The Abominable Sadism of “Alligator Auschwitz”

Floridians know what it’s like to wait weeks or months for government aid after a natural disaster. But amazingly, Governor Ron DeSantis has worked with federal officials to create a harsh outdoor, tent-based detention camp in the Everglades that state officials are proudly calling “Alligator Alcatraz.” They will probably finish this concentration camp for 3,000 detained migrants, complete with showers, this week. It’s expected to cost about $450 million a year, and will be funded using FEMA funds.

Within hours of the first news reports, folks at Bluesky were calling it “Alligator Auschwitz.” We shouldn’t minimize the cruelty of a Nazi death camp. But the two have more than a little in common.

The people who wind up there will be mainly chosen by ethnicity, and almost certainly be convicted of no crime. The lawmakers’ goal is not merely confinement but suffering. At least the poor souls who wound up at Alcatraz, California’s infamous island prison, got due process. They were deterred from escaping by freezing cold waters and the rumor of sharks; these prisoners will be in mosquito-infested swampland surrounded by alligators and pythons. (Trump wanted to reopen Alcatraz, which was transformed from a prison to a museum about 40 years ago; now he is getting his own version.)

But Republicans are bragging about their cruel ingenuity, and using it as a fundraising tool. The Florida Republican Party is selling “Alligator Alcatraz” swag (I’m not linking; trust me). The camp, without air-conditioning, is expected to open this week, as temperatures top 100 degrees.

While Americans gather to celebrate their freedom on July 4, they can be proud that alligators in the environmentally protected Florida Everglades are keeping them safe (along with roughly 100 Florida National Guard troops, and that number will climb).

Progressive Florida Representative Maxwell Frost has denounced it as a “cruel spectacle.” This kind of performative fascist cruelty is not new, or unique to the reign of Donald Trump. Remember Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio, who built tent prisons in the blazing desert heat and made the male inmates wear pink underwear, a nice emasculating touch? (Arpaio immediately endorsed Trump back in 2015.) But MAGA Republicans have perfected the art of the cruel spectacle: migrant children ripped from their parents and living in cages, toddlers wandering alone, crying for their mothers, in Trump’s first term. More recently, the very public humiliation of detained Central and South American men, chained and crouching as their heads were shaved in a notoriously cruel Salvadoran prison. Then posed, shirtless, stacked upon one another, for a photo op with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi “Cruella” Noem. It was cruelty porn.

“Alligator Auschwitz,” though, might be a new apex of public sadism.

I assume we’ll see Noem there too, and maybe the secretary of sadism, Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff. Miller seems to be a driving force behind the very public kidnappings of mothers and fathers, torn from their children by masked men claiming to be ICE and other scenes of desolation: a once bustling taco truck abandoned, its food rotting in the Los Angeles sun; empty agricultural fields in California’s Central Valley, crops there rotting too. “In the fields, I would say 70% of the workers are gone,” a sixth-generation Ventura County farmer told Reuters. “If 70% of your workforce doesn’t show up, 70% of your crop doesn’t get picked and can go bad in one day.”

All of this is likely to get worse: broken families, rotting food, deliberate public spectacles of cruelty. Convicted January 6 seditionist and Proud Boys founder Enrique Tarrio has named himself the “ICERAID CZAR,” and called out to enlist his members to assist in deportations. For now, he’s peddling an app that lets his supporters report people they suspect are here illegally to ICE, and be rewarded in some kind of cryptocurrency. But it’s not hard to imagine legions of Proud Boys, known for their violence, personally helping ICE agents—who have already been criticized for wearing plainclothes and face coverings, making the difference between them almost imperceptible—arrest folks suspected of being here illegally. (Trump, you’ll recall, pardoned Tarrio and liberated him from a 22-year prison sentence.)

Not surprisingly, Trump is expected to attend the opening of his “Alligator Alcatraz” on Tuesday. Luckily, a wide coalition of Florida environmentalists, Indian tribal leaders, immigrant activists and clergy are expected to be out in force, despite the swampy heat. We can’t be numbed into complacency by the constant onslaught of indecency. We’re entering a new realm of cruelty porn.