'Alligator Alcatraz' showcases Trump's surreal brand of stylized cruelty

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/12/alligator-alcatraz-trump-cruelty

‘Alligator Alcatraz’ showcases Trump’s surreal brand of stylized cruelty
Moira Donegan
Immigrants are living in brutal conditions at the Florida detention camp, built on a sense of scripted unreality
Sat 12 Jul 2025 07.00 EDT

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Donald Trump apparently liked what he saw, because the camp was erected over the course of mere days, and Trump toured the facility on 1 July, standing in a red hat that read “GULF OF AMERICA” before a series of chain-link cages filled with rows of bunk beds. The facility received its first prisoners the next day. Almost immediately, DeSantis’s team began selling merchandise for the facility, for Trump supporters who want to advertise their enthusiasm for mass deportation.

It has long been a feature of Trump’s regime that displays of domination and cruelty have to be made in public, in a style of vulgar, over-the-top obviousness. Branded like a low-budget movie, the Everglades site combines the extraordinary racism and contempt for human rights of the Trump anti-immigration effort with the sleazy camp of his movement’s style of masculinity. “Alligator Alcatraz” is the kind of place the hero would have to escape from in a television show, or in a level of a video game, and its stylized cruelty is supposed to seem hyperreal, even uncanny. Perhaps this sense of scripted unreality surrounding what is in fact a concentration camp is supposed to help Trump’s supporters and the rest of the American people partake in the pleasures of domination while avoiding the recognition that the horror and pain they are inflicting is real.

But it is real. The camp has been open, now, for just over a week, and already one prisoner has been hospitalized, reportedly as a result of the camp’s inhumane conditions. According to news reports, many of the men there were not permitted to shower for days. Broken air conditioning left men alternately freezing and sweltering in the heat. Detainees report that they are only being fed one meal a day, and that the food has been infested with maggots. There is no secure line by which the prisoners – who, again, are being detained on civil, not criminal, violations – can speak to their lawyers without being monitored. Toilets don’t flush, and the facility is infested with bugs. It is not clear that the concentration camp, housed in the low-elevation swamps of south Florida, can withstand the rains and winds that are typical of the east coast’s summer hurricane season. It has already flooded.

If the immigrants are kept in these conditions, more of them will die. They will die of heat, disease and exposure; they will die when heavy winds from a hurricane rip the camp’s tents apart or send their metal beams flying; they will die when they are left without edible food or drinkable water for long stretches in severe weather; they will die when the stagnant human waste in the unflushed toilets and the tight quarters with scores of other immigrant strangers causes disease to spread. These are not conditions that can sustain human life, let alone human rights or dignity. For Trump and his followers, that might be the point.