The Florida migrant gulag is what occurs when the depravities of colonialist international coverage are turned inward.
A Florida Freeway Patrol officer appears to be like on as protesters collect to demand the closure of the immigrant detention heart referred to as “Alligator Alcatraz” on the Dade-Collier Coaching and Transition Airport in Ochopee, Florida, on July 22, 2025.
(Chandan Khanna / AFP by way of Getty Photos)
They’re calling it “Alligator Alcatraz”—a sprawling migrant detention heart deep within the Florida wetlands, surrounded by flood zones, razor wire, and a way of menace. Crawling with each literal and governmental predators, it was constructed not simply to course of however to intimidate. ICE buses arrive each day. Surveillance cameras and National Guard patrols clarify: It is a jail, not a sanctuary. These 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 not how they assume. That’s as a result of Alligator Alcatraz isn’t a brand new invention. It’s the most recent incarnation of a system 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 dwelling and overseas.
In June, President Trump bypassed California’s governor and deployed Marines and Nationwide Guard troops to Los Angeles to help ICE raids in residential neighborhoods. Navy personnel patrolled faculty drop-offs and hospitals. Cameras rolled as households have been separated on sidewalks. Days later, Trump publicly suggested that Zohran Mamdani—a US citizen and New York mayoral candidate of South Asian descent—must be arrested and deported.
This isn’t a glitch within the system. It’s the system—warnings embedded in spectacle.
We’re not witnessing a sudden surge in xenophobia. We’re witnessing the convergence of histories—immigration enforcement, racial management, and international coverage merging into one carceral mission. The result’s a home counterinsurgency machine, refined over many years, now turned inward.
Begin in Guatemala, 1954. The CIA overthrew Jacobo Árbenz after he threatened to redistribute land and lower into US enterprise pursuits. The coup plunged the nation right into a civil battle that lasted 36 years, killed greater than 200,000 individuals, and despatched refugees fleeing north. Lots of these refugees or their descendants might now face detention or deportation.
Present Difficulty
The sample repeated throughout the area. The US-backed ousting of Salvador Allende in Chile. The civil battle in El Salvador, the place American funded armed loss of life squads and displaced practically 1 / 4 of the inhabitants. In Honduras, the 2009 US-backed coup sparked a political collapse that’s nonetheless driving tens of hundreds north to the border every year.
These migrations hint the scars of US international coverage. As historian Greg Grandin writes, Latin America turned “empire’s workshop”—a testing floor for counterinsurgency ways that might ultimately return dwelling.
When migrants arrive on the southern border, they’re crossing fault traces created by the US via navy assist, financial coercion, and covert operations. The so-called border disaster isn’t the product of random chaos. It’s the empire’s return circulation.
Within the Nineteen Eighties, Chilly Warfare logic fused with the Warfare on Medicine. Surveillance expanded. Native police have been militarized. Poor and immigrant neighborhoods have been redefined as risk zones. After 9/11, issues intensified once more. Methods refined in Iraq and Afghanistan— biometric monitoring, drone surveillance, predictive policing—have been imported wholesale into immigration enforcement. ICE, DHS, and CBP absorbed a wartime logic.
And with them got here the architects of battle itself.
Behind the biometric gates of Alligator Alcatraz lie the fingerprints of America’s strongest protection contractors. Raytheon, Palantir, and Lockheed Martin— corporations as soon as recognized for cruise missiles and drone strikes—now supply the surveillance, facial recognition software program, and digital monitoring instruments used to police the immigrants.
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These engines of containment function with bipartisan blessing.
From Reagan to Clinton, Bush to Biden, the method has remained largely the identical: deal with migration as a risk to include, not a consequence 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, earning the nickname “Deporter in Chief” from immigrant rights advocates. His administration expanded detention quotas, surveillance packages, and legal frameworks that future presidents would inherit and escalate. Although he later narrowed priorities to concentrate on critical offenders and up to date arrivals, the shift got here too late—and with out dismantling the underlying equipment.
That fortified system was handed to Trump, who wasted no time weaponizing it—turning immigration into theater, threatening naturalized residents, and staging mass raids for cable information consumption. However the logic of punishment over safety, of surveillance over sanctuary, didn’t begin with Trump—and it didn’t finish with him.
Now, below his second time period, the infrastructure is metastasizing. In July, the administration offered $608 million to states keen to duplicate Florida’s detention mannequin—an incentive for governors to construct their very own Alligator Alcatrazes utilizing fast-track emergency powers. Texas, Arizona, and Louisiana have all expressed curiosity. Florida’s prototype—in-built simply eight days with $245 million in federal contracts—is a deterrence mannequin packaged for nationwide rollout.
At the moment, over 56,000 persons are held in ICE detention on any given night time—a file excessive and a 40 % improve over final 12 months. Practically 72 % have no criminal history. With overcrowding mounting, stories of bodily and emotional abuse proliferate: migrants forced to stand within the blazing solar for hours, held in disgusting and unsafe conditions, denied legal counsel, and separated from kids with out clear reunification plans. These are recurring options of a system optimized for disorientation. And nonetheless, the budgets swell. A whole bunch of thousands and thousands materialize for fast building and mass detention, whereas requires livable wages, healthcare, or functioning faculties are met with shrugs and spreadsheets.
The query is rarely how we afford care—solely why we hold selecting cages.
Final month, Congress passed the One Massive Lovely Invoice Act, a sweeping spending measure that slashes funding for Medicaid and SNAP whereas allocating practically $170 billion to immigration enforcement—making ICE the largest federal law enforcement agency. An enormous share of that funding will circulation to non-public jail operators and protection contractors behind detention websites like Alligator Alcatraz. That is intentional. Caging the displaced is now a bipartisan price range precedence.
This isn’t about safety. It’s about funding—in worry, in punishment, in revenue.
As historian Kelly Lytle Hernández reminds us, ICE’s ancestry traces again to slave patrols and colonial policing. What as soon as pursued the enslaved now targets the displaced. The instruments have developed—drones as a substitute of canine, algorithms as a substitute of chains—however the function stays the identical: seize and management.
And more and more, even dissent turns into a deportable offense. Authorized observers have documented ICE raids at churches, schools, and hospitals. Households torn aside not by chance, however by technique. The purpose isn’t simply removing. It’s worry.
I’ve spoken with migrant employees who say immediately’s worry mirrors the violence they as soon as fled. The helicopters have been American then, too—simply flown by others. Now they hover over US cities with the identical intent: detain, divide, disappear.
But, even below these situations, resistance endures. Detainees stage starvation strikes. Authorized advocates sue. Communities construct rapid-response networks and mutual assist methods. However the machine grinds on.
Thinker Aimé Césaire warned that colonial violence all the time boomerangs again dwelling. Hannah Arendt cautioned that totalitarianism begins when imperial strategies flip inward—when total populations are forged as inner enemies.
We’ve reached that second. A nation that when exported counterinsurgency now enacts it on home soil.
Alligator Alcatraz is just not an outlier. It’s a sign flare.
The surveillance state that when patrolled Fallujah now screens Fresno. The protection contractors that when armed international insurgencies now handle migrant detention contracts. The authorized structure that when interned Japanese People now justifies raids on faculties and mosques.
Immigration enforcement is just not damaged. It’s working precisely because it was designed to—to self-discipline labor, suppress dissent, and reinforce a racial and financial order.
We should cease asking the way to repair a system constructed to punish. We should ask why we hold 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 targets the nation’s soul.
“Empire overseas entails tyranny at dwelling,” Arendt warned us. The tyranny has landed.
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