Politics
/
August 6, 2025
The Florida migrant gulag is what occurs when the depravities of colonialist international coverage are turned inward.
Advert Coverage
A Florida Freeway Patrol officer appears on as protesters collect to demand the closure of the immigrant detention heart often called “Alligator Alcatraz” on the Dade-Collier Coaching and Transition Airport in Ochopee, Florida, on July 22, 2025.
(Chandan Khanna / AFP through Getty Photos)
They’re calling it “Alligator Alcatraz”—a sprawling migrant detention heart deep within the Florida wetlands, surrounded by flood zones, razor wire, and a way of menace. Crawling with each literal and governmental predators, it was constructed not simply to course of however to intimidate. ICE buses arrive day by day. Surveillance cameras and Nationwide Guard patrols clarify: It is a jail, not a sanctuary. These deemed “unwelcome” on this nation will probably be caged right here and forgotten.
Officers declare the ability will redefine the deportation pipeline. They’re proper—simply not how they suppose. That’s as a result of Alligator Alcatraz isn’t a brand new invention. It’s the most recent incarnation of a system designed to not welcome the displaced however to include, punish, and erase them. It’s the logical endpoint of a long time of militarized US coverage at dwelling and overseas.
In June, President Trump bypassed California’s governor and deployed Marines and Nationwide Guard troops to Los Angeles to help ICE raids in residential neighborhoods. Army personnel patrolled faculty drop-offs and hospitals. Cameras rolled as households have been separated on sidewalks. Days later, Trump publicly steered that Zohran Mamdani—a US citizen and New York mayoral candidate of South Asian descent—must be arrested and deported.
This isn’t a glitch within the system. It’s the system—warnings embedded in spectacle.
We’re not witnessing a sudden surge in xenophobia. We’re witnessing the convergence of histories—immigration enforcement, racial management, and international coverage merging into one carceral venture. The result’s a home counterinsurgency machine, refined over a long time, now turned inward.
Begin in Guatemala, 1954. The CIA overthrew Jacobo Árbenz after he threatened to redistribute land and reduce into US enterprise pursuits. The coup plunged the nation right into a civil struggle that lasted 36 years, killed greater than 200,000 individuals, and despatched refugees fleeing north. Lots of these refugees or their descendants may now face detention or deportation.
Present Challenge
The sample repeated throughout the area. The US-backed ousting of Salvador Allende in Chile. The civil struggle in El Salvador, the place American funded armed demise squads and displaced practically 1 / 4 of the inhabitants. In Honduras, the 2009 US-backed coup sparked a political collapse that’s nonetheless driving tens of hundreds north to the border annually.
These migrations hint the scars of US international coverage. As historian Greg Grandin writes, Latin America turned “empire’s workshop”—a testing floor for counterinsurgency techniques that may ultimately return dwelling.
When migrants arrive on the southern border, they’re crossing fault strains created by the US by way of navy help, financial coercion, and covert operations. The so-called border disaster isn’t the product of random chaos. It’s the empire’s return circulate.
Within the Nineteen Eighties, Chilly Struggle logic fused with the Struggle on Medicine. Surveillance expanded. Native police have been militarized. Poor and immigrant neighborhoods have been redefined as menace zones. After 9/11, issues intensified once more. Strategies refined in Iraq and Afghanistan— biometric monitoring, drone surveillance, predictive policing—have been imported wholesale into immigration enforcement. ICE, DHS, and CBP absorbed a wartime logic.
And with them got here the architects of struggle itself.
Behind the biometric gates of Alligator Alcatraz lie the fingerprints of America’s strongest protection contractors. Raytheon, Palantir, and Lockheed Martin— corporations as soon as identified for cruise missiles and drone strikes—now provide the surveillance, facial recognition software program, and digital monitoring instruments used to police the immigrants.
Advert Coverage
In style
“swipe left under to view extra authors”Swipe →
These engines of containment function with bipartisan blessing.
From Reagan to Clinton, Bush to Biden, the method has remained largely the identical: deal with migration as a menace to include, not a consequence to know. Criminalization turns into the default. Enforcement turns into coverage. And budgets balloon accordingly.
President Obama—regardless of his reformist rhetoric—deported extra immigrants than any president in US historical past, incomes the nickname “Deporter in Chief” from immigrant rights advocates. His administration expanded detention quotas, surveillance packages, and authorized frameworks that future presidents would inherit and escalate. Although he later narrowed priorities to give attention to severe offenders and up to date arrivals, the shift got here too late—and with out dismantling the underlying equipment.
