring Americans to see the parallels. To allow “Alligator Alcatraz” to stand is to acquiesce to a regime of deliberate cruelty. We must not look away.
First, there must be accountability and transparency. Governor DeSantis and Florida officials built this camp under a veil of emergency power; now they owe answers. State legislators and members of Congress from both parties should demand full inspections (with media present), release of detainee rosters, and an immediate independent review of conditions. The courts have a duty, too: the ongoing lawsuits – from the environmental injunction to the civil-rights challenges – need to be pursued vigorously to halt operations if any laws were skirted or broken. The federal government cannot shrug off responsibility either. If DHS truly does not condone what’s happening, it should formally order the closure of the camp and refuse to take detainees from it. If, on the other hand, the Trump administration intends to replicate this model elsewhere, Americans deserve to know that now, before a network of “Everglades camps” takes root.
Moreover, this camp underscores why we need comprehensive immigration reform and humane policy, not theatrical brutality. People fleeing violence and poverty deserve humane treatment and fair hearings, not to be stockpiled in swamps as a warning to others. Community organizations, faith leaders, and activists are already mobilizing – holding vigils, supplying aid to released detainees, and pushing legislation to prohibit these kinds of state-run detention sites. They need public support. We can raise our voices by contacting our representatives, writing op-eds (just as this one), and supporting groups like the Florida Immigrant Coalition and ACLU, who are fighting these abuses in court.
Finally, let us remember the environmental and indigenous dimension: the Everglades is not just a convenient wasteland to exploit for a jail. It is sacred land and a fragile ecosystem already under threat. Floridians have a proud history of defending the Everglades from misguided schemes (as they did in 1968 when a huge airport project was stoppedtruthout.org). That legacy must continue. Allowing a toxic prison camp to poison the water and soil – and potentially trap hundreds in a disaster if a hurricane strikes – betrays our responsibility to future generations.
In the heart of one of the world’s most unique wetlands, barbed wire now surrounds a camp that challenges our nation’s values. Alligator Alcatraz must be abolished – not in some distant future, but now. Its existence is a test of our collective conscience. Will we shrug and normalize this “efficient” cruelty, as just another news item? Or will we, the public and our leaders, act to shut down this internment camp and ensure that the swamp’s gators are the only ones roaming free? History is watching our response. If we are silent in the face of cages and camps, we risk repeating the sins of the past. The detainees in the Everglades are crying out “Libertad!” – for freedom. It falls to us to answer, and to affirm that even in times of turmoil, America need not abandon its soul.
Sources
Curt Anderson & Kate Payne, Associated Press – “First immigration detainees arrive at Florida center in the Everglades,” July 3, 2025. (Details the opening of “Alligator Alcatraz,” its capacity, construction, and official statements.)
Peter Aitken, Newsweek – “Inside Florida’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ Detention Center,” July 12, 2025. (Report on lawmakers’ tour, quoting Rep. Wasserman Schultz on conditions as “internment camp” and describing cages, sanitation, food issues.)
Thomas Kennedy & Will Mann, Truthout – “DeSantis Races to Open Immigrant Detention Camp in Swamp Amid Hurricane Season,” July 3, 2025. (Provides context on the land seizure, environmental concerns, and DeSantis’ anti-immigrant track record; notes propaganda like alligator memes.)
Jack Holmes, Esquire – “Concentration Camps Expert Andrea Pitzer: The Trump Administration Is Running Camps at the Southern Border,” June 2019. (Interview with historians defining concentration camps and drawing parallels to U.S. migrant detention; quote from Waitman Wade Beorn included.)
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) – Press Release: “Federal Court Halts Florida’s Cruel Anti-Immigrant Law SB 4-C,” April 4, 2025. (Details the injunction against Florida SB 4-C, the law’s provisions, and statements from ACLU attorneys on its unconstitutionality and inhumanity.)
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum – Holocaust Encyclopedia: “Dachau,” (accessed 2025). (Historical background on Dachau concentration camp – first Nazi camp for political prisoners, its model role, prisoner statistics.)
Wikipedia – “Dachau concentration camp,” (summarizing Dachau’s history and early operations). (Used for additional historical context, such as the 1935 “jingle” reflecting public fear of Dachau.)
Debbie Wasserman Schultz – Statement to Newsweek, July 2025. (Comparing “Alligator Alcatraz” to WWII Japanese American internment camps, emphasizing lack of due process and harsh conditions.)