The name was certainly enough to attract Donald Trump to Florida this Tuesday: “Alligator Alcatraz.” The evocative name refers to a field of detention, processing and deportation of undocumented immigrants that emerged in the blink of eyes in the middle of the Everglades.
The aerodrome site in Ohopee, west of Miami, is the perfect scenario for Trump’s acrobatics policy. Here you can go through a strong and scowling man to please voters who hate the politically correct. Democrats who do not like images and cruelty underlying their immigration purge risk being ridiculed as mild to border.
The symbolism of the leader of the most important democracy in the world, which idolizes foreign dictators, enthusiastic about a field of detention can raise dark historical echoes.
But this does not worry the White House that loves this optics and is evoking images of cartoons from an advanced Draconian post in a wild region patrolled by reptiles with blade teeth and poisonous snakes.
“The only way out is one-way flight. It is isolated and surrounded by a dangerous wildlife and relentless ground,” said press secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday. “When there are illegal killers, violators and heinous criminals in a detention center surrounded by crocodiles, yes, I think this is an impediment to try to escape.”
Tom Homan, an associated executive director of execution and removal operations confessed to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins: “I can barely wait for the opening, and let’s put the foreigners inside as soon as we can.” Meanwhile, Florida Governor Ron Desantis described the installation as a “unique counter” in an interview with Fox.
The temporary camp, next to a 11,000 -foot track in a aerodrome used mainly for training flights, will soon house 5,000 migrants in a tent city. The project is controversial and leaves immigrant rights activists and war -to -standing environmentalists, and Florida’s indigenous community fearful for a threat to the sacred lands.
But Trump’s visit to “Alligator Alcatraz” will be the latest in a series of graphic photographs and action plans that management has conjured to highlight the hard line of immigration and law policies and order that are the basis of the magician. Some even approach the glorification of violence and gross justice. Sometimes it seems hard is even more important than being really hard and this posture may be offset a deportation rate that high White House employees, such as Stephen Miller, who considered it disappointing.
Earlier this year, Trump, which is fascinated by the iconography of popular culture, delighted with an impractical plan to convert the true Alcatraz from a museum that recalls the famous prisoners of the past, such as Al Capone, in a federal prison surrounded by air chains.
The Secretary of Internal Security, Kristi Noem, is constantly creating appealing photographic operations. The most famous was his pose at the door of a mass incarceration cage in a celebrated saved prison where the US sent undocumented immigrants in front of shirtless and tattooed prisoners.
Administration also announced plans to expand an immigrant host center, known for its difficult conditions, in a Military Base in Cuba, to help with the deportation effort. This is a separate installation from that still maintains some prisoners of the war against terrorism, but its name, Guantanamo Bay – like “Crocodile Alcatraz” – conveys a tone of hardness and suggests that high employees are not very concerned about the letter of the law.
White House Secretary Karoline Leavitt speaks during the Daily Briefing at the White House in Washington, DC, on June 30. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images
Mugs, T-shirts and “Alligator Alcatraz” caps
The performance hardness of the immigration administration approach often seems to be a bad joke, an impression underlined by the new “Alligator Alcatraz” product of the Florida Republican Party, which includes caps, drinks, mugs, and baby onms.
But frivolity obscures serious political goals, especially at a time when Trump is trying to present his vast bill, which includes millions of millions of dollars in financing for deportation effort and a broader application of immigration law.
“I think your trip to this detention center highlights the need to approve ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ because we need more detention centers across the country,” Leavitt said.
Often Trump’s political plays seem conceived both to offend the liberals and the elite, the opinion of Estabishment, and to achieve a specific political goal. And your visit to Florida will do more than provide food for your presidential content machine and social networking feeds.
The images of outraged democrats in the main media will feed subsequent coverage in conservative media, which will solidify Trump’s base around them. After all, this is a president who turned a photo of an Atlanta prison after one of his criminal accusations into a persecution parable that helped him win the 2024 elections.
The intertwining of choreographed photographic operations and controversies is vital to Trump’s political technique. This is how he builds and exercises power and drown out all others. Democrats have no one who can convey a message and flood the area all day, every day, in a comparable way.