That fortified system was handed to Trump, who wasted no time weaponizing it—turning immigration into theater, threatening naturalized residents, and staging mass raids for cable information consumption. However the logic of punishment over safety, of surveillance over sanctuary, didn’t begin with Trump—and it didn’t finish with him.
Now, below his second time period, the infrastructure is metastasizing. In July, the administration supplied $608 million to states prepared to duplicate Florida’s detention mannequin—an incentive for governors to construct their very own Alligator Alcatrazes utilizing fast-track emergency powers. Texas, Arizona, and Louisiana have all expressed curiosity. Florida’s prototype—inbuilt simply eight days with $245 million in federal contracts—is a deterrence mannequin packaged for nationwide rollout.
Right this moment, over 56,000 individuals are held in ICE detention on any given night time—a document excessive and a 40 p.c enhance over final 12 months. Practically 72 p.c haven’t any legal historical past. With overcrowding mounting, stories of bodily and emotional abuse proliferate: migrants pressured to face within the blazing solar for hours, held in disgusting and unsafe circumstances, denied authorized counsel, and separated from kids with out clear reunification plans. These are recurring options of a system optimized for disorientation. And nonetheless, the budgets swell. Tons of of hundreds of thousands materialize for speedy building and mass detention, whereas requires livable wages, healthcare, or functioning colleges are met with shrugs and spreadsheets.
The query isn’t how we afford care—solely why we maintain selecting cages.
Final month, Congress handed the One Huge Lovely Invoice Act, a sweeping spending measure that slashes funding for Medicaid and SNAP whereas allocating practically $170 billion to immigration enforcement—making ICE the largest federal legislation enforcement company. An enormous share of that funding will circulate to non-public jail operators and protection contractors behind detention websites like Alligator Alcatraz. That is intentional. Caging the displaced is now a bipartisan finances precedence.
This isn’t about safety. It’s about funding—in worry, in punishment, in revenue.
As historian Kelly Lytle Hernández reminds us, ICE’s ancestry traces again to slave patrols and colonial policing. What as soon as pursued the enslaved now targets the displaced. The instruments have developed—drones as an alternative of canines, algorithms as an alternative of chains—however the goal stays the identical: seize and management.
And more and more, even dissent turns into a deportable offense. Authorized observers have documented ICE raids at church buildings, colleges, and hospitals. Households torn aside not by chance, however by technique. The purpose isn’t simply removing. It’s worry.
I’ve spoken with migrant employees who say right this moment’s worry mirrors the violence they as soon as fled. The helicopters have been American then, too—simply flown by others. Now they hover over US cities with the identical intent: detain, divide, disappear.
But, even below these circumstances, resistance endures. Detainees stage starvation strikes. Authorized advocates sue. Communities construct rapid-response networks and mutual help techniques. However the machine grinds on.
Thinker Aimé Césaire warned that colonial violence all the time boomerangs again dwelling. Hannah Arendt cautioned that totalitarianism begins when imperial strategies flip inward—when complete populations are forged as inner enemies.
We’ve reached that second. A nation that when exported counterinsurgency now enacts it on home soil.
Alligator Alcatraz shouldn’t be an outlier. It’s a sign flare.
The surveillance state that when patrolled Fallujah now displays Fresno. The protection contractors that when armed international insurgencies now handle migrant detention contracts. The authorized structure that when interned Japanese People now justifies raids on colleges and mosques.
Immigration enforcement shouldn’t be damaged. It’s working precisely because it was designed to—to self-discipline labor, suppress dissent, and reinforce a racial and financial order.
We should cease asking how one can repair a system constructed to punish. We should ask why we maintain paying for it—in Congress, in budgets, in silence, and in complicity.
As a result of when empire turns inward, it doesn’t simply goal migrants. It targets the nation’s soul.
“Empire overseas entails tyranny at dwelling,” Arendt warned us. The tyranny has landed.
Donté L. Stallworth
Donté L. Stallworth has written for The New York Instances, HuffPost, Jacobin, and different shops. He performed within the Nationwide Soccer League for 10 seasons.
Extra from The Nation
Stephen Miller’s dystopian immigrant-hunting system is selecting up tempo, and asylum seekers like Mohamed Naser are more and more susceptible.
Column
/
Sasha Abramsky
The president is making an enormous push to rewrite the previous in favor of a few of America’s prime historic traitors, racists, and scumbags.
Chris Lehmann
At first, they needed to say progressives have been delusional for seeing a slide again into white supremacy within the American Eagle advert. Now they’re boasting about it.
Joan Walsh
A gerrymandering battle reveals how far Trump will go to keep away from electoral accountability.
John Nichols
