CNN
—
The name alone surely was enough to lure Donald Trump to Florida.
The president heads to “Alligator Alcatraz” on Tuesday. The evocative name refers to a detention, processing and deportation camp for undocumented migrants that sprang up in a blink of an eye in the middle of the Everglades.
The airfield site, in Ochopee, west of Miami, is a perfect backdrop for Trump’s stunt politics. Here, he can pose as a scowling strongman to please voters who hate political correctness. Democrats squeamish about the imagery and the undercurrent of cruelty around his immigration purge risk being mocked as soft on the border.
The symbolism of the leader of the world’s most important democracy, who idolizes foreign dictators, enthusing over a detention camp may stir dark historic echoes .
But that’s not worrying the White House. It loves the optics and is evoking cartoonish imagery of a draconian outpost in a wilderness patrolled by razor-toothed reptiles and venomous snakes.
“The only way out is a one-way flight. It is isolated and surrounded by dangerous wildlife and unforgiving terrain,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday. “When you have illegal murderers and rapists and heinous criminals in a detention facility surrounded by alligators, yes, I do think that’s a deterrent for them to try to escape.”
The president’s border czar, Tom Homan, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins, “Can’t wait for it to open, and we’ll put aliens in there as soon as we can.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis described the facility as a “one-stop shop” in a Fox interview.
The temporary camp, alongside an 11,000-foot runway at an airfield mainly used for training flights, will soon house 5,000 migrants in a tent city. The project is controversial: Immigration rights activists and environmentalists are up in arms. Florida’s indigenous community fears a threat to sacred lands.
But Trump’s visit to “Alligator Alcatraz” will be the latest in a series of graphic photo ops and buzzy plans the administration has conjured to highlight hardline immigration and law and order policies that are a foundation of his MAGA creed. Some come close to glorifying violence and rough justice. At times, it seems like looking tough is even more important than being tough; the posturing may be compensating for a deportation rate that senior White House officials such as Stephen Miller have deemed disappointing.
Earlier this year, Trump, who is fascinated with the iconography of popular culture, raved about an impractical plan to convert the real Alcatraz from a museum recalling famous past inmates such as Al Capone to a federal prison surrounded by swirling currents.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is constantly creating eye-catching photo ops. The most famous was her pose outside a mass incarceration cage in a notorious Salvadoran prison to which the US has sent undocumented migrants, in front of shirtless and tattooed inmates. The administration has also announced plans to expand a migrant facility notorious for harsh conditions on a military base in Cuba to aid the deportation effort. It’s separate from the facility still holding some war on terror prisoners, but its name, Guantanamo Bay – like “Alligator Alcatraz” – carries a tone of hardheartedness and suggests top officials are not too worried about the letter of the law.
‘Alligator Alcatraz’ mugs, shirts and caps
The performative toughness of the administration’s immigration approach often seems like a joke in poor taste, an impression underlined by the Florida GOP’s new “Alligator Alcatraz” merch, which includes caps, beverage holders, mugs and baby onesies.
But the frivolity obscures serious political goals – especially at a moment when Trump is trying to land his vast policy bill, which include billions of dollars in funding for the deportation effort and broader immigration enforcement.
“I think his trip to this detention facility actually underscores the need to pass the ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ because we need more detention facilities across the country,” Leavitt said.
Often, Trump’s political gambits seem designed as much to offend liberals and elite, establishment opinion as to achieve a specific policy goal. And his visit to Florida will do more than provide fodder for his presidential content machine and social media feeds. Footage of outraged Democrats in mainstream media outlets will fuel follow-on coverage in conservative media that will solidify Trump’s base around him. This, after all, is a president who turned a mugshot at an Atlanta jail after one of his criminal indictments into a parable of persecution that helped him win the 2024 election.
The weaving together of photo ops and choreographed controversies is vital to Trump’s political technique. It’s how he builds and wields power and drowns everyone else out. Democrats have no one who can drive a message and flood the zone all day, every day in a comparable manner.
