Red Flag Alert for the USA #6: ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ & the Emerging Internal Concentration Camp System

The Lemkin Institute unequivocally condemns the Trump administration’s construction of the ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ immigration detention center and the inhumane treatment, unhygienic conditions, and rampant human rights abuses inflicted upon people detained in the facility. We further condemn the increasingly genocidal rhetoric utilized by the Trump Administration and its affiliated media in their promotion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) operations and in the targeting of immigrant communities.

We laud the brave efforts by the Miccosukee Tribe to shut down Alligator Alcatraz in defense of their access to, and the environmental integrity of, their historical lands, and the federal courts for halting Alligator Alcatraz’s construction. The Lemkin Institute notes that Alligator Alcatraz’s intrusion onto the Miccosukee’s lands is an act of cultural erasure grounded in past genocides against indigenous peoples in the United States.

While recent reports suggest that Alligator Alcatraz could be shut down and emptied of prisoners in the next 60 days, this will not mark the end of abusive immigration detention facilities. The hundreds of people held at Alligator Alcatraz are being transferred to other detention centers. President Trump has openly stated that this facility serves as a model for planned facilities across the US. Already, a detention center nicknamed ‘Deportation Depot’ is being built in north Florida. Detainees have also begun arriving at Fort Bliss near the US-Mexico border, where the Trump administration has ordered the construction of a $1.2 billion facility designed to house 5,000 people.

The third circuit court ruling shutting down Alligator Alcatraz rests on the fact that its construction violated federal environmental laws that require public input, consideration of alternatives, and an environmental impact statement. By building new facilities at existing prisons and military bases, the administration hopes to avoid similar legal issues. Without a ruling on the civil rights issues at stake, new facilities just as bad — or worse than — Alligator Alcatraz will continue to be built. As a harbinger of what is to come, we must pay close attention to the atrocities that have unfolded at Alligator Alcatraz.

The 30-square-mile ICE detention facility dubbed ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ was opened in the Florida Everglades on 1 July 2025 after the Trump administration re-allocated $625 million away from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to reimburse Florida’s state government for construction costs. Most of this money was paid out to private contractors such as IRG Global, which took a contract to help build Alligator Alcatraz despite having no construction background. Other beneficiaries include White Rock Quarries, which is supplying rocks to Alligator Alcatraz, and dozens of trucking companies. Grotesquely, FEMA’s Shelter and Services program, which was directly targeted by the funding reallocation, was meant to help new immigrants by providing housing, food, and other resources.

Alligator Alcatraz does not have permanent structures, electricity, or running water. It is expected to cost $450 million annually. Contrary to Trump Administration claims, a significant number of the people detained and suffering within Alligator Alcatraz have no criminal record and have broken no laws. Those sent to Alligator Alcatraz include asylum seekers exercising their legal right to seek asylum, immigrants with minor traffic violations, at least one wrongfully detained U.S. citizen, and at least one child.

The inhumane and barbaric living conditions imposed upon the detainees at Alligator Alcatraz have been documented by detainees, lawyers, former guards, and public officials. Detainees are confined to chain-link cages with only large tents for shelter and are therefore left vulnerable to the elements. Reports describe unsanitary and unsafe living conditions, inhumane treatment, physical and mental abuse of detainees, refusal of medical care, denial of access to lawyers, and a complete lack of transparency. A list of detainees verified by the Miami Herald indicates that at least 250 of a group of 700 incoming detainees had no criminal charges. Despite the Miami Herald’s findings, ICE refuses to publish an official and complete list of detainees.

The legal basis for detaining the people at Alligator Alcatraz is unclear. During a tour by lawmakers, one detainee identified himself to Democratic Florida congressman Maxwell Frost as a United States citizen. Another detainee, 56-year-old Nicaraguan Denis Alcides Solis Morales, was retroactively declared an illegal immigrant by the Trump Administration despite entering the United States under the policy of humanitarian parole in 2023. According to his nephew, Morales ended up in Alligator Alcatraz after ICE agents unexpectedly detained him on his way to a construction job in Palm Beach County.