The sinister side of Trump’s photographic operation in Florida
But there is a more sinister and dehumanizing dimension around an operation that involves human beings who often fled the most desperate circumstances to end in the United States. The idea of detention camps on American soil evokes dark allusions to the Internment of Nipo-Americans during a dark historical chapter of World War II. And the images of Rusas, arrests and deportations are worrying, given Trump’s admiration for foreign dictators, his own autocratic tendencies and the incessant test of his administration to the limits of the Constitution and the Law.
The visit to the new detention field occurs just a few weeks after the president sent the US National Guard and Marines troops to Los Angeles amid protests against repression of migrants and the will of California governor Gavin Newsom. Subsequently, he organized a parade in Washington to mark the Army’s 250th anniversary – and his 79th birthday – which raised comparisons with the ostensible exhibitions of military equipment by totalitarian states such as the Soviet Union or North Korea, which always seemed more attempts to intimidate citizens than enemies abroad.
Destis, who seems to be preparing a political approach to Trump, his old and bitter rival in the Primary of the Republican Party, when building the field, insisted that the conditions of “Alligator Alcatraz” will be human, comparing them in the interview with Fox with quickly erected facilities for rescue workers and electricians who wake Florida at each harassment season. The governor also showed a bench of huge air conditioning units abroad of a temporary installation.
But Trump’s visit arises at a time when more and more questions about the conditions faced by immigrants without documents detained in government facilities are raised. This year, several immigrants died under the custody of the immigration and customs service (ICE), amid issues about whether detainees are receiving adequate medical care.
On Sunday, ICE announced the death of a Cuban citizen, Isidro Perez, 75, at the Krome Detention Center in Miami, and said the cause of death was being investigated. A press release stressed that all detainees underwent medical and health examinations when they were detained and had access to emergency care 24 hours a day.
Homan was straightforward when asked about the case in the White House. “People die in the Custody of Ice. People die in the county chains. People die in state prisons,” said CNN Kristen Holmes, stating that he was unaware of the individual case. “The question should be: How many lives does Ice save? Because when they go to detention, we find many with diseases and this is something we immediately deal with to avoid it.” Homan also argued that Ice has the “highest industry detention patterns.”
Image captured from a video shows the activity in an immigrant detention center nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz”, located in an everglades isolated aerodrome. WSVN/AP
But there is also the question of knowing who will be sent to the Florida field. Trump has repeatedly and falsely labeled most migrants who illegally crossed the border such as violators, criminals, and imprisonment from asylums.
And Noem said in a statement on Monday that “Alligator Alcatraz” and “other facilities like this will give us the ability to arrest some of the worst scrocks that entered our country under the previous administration.” The statement was accompanied by descriptions and photographs of undocumented immigrants, caught in ICE Rusgas who were convicted of crimes such as murder, abduction, violation and sexual crimes against children. People like these can expect to end in the field, he added.
Few Americans would argue that convicted criminals should be left free or opposed their deportation if they were illegally in the country. The administration’s arguments that the Biden government denied a border crisis attracted many voters by 2024. But the idea that all undocumented immigrants targeted by ICE Rusgs of Trump administration are violent criminals is also misleading.
CNN reported in June that less than 10% of ICE immigrants since October have been convicted of serious crimes such as murder, aggression, violation or theft. More than 75% had no conviction beyond an immigration or traffic violation, according to ICE data from October until the end of May.
Although the rhetoric that demonls undocumented migrants can satisfy Trump’s Maga Magine, it also ignores the fact that many of those who go to the north through South and Central America or who pay messengers to undertake the risky trip are escaping economic deprivation, societies plagued by crime and environmental crises. Some also have genuine cases of political asylum and have left their home countries because they fear being persecuted.
However, many migrants do not gather the conditions to benefit from asylum. The accumulation of its cases is, in part, the product of asylum laws that were overloaded by the mass migration of illegal immigrants on the southern border and for years of negligence of Congress to update them. Administration is not wrong with the fact that there is a chronicle scarcity of security measures, immigration courts and detention facilities.
But this is partly due to the political polarization of the debate on immigration on both sides that demagogy on “Crocodile Alcatraz” is a perfect example.
