Alligator Alcatraz: Florida’s $450 Million Concentration Camp in the Everglades
Welcome to America’s most sadistic spectacle—built on sovereign swamp, funded by FEMA, and merchandised in $15 beer koozies.
To step into the Everglades in June is to feel a wet fist close around your lungs. The air is humid with decay and industrial powdered lime. Cypress trees stand ankle-deep in swampwater, motionless, except for the ripple of something just beneath—perhaps a gator, perhaps a drowning conscience. And in this already vanishing wilderness, Florida has constructed a new ecosystem: heavy‑duty tents, FEMA trailers, portable generators—and a perimeter patrolled not by guards, but by alligators, crocodiles, pythons, and panthers. The official term for this wetland monstrosity is a “temporary migrant processing facility.” But Floridians—and soon the nation—have come to know it by a name so grotesque it might’ve been brainstormed by Orwell on ketamine: Alligator Alcatraz. Here, in the federally protected Dade-Collier Preserve, up to 5,000 migrants will be interned in military-style tents on an abandoned airstrip once earmarked for Cold War bombers. The location was not chosen for practicality. It was chosen for the optics of conquest. DeSantis’s Florida, federally armed and morally bankrupt, has sunk a compound in the swamp—and crowned it with the flag like a skull on a pike.
You might assume the blueprint came from a sadist with a badge—half Stephen Miller, half Heinrich Himmler—scrawling policy directives in blood and chlorine, dreaming of empire with a cattle prod in one hand and a Bible in the other. Instead, you get Ron DeSantis—a man with the charisma of an overcooked yam and the ethical architecture of a vending machine. At his side stands Attorney General James Uthmeier, a former chief of staff turned detention enthusiast, who announced the plan not in a legal brief or policy memo, but on Fox News, presumably between an erectile dysfunction ad and a sermon on the moral hazards of empathy. The location? Big Cypress National Preserve—federal conservation land, home to endangered panthers, ancestral tribal territory, and now, a militarized sprawl of canvas and concrete. The mechanism? Executive authority under the state’s “emergency powers,” recycled from a migrant panic two years past its expiration date. “There’s no way in and no way out,” Uthmeier boasted, “other than pythons and alligators.” Governance has collapsed into pageantry in fatigues, vengeance marches in policy’s uniform. And like most fascist-adjacent pageantry, it comes with merch: the Florida GOP now sells Alligator Alcatraz hats and beer koozies, priced at $27 and $15 respectively. Nothing says national dignity quite like a sweltering torture compound you can pair with a tailgate.
The term they use is “processing facility,” as if bureaucracy could sanitize the smell of a cage. But no volume of paperwork, no euphemism from a governor’s podium, can hide what this place is. This is a concentration camp—by any honest historical measure: from the Boer camps in South Africa to Manzanar, from the gulags to Guantánamo. All of the elements are present: mass internment without trial; confinement based not on conduct but identity; isolation from the public; indefinite detention under executive edict. The isolation doesn’t lie. Neither does the intent. This isn’t a prison for crimes—it’s a complex that criminalizes existence. One doesn’t need to invoke fascism to name it honestly—only consult historian Andrea Pitzer’s definition: “the mass detention of civilians without trial, usually on the basis of race, religion, national origin, citizenship, or political party.” And yet we dare not use the term—not because it’s inaccurate, but because it’s uncomfortably precise. In that refusal, the cruelty escapes language just as it escapes accountability. It becomes, like the swamp itself, something primal—alive, and feeding.
It’s a curious thing—how a government that pleads austerity when asked to feed its children somehow finds half a billion dollars when the appetite is for confinement. You’d think $450 million a year might purchase something noble. Healthcare infrastructure, perhaps. A full reckoning with Florida’s collapsing public schools—a system that ranks dead last in teacher pay and near the bottom in per-pupil funding. Hospitals. Housing. Hunger relief. But no. That sum is being funneled into diesel generators, floodlights, surveillance drones, portable latrines, and the deployment of armed National Guard troops and Highway Patrol officers—the infrastructural vocabulary of internment. Meanwhile, Florida refuses to expand Medicaid—turning away about $4 billion in annual federal aid—leaving over 1.4 million adults in the coverage gap. Because when forced to choose between healing and harm, this government would rather allocate public money to the punitive financial anvil it has chosen to sink into the gut of the Everglades. The cruelty is not incidental. It is engineered. Compassion never gets an appropriation. Infrastructure always does. One begins to suspect that in this state—and in this country—the problem is not that we cannot afford decency—but that it no longer occurs to us to try.
To visit the Dade-Collier Preserve, if one is inclined to walk beyond the plywood checkpoint and remain silent long enough to hear more than the buzz of generators or the barked cadence of drills, is to be reminded—violently and viscerally—that this was once sacred land. Not metaphorically sacred, but literally: ancestral Seminole territory, where medicine men marked time by moon and fire, and where panther tracks were read like scripture. Now, the sermons come from a governor’s podium and concern “illegal aliens” who must be, in the language of policy, “processed,” as if humanity were pulp to be pressed through mesh and drained of name, family, and face. Erecting this compound didn’t just override human decency—it bypassed environmental law, ignored tribal sovereignty, and reanimated a history Florida pretends to forget. The wetlands in question are the Big Cypress National Preserve, part of the Everglades ecosystem and sovereign Miccosukee and Seminole territory. Cypress groves that once mirrored constellations in still water are now cordoned with motion sensors and klieg lights. The marshland, long home to endangered wood storks and red-bellied turtles, has been clear-cut for modular tents and security trailers. No environmental review was conducted. No tribal consultation was honored. And somewhere beneath this concrete bloom, the roots of a thousand severed traditions rot slowly in the damp. The Miccosukee and Seminole tribes, offered no real voice in the matter, have denounced the desecration—but their outrage echoes faintly against the diesel chorus of empire.
Alligator Alcatraz is not an outlier. It is a prototype. A proof of concept in the theater of American deterrence—constructed in Florida, but federally blessed, publicly merchandised, and soon to be nationally replicated as part of Trump’s promised network of mass detention hubs across the border states. The facility operates under the banner of state emergency, but its blood type is unmistakably federal. It is ICE that will fill its tents. It is FEMA funds that fuel its generators. And it is Donald Trump himself who plans to appear at its unveiling, not as a disapproving observer, but as a patron of the architecture.
American cruelty rarely outgrows its euphemisms—only its expiration dates. And here, in the sweltering bowel of the Everglades, that linguistic sleight of hand has reached its most necrotic form. A “temporary migrant processing facility” is the sort of phrase that could only be uttered by a man who has never been processed. It implies transience, a kind of administrative breeze, when in fact it is closer to penal colonization than any form of transit. The tents are not pop-ups. The fences do not roll away. And the memory, once etched into a place like this, does not obey semantics. No one with a working conscience visits the ruins of Tule Lake or Rohwer and asks to see the “temporary relocation center.” We only speak honestly about such places once they’ve completed their work. Until then, we pretend. We call them facilities. We call them camps. And we keep the receipts—until the tribunal.
The Everglades is a National Park. Airboat rides, tram tours, wildlife, and now for your viewing pleasure… Alligator Alcatraz…disgusting. Where is the outrage.
Art work looks just like De Santis btw.
They will be left to die when the Hurricanes hit. This is cruel and inhumane!