Lawyers are routinely denied access to their clients held in Alligator Alcatraz, even in the case of a 15-year-old Mexican boy with no criminal record. When five members of Congress and twenty Florida state politicians toured Alligator Alcatraz, some of their post-tour statements condemned Alligator Alcatraz as a shoddy, dangerous, and expensive publicity stunt. Visiting lawmakers said they were not allowed to bring phones, cameras, or any other electronic devices, and state lawmakers were not allowed to bring staff. Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said representatives were only shown unused cages, though it was clear from their design that occupants must drink and brush teeth with the same water used for toilets. Each cage holds over 30 detainees, yet has only three small toilets and attached sinks. Descriptions of detainees “crammed in like sardines” demonstrate the overcrowding that is common at the facility. Insider accounts obtained by the Associated Press also detailed nutritionally deficient meals for detainees served in unsanitary conditions.

Congressman Frost said ICE denied a tour of areas in use when questioned about reports of malfunctioning toilets. ICE also refused to offer the visiting officials a tour of medical facilities, citing HIPAA laws, despite allowing medical facility tours at other detention centers. ICE prematurely ended the tour after Florida representative Angie Nixon noticed signs of rainfall and asked to see if the facility could withstand flooding. Representative Darren Soto said he found clear evidence of flooding. Local media also found the facility’s soft-sided tents had started to flood during a visit by Trump, according to video footage they gathered.

Numerous reports have also surfaced from former guards and detainees of Alligator Alcatraz’s inhumane living conditions, corroborating the concerns of Democratic state and federal lawmakers. According to Cuban detainee Leamsy “La Figuera” Isquerdo, Alligator Alcatraz does not have the capacity to hold even 400 people, saying “there's no water to take a bath [...] they only brought a meal once a day and it had maggots [and] they never take off the lights for 24 hours.” Immigration attorney Katie Blankenship also spoke about a lack of medical care, relaying an account from a 35-year-old Cuban client who told his wife that detainees go days without a shower. The woman, a 28-year-old green card holder and the mother of the couple’s 2-year-old daughter, a U.S. citizen, told the Associated Press, “they have no way to bathe, no way to wash their mouths, the toilet overflows and the floor is flooded with pee and poop. They eat once a day and have two minutes to eat. The meals have worms.”

Of particular concern is the large number of mosquitoes in the facility. In phone interviews facilitated by family members and their attorneys, detainees described the mosquitoes in the South Florida wetlands as relentless. 25-year-old Guatemalan immigrant Anderson Miranda said, “most of us have skin irritations from mosquitoes; they don’t give us spray. All of us worry that we’ll get a disease because of the mosquitoes.” 49-year-old Dominican immigrant Juan Javier Gonzalez simply said, “the mosquitoes don’t let you sleep.” One anonymous former guard said detainees are only sprayed with mosquito repellent once when they arrive. Guards are only given one can of repellent for their time at the facility. One guard told the Washington Post about conditions for the guards and detainees: “The mosquitoes are filling the bathrooms, the showers. You go in the shower, you shower with a million mosquitoes.”

Another concern is the violent and neglectful treatment detainees receive from guards. One detainee, Michael Borrego Fernandez, a Cuban national from Miami, was hospitalized after “experiencing profuse bleeding,” but didn’t get access to antibiotics when he returned to the detention center. According to a pending lawsuit, the heat and humidity caused him to leak pus out of his wounds. An unidentified Venezuelan detainee said ICE responded to detainees’ protest of Alligator Alcatraz’s conditions by leaving them “[...] without food all night.” Guards also “took a Cuban protester to a punishment cell.” Reports also surfaced on 29 August 2025, that camp guards conducted an indiscriminate mass beating and tear gassing of detainees after one pleaded for freedom to attend a deceased relative’s funeral.

Despite the U.S. government’s repeated denial of these claims, three former guards who were enticed by the high pay at Alligator Alcatraz said they quit after about a week over the conditions for staff and detainees, corroborating claims made by detainees and Democratic lawmakers. In response to all these allegations, President Trump simply said, “It might be as good as the real Alcatraz. A little controversial, but I couldn’t care less.”

There are many parallels between the U.S. government’s current policies towards so-called “illegal immigrants” and genocidal processes throughout history, including U.S. history. The bounty hunter style with which ICE has pursued arrest and detention of people suspected of being undocumented is itself reminiscent of fugitive slave hunts of the 1850s. It draws on the same human instincts as the terrifying “Jew hunts” during the Holocaust and the daily hunt for Tutsis hiding in marshes during the 1994 Genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda. The gradual stripping of rights, starting with a vilified group and moving outwards from there, is common to all modern genocidal processes that target domestic “enemies.” Whenever a state identifies a group as an internal “threat,” dehumanizes them as cosmic enemies, or concentrates them in inhumane conditions through unlawful processes, we are in the hot zone of a genocidal process.

