Fascism in Florida: Building the Horrors to Come

There are times I hate living in this godforsaken deep Republican hellhole that is Florida.

Pandering to the harsh anti-immigrant war on our American communities, Governor DeSantis and his cronies are fast-tracking a migrant detention center in South Florida (via Rachel Treisman at NPR):

Despite resistance, Florida officials are turning an airfield in the Everglades into a migrant detention center, which they've nicknamed "Alligator Alcatraz" due to its proximity to the apex predators.

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier proposed the project last week, saying in a video posted to X that, in support of the Trump administration's crackdown on illegal immigration, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis had asked state leaders to identify places for temporary detention facilities.

"I think this is the best one, as I call it: Alligator Alcatraz," Uthmeier said, referencing the infamous prison island in San Francisco Bay.

The goddamned trumpshirts can't give up their fantasies about Alcatraz, can they?

Uthmeier told the right-wing podcast The Benny Show on Monday that the federal government had approved his plan that morning, with the facility on track to open the first week of July. He said it would have 5,000 beds — half of its total capacity — by "early July."

"Alligator Alcatraz will expand facilities and bed space in just days, thanks to our partnership with Florida," the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) later wrote on X.

DeSantis is using emergency powers to take over the site, which is owned by Miami-Dade County.

But not everyone is on board.

Environmental organizations and immigration advocates have expressed concerns about multiple aspects of the project, from the potential consequences on the fragile Everglades ecosystem to the well-being of the people who will be detained there, especially in the hot summer months.

If anyone's paying attention to the overwhelmed ICE "detention facilities" right now, there are serious overcrowding, food availability, and wellness problems to where people are dying in custody. Even this horrific attempt to alleviate crowding at existing facilities won't stop this new prison - it's not a detention center, trust me - from being overcrowded itself. Stephen Miller wants his fucking quotas filled, and doesn't give a damn about treating his and ICE's victims with any basic decency or civil rights.

From what people can see happening at the airfield - there are already protestors gathering, bless them - it's looking like a bunch of portable classrooms getting converted into barracks, which I guarantee you will not be adequately air-conditioned. I doubt there will be any serviceable water or sewage considering that abandoned airfield would need months of dedicated construction efforts to make it genuinely livable.

This isn't going to be a safe or healthy place to get imprisoned.

And the majority of people getting sent to this forsaken swampy Alcatraz aren't going to be gangbangers, or criminals, or violent people. It's going to be nurses, mothers, veterans, families, honest-to-God citizens.

This isn't even really a prison: it's a goddamned concentration camp, and the first of many under trump.

This is ethnic cleansing, the likes of which we've seen in Nazi Germany, and the Balkans in the 1990s, and dozens of other places we used to pretend we'd never be like. Except that is for the history of us punishing Native Americans in the 19th Century and Japanese residents during the Second World War.

This is us at our worst, America. We need to fight back against what trump and Miller and their ICE thugs and their wingnut allies are doing to our communities and our neighbors.