The Florida migrant gulag is what occurs when the depravities of colonialist overseas coverage are grew to become inward.
A Florida Freeway Patrol officer seems on as protesters acquire to call for the closure of the immigrant detention middle referred to as “Alligator Alcatraz” on the Dade-Collier Coaching and Transition Airport in Ochopee, Florida, on July 22, 2025.
(Chandan Khanna / AFP by means of Getty Photographs)
They’re calling it Alligator Alcatraz—a sprawling migrant detention middle deep within the Florida wetlands, surrounded by way of flood zones, razor twine, and a way of risk. Crawling with each literal and governmental predators, it used to be constructed no longer simply to procedure, however to intimidate. ICE buses arrive day by day. Surveillance cameras and Nationwide Guard patrols shed light on: it is a jail, no longer a sanctuary. The ones deemed “unwelcome” on this nation shall be caged right here and forgotten.
Officers declare the power will redefine the deportation pipeline. They’re proper—simply no longer how they believe. That’s as a result of Alligator Alcatraz isn’t a brand new invention. It’s the newest incarnation of a gadget designed to not welcome the displaced, however to include, punish, and erase them. It’s the logical endpoint of many years of militarized US coverage at house and out of the country.
In June, President Trump bypassed California’s governor and deployed Marines and Nationwide Guard troops to Los Angeles to lend a hand ICE raids in residential neighborhoods. Army group of workers patrolled faculty drop-offs and hospitals. Cameras rolled as households had been separated on sidewalks. Days later, Trump publicly urged Zohran Mamdani—a US citizen and New York mayoral candidate of South Asian descent—will have to be arrested and deported.
This isn’t a glitch within the gadget. It’s the gadget—warnings embedded in spectacle.
We aren’t witnessing a surprising surge in xenophobia. We’re witnessing the convergence of histories — immigration enforcement, racial keep an eye on, and overseas coverage merging into one carceral undertaking. The result’s a home counterinsurgency device, subtle over many years, now grew to become inward.
Get started in Guatemala, 1954. The CIA overthrew Jacobo Árbenz after he threatened to redistribute land and lower into US industry pursuits. The coup plunged the rustic right into a civil conflict that lasted 36 years, killed greater than 200,000 other folks, and despatched refugees fleeing north. A lot of the ones refugees or their descendants may now face detention or deportation.
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The trend repeated around the area. The USA-backed ousting of Salvador Allende in Chile. The civil conflict in El Salvador, the place American funded armed demise squads and displaced just about 1 / 4 of the inhabitants. In Honduras, the 2009 US-backed coup sparked a political cave in this is nonetheless riding tens of hundreds north to the border each and every 12 months.
Those migrations hint the scars of US overseas coverage. As historian Greg Grandin writes, Latin The united states turned into “empire’s workshop”—a trying out flooring for counterinsurgency ways that will ultimately go back house.
When migrants arrive on the southern border, they’re crossing fault traces created by way of the USA thru army support, financial coercion, and covert operations. The so-called border disaster isn’t the made from random chaos. It’s the empire’s go back glide.
Within the Nineteen Eighties, Chilly Conflict good judgment fused with the Conflict on Medication. Surveillance expanded. Native police had been militarized. Deficient and immigrant neighborhoods had been redefined as danger zones. After 9/11, issues intensified once more. Tactics subtle in Iraq and Afghanistan— biometric monitoring, drone surveillance, predictive policing—had been imported wholesale into immigration enforcement. ICE, DHS, and CBP absorbed a wartime good judgment.
And with them got here the architects of conflict itself.
In the back of the biometric gates of Alligator Alcatraz lie the fingerprints of The united states’s maximum robust protection contractors. Raytheon, Palantir, and Lockheed Martin— companies as soon as identified for cruise missiles and drone moves—now provide the surveillance, facial reputation tool, and virtual monitoring equipment used to police the immigrants.
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Those engines of containment perform with bipartisan blessing.