But there’s a more sinister and dehumanizing dimension surrounding an operation involving human beings who often fled the most desperate of circumstances to end up in the United States. The thought of detention camps on US soil evokes dark allusions to the internment of Japanese Americans during a somber historical chapter in World War II. And the imagery of raids, roundups and deportations is troubling given Trump’s admiration of foreign dictators, his own autocratic tendencies and his administration’s incessant testing of the limits of the Constitution and the law.
The trip to the new detention camp comes only a few weeks after the president sent National Guard troops and US Marines into Los Angeles amid protests over a migrant crackdown and against the wishes of California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Then he held a parade through Washington to mark the Army’s 250th birthday – and his own 79th – that drew comparisons with the ostentatious shows of military hardware by totalitarian states such as the Soviet Union or North Korea that always seemed more like attempts to intimidate the citizenry than foes abroad.
DeSantis – who seems to be engineering a political rapprochement with Trump, his former bitter GOP primary rival, by building the camp – insisted that the conditions of “Alligator Alcatraz” will be humane, comparing them in the Fox interview to facilities quickly erected for rescue workers and electrical linemen who rush to Florida each hurricane season. He showed off a bank of huge air-conditioning units outside a temporary facility.
But Trump’s visit comes at a time of growing questions about conditions faced by detained undocumented migrants in government holding facilities. A number of migrants have died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody this year amid questions over whether detainees are getting proper medical care. ICE on Sunday announced the death of a Cuban national, Isidro Perez, 75, at the Krome Detention Center in Miami and said the cause of death was being investigated. A news release pointed out that all detainees got health and medical screenings when they were taken into custody and had access to 24-hour emergency care.
Homan was offhand when asked about the case at the White House. “People die in ICE custody. People die in county jails. People die in state prisons,” he told CNN’s Kristen Holmes, saying he was unaware of the individual case. “The question should be how many lives does ICE save? Because when they go into detention, we find many with diseases and that’s something we deal with right away to prevent that.” Homan argued that ICE has the “highest detention standards in the industry.”
But there’s also the question of who will be sent to the Florida camp. Trump has repeatedly and falsely branded most of the migrants who have illegally crossed the border as rapists, criminals and escaped inmates of asylums.
And Noem said in a statement Monday that “Alligator Alcatraz” “and other facilities like it will give us the capability to lock up some of the worst scumbags who entered our country under the previous administration.” She accompanied the release with descriptions and pictures of undocumented migrants swept up in ICE raids who were convicted of crimes such as homicide, kidnapping, rape and child sex offenses. People like these could expect to end up in the camp, she said.
Few Americans would argue that convicted criminals should be left at large or would oppose deporting them if they were in the country illegally. And the administration’s arguments that the Biden administration denied a border crisis appealed to many voters in 2024. But the idea that all undocumented migrants targeted by Trump administration ICE raids are violent criminals is also misleading.
CNN reported in June that less than 10% of migrants booked into ICE custody since October were convicted of serious crimes like murder, assault, rape or robbery. More than 75% had no conviction other than an immigration or traffic-related offense, according to ICE data from October through the end of May.
And while rhetoric demonizing undocumented migrants may be satisfying to Trump’s MAGA Cabinet, it also ignores the fact that many of those who head north through South and Central America or who pay couriers to undertake the risky journey are fleeing economic deprivation, crime-blighted societies and environmental crises. Some also have genuine cases for political asylum and left their home countries because they feared persecution.
Many migrants do not, however, qualify for asylum. The backlog of their cases is partly the product of asylum laws that have been overwhelmed by mass undocumented migration at the southern border and years of neglect by Congress in updating them. The administration is not wrong that there’s a chronic shortage of security measures, immigration courts and holding facilities.
But this is partly due to the political polarization of the immigration debate on both sides – of which the demagoguery over “Alligator Alcatraz” is a perfect example.
