Alligators and Aliens

The Trump regime ups the stakes on its anti-immigrant campaign.

Photo from James Martin, AmericaMag, on Twitter.

The Trump regime’s weaponization of our immigration system swung into full, appalling gear yesterday with three notable developments.

First, the GOP’s budget bill narrowly passed the Senate, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking 51-50 vote. Buried in the pages and figures of the budget are tens of billions of new dollars for immigration enforcement. The number of ICE agents is about to swell to private militia size, and there’s money now to build detention centers to hold up to 125,000 people at a time.

Second, Trump visited a hastily constructed facility in the Florida Everglades that MAGA calls “Alligator Alcatraz.” It’s so named because of the dangerous alligators, crocodiles and pythons in the wetlands around it, which are intended to terrify detainees and deter their escape.

Third, at a press conference yesterday, Trump signaled his intent to weaponize denaturalization of U.S. citizens. Trump was asked what he would do in response to Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani’s pledge to not allow ICE to arrest “criminal aliens” in New York City. Trump responded, “Well, then, we’ll have to arrest him.” He added, “Look, we don’t need a communist in this country,” then threatened Mamdani directly. “A lot of people are saying he’s here illegally. We’re gonna look at everything.”

Make no mistake. Trump’s police state, enforced by unaccountable, anonymous secret police, is quickly taking shape. Our federal legislators are handing him the billions in resources needed to build it, red state governors like Ron DeSantis are constructing concentration camps to hold human beings in wired cages, and Trump is already threatening to strip a political opponent of his U.S. citizenship and deport him.

Tens of billions for Homeland Security and ICE

The Medicaid cuts and tax breaks for the wealthy in the Republican budget get most of the media attention. But there’s also an eye-poppingly huge sum of money earmarked for Homeland Security and ICE. And that money, according to JD Vance, is the most important expenditure in the budget, calling everything else “immaterial” and labeling Medicaid policy nothing more than “minutiae.”

As Don Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, noted,

The spending is so large that it defies easy understanding. For example, ICE will receive a 365% increase in detention, spending $45 billion. For context, this is more than the combined budget for all 50 state prison systems. The current budget for the federal Bureau of Prisons is just over $8.3 billion.

Moynihan notes that the ICE detention budget is larger than the former budget for USAID, and that the increase is larger than budget cuts to education, SNAP, and larger than cuts to NIH, CDC and cancer research combined.

“It is on the scale of the type of supplemental budgets that the US passed when engaged in foreign wars,” Moynihan warns.

Once you spend that much on internal security, the system—which is profit-driven by the companies providing the apparatus—begins to feed on itself. It will demand ever more bodies in a supercharged prison/industrial complex.

The opportunities for waste, fraud and abuse also skyrocket, particularly as this regime cares almost nothing for competitive bidding, accountability or conflicts of interest.

This sudden influx of funds is not happening in a political vacuum. News media and social media are filled with images of gun-waving ICE agents rounding up ordinary, hardworking immigrants, many with decades of roots in their communities. Federal authorities are manhandling, indicting and arresting civic leaders, from judges to senators, who dare to stand up for the rights of immigrants in their communities. A majority of Americans are now opposed to the mass deportation policy and tactics and do not want to see them on steroids, funded by tens of billions in new money allocations.

Brutality as entertainment

While the Senate was busy approving tens of billions for a new police state, Trump took a trip down to Florida, where Gov. Ron DeSantis was more than happy to partake in a gross spectacle of brutality and racism alongside him.

During the visit, Trump was near giddy with excitement. He reportedly has always wanted to use animals such as snakes and alligators to keep migrants from crossing our Southern border. According to former Trump aide Miles Taylor, during his first term, Trump once even called up his former Homeland Security Secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, to tell her he wanted to explore what it would take to build a 2,000 mile moat and fill it with snakes and alligators.

During the detention facility visit, Trump said to reporters, “We’re surrounded by miles of treacherous swampland and the only way out is, really, deportation.” He added he “wouldn’t want to run through the Everglades for long” and anyone who attempted to do so would be met by “a lot of cops in the form of alligators.”

The MAGA base treats this camp like some kind of entertainment venue, complete with merchandise. Podcaster Benny Johnson posted a clip to social media enthusiastically promoting “official Alligator Alcatraz merch” while asking his audience whether they would “rock this drip.”

On social media, the White House is trolling with images like this:

Beyond the dangers outside its perimeter, the facility has cages made of fencing to hold detainees, giving it the look of a modern concentration camp.

It will also cost a whopping $450 million per year to operate.

Per reporting by the BBC, the facility will hold thousands of immigrants destined for deportation:

The facility is designed to hold 3,000 detainees, with the first expected to arrive as soon as Wednesday. A second facility—meant to house 2,000 people—is going to be built near Jacksonville.

And that’s just the beginning. Trump hopes the detention center will be a model for future similar facilities, and his regime is working with GOP-run states such as Louisiana to find other locations.

Currently there are an estimated 56,000 migrants being held in ICE detention facilities around the country, the highest number since 2019, during Trump’s last term.

One last point here. Those who know the history of slavery and racism in the U.S. will quickly recognize the messaging behind threats of feeding brown-skinned migrants to alligators and crocodiles. A popular depiction during slavery and beyond in the South was of Black children as “bait” for alligators (warning: gruesome images)

Trump’s “Alligator Alcatraz” is the heir to these dehumanizing, racist taunts and depictions. Through his messaging, he leads his followers to cheer for violence and bloodshed and imagine actual deaths of immigrants from wild animals, all for the “crime” of being undocumented.

Targeting political opponents

Deportations have been on Trump’s mind, not only as a way to conduct ethnic cleansing, but as a weapon against his perceived political opponents, rivals and enemies.

There was a telling moment at a press conference on Tuesday. Trump was asked about the “communist” Democratic mayoral candidate for New York City, Zohran Mamdani, and what his thoughts were after Mamdani stated he would defy ICE if it tried to conduct roundups of immigrants within the city.

Trump said he thought Mamdani should be arrested, and he mused about deporting him if he were here “illegally.” (Mamdani is a naturalized U.S. citizen.)

As Robert Mackey of the Guardian observed,

This partisan commentary masquerading as a question, inviting Trump to attack Mamdani, was asked by Benny Johnson, a far-right influencer twice fired by news outlets for plagiarism who was then recruited by a pro-Trump outlet covertly funded by the Kremlin

Mamdani responded publicly to the threat, blasting it not just “an attack on our democracy but an attempt to send a message to every New Yorker who refuses to hide in the shadows: if you speak up, they will come for you.” He added defiantly, “We will not accept this intimidation.”

Trump’s attacks may generate an unintended effect. The Democratic establishment has been slow to embrace a democratic socialist like Mamdani as its banner bearer for the mayoral race this fall, despite his massive and unprecedented electoral victory. But Trump’s targeting of him has given them significant political cover, and now officials such as Gov. Kathy Hochul have seized the moment.

“I don’t care if you’re the President of the United States,” Hochul declared. “If you threaten to unlawfully go after one of our neighbors, you’re picking a fight with 20 million New Yorkers — starting with me.”

Add this New Yorker’s name to that list.