The more I find out about this place, the more disgusted, and *worried* I get. Right now, it’s immigrants. But if this works, who’s to say it won’t be done again and again? Who’s to say that it couldn’t be you or me? I don’t like this trend. It’s dark and brutal. Our country deserves better than this. From Thom Hartmann via Raw Story:
Let’s stop pretending. Let’s stop dancing around the language, around the morality, and around the history. What’s being built in the Florida Everglades, for example — what they’re calling “Alligator Alcatraz” — is not just another immigration facility. It’s a political prison engineered not merely to detain, but to humiliate, dehumanize, and broadcast terror. It’s America’s first open-air symbol that our democracy is not just dying: it is being dissected publicly, cruelly, and with calculation.
Absolutely. No wonder the facility is nicknamed Alligator Auschwitz. It’s not a “detention center”. It’s a symbol, put right out there, of America going to hell. What Agent Orange did through the Big F-ed Up Bill was bad enough, but this? Oh, no, this is worse. And he is denying an association with it, but we know better. Does it only belong to Ron DeSatan? Yea, right. They even put up a sign that it’s Alligator Alcatraz. That hit hard.
When Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany, the first thing he built wasn’t a tank or a warship. It was a “detention facility.” The Dachau concentration camp, opened in March 1933 just three months after he became Chancellor, was described at the time as “the first concentration camp for political prisoners.” As the Dachau memorial site explains: “From the very beginning, the camp was a place of brutality. During the first years, most prisoners were political opponents of the Nazi regime.” They weren’t criminals. They weren’t traitors. They were “undesirable immigrants.” Trade unionists. Communists. Jews. Catholics. Writers. Teachers. Students. They were anyone the regime considered a threat or a convenient enemy. The Nazis didn’t hide Dachau. They advertised it. It was a warning. A message. Step out of line, and this is where you go. Sound familiar?
I think so. I’m lucky because of the color of my skin, and don’t think I don’t know it! People are going to be taken to this place, and then they will disappear. If ICE grabs them, it’s now being used for civil charges, which don’t guarantee a right to a lawyer. And if they’re incommunicado, well, that’s it. No one will have any idea where someone is. And if that person disappears, they have no way of knowing what happened. That’s gotta hurt, and the hurt will never go away.
Alligator Alcatraz isn’t just a prison. It’s a mirror. And it’s asking us: Who are we, really? The answer, as always, is up to us. We must engage:
- Lawsuits: Civil liberties groups and Indigenous tribes must continue challenging this facility in court. Environmental statutes, tribal treaties, and international human rights laws can still be leveraged.
- Documentation: Journalists must risk everything to document the construction, conditions, and policies of Alligator Alcatraz. We need eyes in the swamp, or darkness will reign.
- Direct Action: Peaceful protest, civil disobedience, and national mobilization must become central. This is a fight for the moral compass of our country.
- Language: Stop calling this a “detention center.” Call it what it is: a political prison. A migrant concentration camp. Words matter.
- History: Teach your neighbors about Dachau. Show them how it started. Not with mass extermination, but with silence. With a single camp, surrounded by a fence, where people were put “for their own protection.”
Dachau was the beginning of something monstrous. Let Alligator Alcatraz be the end of something: the end of our innocence, the end of our complacency, and the start of a renewed resistance. Because if we wait too long, we may wake up one day and discover we are no longer the land of the free, but only the home of the caged.
There you have it. He said it better than I could, although I found the picture elsewhere. There is a lot more in the article. The link is at the top. Please go read it. Every American with a heart and a soul needs to read this. We may be small, but things can start small. Look at the protests thus far. They grew. So can we. Thanks for sticking with me!
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Yes.
It’s a concentration camp, not a prison.
Alligator Auschwitz is a better term than Alligator Alcatraz.
Exactly. It’s only going to get worse from here.