The opening of Alligator Alcatraz, the justifications for it, and the methods used to detain people within it bear a striking resemblance to the early Nazi concentration camp system (1933-1939). The notorious concentration camp Dachau, founded in 1933 on the outskirts of Munich, was originally established as a “protective custody center” for people implicated in the Reichstag Fire, most of whom were Communists. Like Alligator Alcatraz, Dachau was justified by concerns for national security and imprisoned a group that was marginalized by the majority of middle-class Germans. It was staffed by the newly formed Schutzstaffel (SS) police unit, which was formed out of pre-existing police infrastructure and Nazi paramilitaries. Dachau drew some initial scrutiny as reports of atrocities leaked, but the German population largely felt helpless in the face of state persecution of its perceived and real opponents. Theodor Eicke, Dachau’s second commandant, encouraged the use of corporal punishment, solitary confinement, and forced labor in the camp. In May 1934, Eicke was tasked with expanding the concentration camp system, using Dachau as a model for other camps such as Sachsenhausen (1936), near Berlin, and Buchenwald (1937), near Weimar.

Importantly, Dachau existed outside of Germany’s regular prison system, just as ICE detention facilities do not fall under the Federal Bureau of Prisons or individual state Departments of Corrections, rendering them particularly vulnerable to abusive conditions. The detention of immigrants is empowered by the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), but only became a policy under President Ronald Reagan during the “War on Drugs,” when Congress amended the INA to mandate the detention of immigrants convicted of certain crimes. The use of detention expanded dramatically under President Bill Clinton, who signed the draconian Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) and the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) in 1996, both of which expanded the categories of persons who could be detained to include any non-citizen, even those legally residing in the U.S. After 9/11 these detention facilities became part of the U.S. “war on terror” and immigration was elevated to a national security concern.

ICE detention facilities currently fall under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which provides little oversight but generous financial incentives to private corrections firms and public jails and prisons to detain people arrested by ICE. The detention of immigrants grew steadily under President Obama and skyrocketed during President Trump’s first term. From 2017-2021, the Trump administration deliberately separated 4,600 children from their parents who were apprehended at the southern border to deter other families from crossing the border illegally. The forced transfer and disappearance of these children (1,360 of which still are unaccounted for) during Trump’s first term already could be considered an act of genocide. Under President Biden, after a short hiatus due to the closure of the border during the height of the pandemic, detentions returned almost to their pre-pandemic levels. The U.S. now operates the largest immigrant detention system in the world.

The steady growth of immigrant detention, which mirrored the steady growth in mass incarceration in the U.S., is now facing a crossroads. With the development of the concentration camp-style detention of immigrants – without legal basis, without due process, without oversight, and with high levels of cruelty that appear to be entirely intentional, the U.S. is facing a radicalization moment in its already shameful history of immigrant detention. The Trump Administration is focusing more than any previous administration on the arrest and detention of people inside the country, as opposed to those who have just arrived at the border – and this has brought with it all the inhumanity and horror involved in uprooting productive members of society from their communities and ripping families apart. Without legislative and judicial opposition, it is certain that the number of detention facilities like Alligator Alcatraz will skyrocket. This is especially true if President Trump is able to continue governing with dictatorial powers. In Nazi Germany, Dachau did not face judicial opposition or oversight, and therefore became the incubator of a concentration camp system that eventually consisted of over 40,000 camps across occupied Europe.

Without legislative and judicial opposition, the U.S. will also face ever-growing categories of persons who can be held at ICE concentration camps. Before World War II, in 1937, SS Chief Heinrich Himmler sought to increase the number of detainees in the concentration camp system, expanding from political dissidents to those deemed asocial or “work-shy,” to Roma-Sinti people, and eventually to foreign POWs, antifascist intellectuals, and German Jews. As Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen continued to expand, their operational funds came directly from the national budget. The Nazis also began granting controlled tours to students, government officials, and other select groups, marketing the concentration camp system as a necessary, unavoidable action to defend the homeland. After Kristallnacht in 1939, 11,000 Jews were detained in Dachau and only released on the expectation that they would permanently leave Germany. These concentration camps were training grounds for the Holocaust and also had the effect of drawing all of German society into the Nazis’s criminal conspiracy.