From Reagan to Clinton, Bush to Biden, the way has remained in large part the similar: deal with migration as a danger to include, no longer a outcome 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-Leader” from immigrant rights advocates. His management expanded detention quotas, surveillance systems, and felony frameworks that long run presidents would inherit and escalate. Despite the fact that he later narrowed priorities to concentrate on critical offenders and up to date arrivals, the shift got here too overdue—and with out dismantling the underlying equipment.
That fortified gadget used to be passed to Trump, who wasted no time weaponizing it—turning immigration into theater, threatening naturalized voters, and staging mass raids for cable information intake. However the good judgment of punishment over coverage, of surveillance over sanctuary, didn’t get started with Trump— and it didn’t finish with him.
Now, underneath his 2nd time period, the infrastructure is metastasizing. In July, the management introduced $608 million to states keen to duplicate Florida’s detention fashion—an incentive for governors to construct their very own “Alligator Alcatraz” the usage of fast-track emergency powers. Texas, Arizona, and Louisiana have all expressed hobby. Florida’s prototype—in-built simply 8 days with $245 million in federal contracts—is a deterrence fashion packaged for nationwide rollout.
Lately, over 56,000 individuals are held in ICE detention on any given evening—a document top and a 40% build up over final 12 months. Just about 72% don’t have any felony historical past. With overcrowding mounting, reviews of bodily and emotional abuse proliferate: migrants compelled to face within the blazing solar for hours, held in disgusting and dangerous stipulations, denied felony suggest, and separated from youngsters with out transparent reunification plans. Those are routine options of a gadget optimized for disorientation. And nonetheless, the budgets swell. Masses of tens of millions materialize for immediate building and mass detention, whilst requires livable wages, healthcare, or functioning faculties are met with shrugs and spreadsheets.
The query is rarely how we find the money for care—handiest why we stay opting for cages.
Closing month, Congress handed the One Giant Gorgeous Invoice Act, a sweeping spending measure that slashes investment for Medicaid and SNAP whilst allocating just about $170 billion to immigration enforcement— making ICE the biggest federal legislation enforcement company. A large proportion of that investment will glide to personal jail operators and protection contractors in the back of 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 benefit.
As historian Kelly Lytle Hernández reminds us, ICE’s ancestry lines again to slave patrols and colonial policing. What as soon as pursued the enslaved now goals the displaced. The equipment have advanced—drones as an alternative of canines, algorithms as an alternative of chains—however the goal stays the similar: seize and keep an eye on.
And increasingly more, even dissent turns into a deportable offense. Felony observers have documented ICE raids at church buildings, faculties, and hospitals. Households torn aside no longer accidentally, however by way of technique. The purpose isn’t simply elimination. It’s worry.
I’ve spoken with migrant staff who say lately’s worry mirrors the violence they as soon as fled. The helicopters had been American then, too—simply flown by way of others. Now they hover over US towns with the similar intent: detain, divide, disappear.
But even underneath those stipulations, resistance endures. Detainees level starvation moves. Felony advocates sue. Communities construct rapid-response networks and mutual support methods. However the device grinds on.
Thinker Aimé Césaire warned that colonial violence at all times boomerangs again house. Hannah Arendt cautioned that totalitarianism starts when imperial strategies flip inward—when whole populations are solid as inner enemies.
We’ve reached that second. A country that when exported counterinsurgency now enacts it on home soil.
Alligator Alcatraz isn’t an outlier. This is a sign flare.
The surveillance state that when patrolled Fallujah now screens Fresno. The protection contractors that when armed overseas insurgencies now organize migrant detention contracts. The felony structure that when interned Eastern American citizens now justifies raids on faculties and mosques.
Immigration enforcement isn’t damaged. It’s operating precisely because it used to be designed to—to self-discipline exertions, suppress dissent, and beef up a racial and financial order.
We will have to prevent asking methods to repair a gadget constructed to punish. We will have to ask why we stay 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 goals the country’s soul.
“Empire out of the country involves tyranny at house,” Arendt warned us. The tyranny has landed.
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