President Donald Trump is set to tour a new immigrant detention prison near Florida’s alligator-infested Everglades on Tuesday.
Dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” the temporary facility would house more than 3,000 people in tents in the stifling Florida humidity, where temperatures routinely climb above 90 degrees.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt touted the facility, which was announced by Florida's GOP Attorney General James Uthmeier on June 19 and could open as soon as July 1.
"The only way out is a one-way flight. It is isolated and surrounded by dangerous wildlife. ... This is an efficient and low-cost way to help carry out the largest mass deportation campaign in American history," Leavitt said during a press briefing Monday.
Trump is no doubt excited to visit the facility, as he loves inhumane prisons and has long fantasized about using dangerous wildlife to keep immigrants out of the United States. Trump admitted in an interview with Fox News Tuesday that the concept of the facility is that immigrants who seek to escape are eaten by alligators.
"I guess that's the concept. This is not a nice business. I guess that's the concept," Trump said.
Of course, experts say the facility—which is being constructed with Federal Emergency Management Agency funds—is not likely to be cost effective, as Leavitt claimed.
"As someone who has studied the costs of detention centers, I can tell you for a fact that this facility will run at a cost substantially higher than average," Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, wrote on X. "Detention tent camps are always more expensive to operate than brick and mortar facilities with permanent infrastructure."
The location of Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz”
But Alligator Alcatraz—which sounds disturbingly like a concentration camp—is just the Trump administration’s latest tactic to torture immigrants.
Masked ICE agents have been abducting both undocumented immigrants and U.S. citizens, whisking them off to detention centers to meet an arbitrary quota of 3,000 arrests per day, as set by racist, sociopathic White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. Some of the immigrants who have been detained have even died in ICE custody, including a Cuban man who had lived in the United States for 60 years.
The Trump administration has also sent immigrants to El Salvador’s notoriously violent CECOT prison without due process and against the orders of a federal judge. Immigrants have also been sent to South Sudan, even though they have zero ties to the African nation. The Trump administration is also deporting hundreds of other immigrants to Guantanamo Bay, the infamous torture prison in Cuba.
Ultimately, Trump’s deportation agenda is unpopular with voters, who view him as being too harsh.
But rather than moderate, Trump and his GOP bootlickers are seeking ways to be even more cruel to immigrants with facilities like Alligator Alcatraz, which Republicans are promoting with merchandise.
The moral bankruptcy knows no bounds.
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