Though Alligator Alcatraz is, of course, not a one-to-one replica of Nazi Germany’s concentration camp system, history can offer us important lessons about how genocidal processes develop and how they appear to observers at different moments in time. Like Hitler, Trump has singled out a marginalized group to begin his authoritarian project. While the former targeted Communists and the Jewish people, both groups marginalized from the dominant Christian social order, in the U.S. so-called “illegal immigrants” are an effective first target for normalizing an authoritarian power grab and a genocidal process because of their legal vulnerability. Though staying in the U.S. illegally is not a criminal offense and the U.S. Constitution mostly applies to noncitizens, the Trump Administration and its allies, through their constant use of genocidal rhetoric, have been able to convince many Americans that illegal immigrants are criminals deserving of cruel treatment. From claims of immigrants eating pets to cruel videos mocking detentions and deportations, the Trump Administration is solidifying its normalization of cruelty and extrajudicial action so the American people will passively, if not gleefully, accept ever-expanding authoritarian overreach. Just as Hitler was able to write laws to exclude Jewish people and other “undesirables” from citizenship and legal protections, the Trump Administration has succeeded in convincing many Americans that immigrants are not protected by the U.S. Constitution and already seeks to expand its dragnet to naturalized citizens, and eventually, birthright citizens.

To meet the Administration’s immigration goals, ICE has been empowered with generous funds for a rapid expansion. With the unprecedented increase in funding for the US Department of Homeland Security designated by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBBA), we expect ICE to continue its record of illegal, inhumane, and unjust treatment of human beings at a rapid pace. Signed into public law by President Trump on July 4, the bill allocates $75 billion over the next four years to enable ICE to expand its capacity to detain single adults and families. This could allow ICE to essentially double its current detention capacity to over 100,000 people. The system was previously funded for 41,500 beds in 2024 but held over 58,000 people. There is no reason to expect that it will not continue to function beyond capacity as the inmate population balloons.

To understand how large ICE’s budget is now, it is instructive to compare it to military spending worldwide: ICE is now better funded than all but 15 militaries in the world. Given ICE’s mandate is to act as a police force by arresting, detaining, and deporting people under immigration law, as opposed to Customs and Border Patrol (CPB), which conducts border inspections, this new funding will effectively transform ICE into a paramilitary force loyal to the President with unprecedented powers and its own prison system. The implications of such an undemocratic security agency are even more alarming, given that Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) has tried to grant ICE the power to conduct warrantless searches and seizures, and ICE agents already conduct raids while masked and refusing to identify themselves. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has also greatly relaxed ICE’s hiring standards, making it easier for people affiliated with far-right extremist groups to get hired.

The OBBBA also includes about $46.5 billion for border wall construction and associated costs appropriated to CBP. These massive budget increases come in tandem with efforts by the US Department of Justice to give ICE broader powers to detain people and reinforce its ranks with National Guard and active duty military personnel. These developments mirror the rise of the SS and its mergers with other German police and military agencies into a large, well-funded, militarized secret police force.

Trump’s allies have touted Alligator Alcatraz as a model for more camps and a necessary means to “purify” the United States. To this end, Trump touted Alligator Alcatraz’s location on the grounds of an isolated former training airport as insurance that “[...] the only way out is really deportation." Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said five other states are considering using the site as a model as ICE prepares to double the nation’s immigrant detention capacity to 100,000 beds. Spokespeople for the governors of South Carolina, Mississippi, and Texas said their states are among those five. Florida also started building its second immigration detention center after the July 4th holiday weekend, according to Florida Emergency Management Director Kevin Guthrie. This detention center has already taken form at the Florida National Guard’s Camp Blanding. Notably, Trump ally and de facto National Security Advisor Laura Loomer lauded Alligator Alcatraz in a June 30th X (formerly Twitter) post and celebrated the possible death of 65 million Latines in the United States, whom, she joked, would provide 65 million meals for alligators. The Lemkin Institute condemned Loomer’s remarks as a call for genocide on July 23.

With its demarcation of “internal enemies,” the Trump Administration has expanded who qualifies as a criminal in an effort to eventually criminalize the mere existence of noncitizens in the US, as well as critics and those deemed not to fit within MAGA’s vision for U.S. society. President Trump – backed by the US Supreme Court – has chipped away at legal avenues of immigration, expanded the powers of ICE officers and operations, and suspended much-needed legal services and resources for noncitizens trying to navigate complex US immigration proceedings. These changes not only threaten fundamental human rights, like due process, but also increase the likelihood that noncitizens will lose their legal status or be found unlawfully present in the US.

In the eyes of the Trump administration, to be “unlawfully” present in the USA is a crime worthy of arbitrary detention in inhumane conditions, deportation without a court hearing to their home country or third countries with abysmal human rights records, and possible incarceration in external concentration camps, where individuals experience further persecution. The establishment of facilities like Alligator Alcatraz marks a new phase in this ever-radicalizing process.

Citizens are not immune from Trump’s anti-immigrant dragnet. Many citizens have been detained by ICE due to their political affiliations or racial profiling, such as the 15 year-old Los Angeles student who ICE detained and held at gunpoint, after mistaking him for a completely different person. Furthermore, Trump’s attempts to limit birthright citizenship are an attack on the very notion of citizenship in a democratic society, which is the protection of the people from the whims of the state. The Trump administration’s insistence that citizenship is a privilege rather than a right is threatening to turn citizenship – alongside immigration status – into a loyalty test, reserving legal status only for people deemed loyal and “worthy.” This logic can be seen in the way the Trump administration has weaponized the language of “lawful presence in the US” to detain and deport noncitizens who are critical of Trump and his allies, such as Israel. It can also be seen in Trump’s threats against figures like Rosie O’Donnell and Zohran Mamdani to use denaturalization and (re)naturalization as tools to ensure a pliant and cowed population. Furthermore, Donald Trump’s stated desire to deport United States citizens to the notoriously brutal CECOT prison in El Salvador foreshadows further escalation to this effect.

Every single American citizen should be appalled by the US government’s creation of a camp system that operates outside of the law and with apparent impunity. Trump’s category of “illegal alien” is typical of early-stage genocidal thinking, as it both identifies a historically marginalized group (people of color not born in the United States) and remains vague enough to be able to expand to new groups considered to be “internal enemies” by the state. Trump’s repeated rhetoric condemning migrants as subhuman directly reflects the dehumanization necessary for a state to begin an effort to cleanse its population of people it considers to be internal and external enemies. A similar dynamic within the Nazi Party allowed the Third Reich to expand its concentration camp system into the genocidal monstrosity it is now known to have become.

The Lemkin Institute calls on members of the Democratic Party, as the only organized opposition to Trump’s executive overreach, to push even harder to ensure respect for the rights of citizens, documented immigrants, and undocumented people in the USA. It is not the time to be polite, but rather the time to be bold.

We call on foreign states to take President Trump’s threats to the rule of law seriously and place pressure on the Trump Administration to respect the U.S. Constitution and international law. We urge countries with the economic power to withstand Trump’s punitive tariffs to stand up to his Administration.

We further call on American citizens to use the waning power of their citizenship to hold their government accountable. All Americans who believe in the rule of law must ensure that the U.S. government closes down Alligator Alcatraz and similar camps, ensures that all persons in the USA receive due process, and takes action to improve conditions in existing ICE detention centers. The USA must be further pressured to cease roundups of immigrants with no criminal records, extrajudicial deportations, third-country deportations, arbitrary revocations of temporary protective status and other legal resident statuses, the detention and deportation of United States citizens, and the promotion of genocidal rhetoric against minorities.

In the long run, the US must end its use of detention to address immigration issues, instead instituting a sane immigration system that promotes human rights and a pathway to citizenship, as well as a productive rather than destructive foreign policy that can help bring down the numbers of people seeking safety and a better life in faraway countries.

Knowing how difficult it is to alter the path of a fascist government once it has gained control over the levers of power, the Lemkin Institute calls upon local and national civil society organizations to continue their campaigns against abusive detention camps, the mistreatment of ICE detainees, and the Trump Administration’s attempts to circumvent the law. Without our unwavering attention to this matter, the model of Alligator Alcatraz could easily evolve into ground zero for an untold level of brutality against all persons in the United States, citizen and noncitizen alike. The Trump Administration has allocated the funds, compiled the lists, drafted the scope of its plans, and continues to espouse and support genocidal rhetoric. It is normalizing its cruelty while downplaying the significance of its actions. As the Trump Administration continues to bend, rewrite, and ignore laws to vilify, detain, and deport increasing numbers of people, it has inaugurated a genocidal process against a very capacious category of persons that, without vigorous opposition, will undoubtedly expand to new victims and radicalize in its tactics.