By Diane Roberts
Do you think concentration camps are cool?
Does your heart fill with mean-spirited joy at the thought of human beings stuffed into tents and FEMA trailers parked on a disused airstrip in the heart of the Everglades in the middle of a Florida summer?
Do you get off on the idea of alligators and snakes killing people and admire bully capitalism hawking camo beverage coolers, stickers, and T-shirts with grinning reptiles proclaiming, “Nowhere to Run; Nowhere to Hide”?
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier certainly does: He’s raising campaign cash on his own little merch site.
Other paid-up members of the Cruelty is the Point cult do, too.
Celebrating the erection of Florida’s own gulag, known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” the state Republican Party bosses trilled, “Don’t forget to pick up your swag to support our efforts to undo all of Joe Biden’s failures!”
We are ruled by sociopaths.
This prison, parked in the middle of Big Cypress National Preserve, has already received hundreds of detainees, packed into rough-and-ready structures that have not had to meet any building or environmental codes and may not be able to withstand a tropical storm.
Cult leaders can’t decide if the place is Devil’s Island or a charmingly rustic resort.
Showing Donald Trump around the place, Ron DeSantis pointed to the razor wire, iron bunk beds, and bright new Astroturf on the ground.
The first batch of detainees don’t seem especially grateful. Those who’ve managed to make a phone call to the outside world say the guards have served them maggot-laced food, refused them medical attention, kept bright lights on all night, and either crank up the air conditioning until the detainees freeze or cut it off and let them swelter.
One alleged foreign malefactor says guards confiscated his Bible.
Gators in ICE caps
Trump loves this. He fantasizes about terrified detainees chased by Burmese pythons and “cops that are in the form of alligators.”
The White House has put out a Trump meme with a gaggle of gators in ICE caps.
The Trump administration is proud of this latest monument to hatred and gets very upset if anyone criticizes it.
Stephen Miller, architect of Trump’s immigration policy, flew into a tantrum the other day when a reporter told him inhabitants of the human world were calling the South Florida stalag “dehumanizing.”
“American citizens are stripped of their rights and their liberties by the invasion of illegal aliens!” he replied. “What’s ‘dehumanizing’ is when Democrats let illegal alien rapists into the country to attack our children. That is ‘dehumanizing’!”
He failed to explain exactly how people fleeing murderous dictatorships in Venezuela, El Salvador, and Nicaragua take rights and liberties from citizens.
As for those hideous assaults alleged by Miller, American citizens commit far more crimes than undocumented immigrants.
The administration knows this. Until a few weeks ago, a Department of Justice website contained information confirming it.
Attorney General Pam Bondi shut down the website for “review” in “accordance with recent Executive Orders and related guidance.”
Why let data get in the way of propaganda?
‘Not safe’
Miller, Trump, and DeSantis insist the people ICE rounds up are “the worst of the worst, the most heinous of the most heinous.”
Again, the data show this is not true. Only 8% of undocumented detainees have been convicted of violent crimes.
This country is still — nominally — a nation of laws, and everyone thrown into an ICE dungeon is entitled to due process.
Even our supine Supreme Court agrees.
But Florida’s tropical tent prison makes it nearly impossible for detainees to consult with attorneys, meaning they could be deported without fair hearings.
A group of lawmakers, including Rep. Anna Eskamani and Sen. Carlos Guillermo Smith, tried to visit the facility a couple of weeks ago. Inmates from the Orange County jail — which is in Eskamani’s and Smith’s districts — had been transferred there without being charged with anything.
Legislators pointed out Florida Statute 944.23 allows them to visit state facilities “at their pleasure.”
But DeSantis’ people insist the Everglades prison camp is not technically a state facility, not under the jurisdiction of the Department of Corrections.
Even though the state of Florida’s paying for it.
‘Emergency’ powers
Actually, the Trump administration admits it’s a state facility.
In a filing asking a federal judge to deny a request by Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biodiversity to halt construction in Big Cypress, the administration argues the plaintiffs’ claim depends on showing a final federal “agency action,” which they can’t because the feds haven’t “implemented, authorized, directed or funded Florida’s temporary detention center.”
Indeed, they insist, “Florida is constructing and operating the facility using state funds on state lands.”
DeSantis, Uthmeier, and Pam Bondi need to get their stories straight.
By last Saturday, legal problems had been overcome and the gulag had miraculously become “safe.”
A group of legislators got a curated tour, during which what you saw depended on who you were—and whether you gave a damn about the human beings locked up in there.
Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Florida) took a thermometer with her, reporting an indoor temperature of at least 83 degrees.
Another Democratic lawmaker said some detainees were shackled to benches.
Republican state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia insisted it’s pretty nice: “I actually laid down in one of the beds and it was really comfortable.”
Sure. And everybody’s talked to a lawyer, there are no mosquitoes, and tropical storms? No problem!
Meanwhile back in reality, DeSantis’ vanity project has already flooded at least once.
Big Cypress is 96% wetlands. It’s wetlands’ job to flood.
When Ron DeSantis, claiming “emergency” powers, seized 39 square miles of Everglades land (nearly 25,000 acres) he claimed, “The environmental impact will be zero.”
DeSantis and the attorney general contend they’re merely taking over what Uthmeier calls “an old, virtually abandoned” airstrip.”
That airstrip is abandoned for a reason. It’s a relic of one of the most boneheaded ideas anyone in Florida ever had.
The Phoenix’s own Craig Pittman recently recounted how in 1968 a really stupid plan to build a huge airport in the Everglades galvanized support for preserving Florida’s River of Grass.
Fun fact: It was Florida’s then-Gov. Claude Kirk and his top aide Nathaniel Reed — who went on to help pass the Clean Water Act in 1972 and co-write the Endangered Species Act in 1973 — who led the fight to save Big Cypress.
Both were Republicans.
Vandals
Back then, some conservatives wanted to conserve, not destroy.
DeSantis and Uthmeier belong to a new generation of environmental vandals.
They want us to believe Big Cypress is wasted space with a few snakes, some bugs, a cadre of demonic alligators programmed to chase brown folks.
Inconsequential. Nothing to see there.
The ignorance is embarrassing.
To the Miccosukee and the Seminoles, the land is holy: “We live here. Our ancestors fought and died here. They are buried here,” said one tribal leader. “The Big Cypress is part of us, and we are a part of it.”
The land is not empty, or “abandoned.”
Manatees and dolphins give birth to their young in the estuaries on the eastern side. Mullet, trout, grouper, silver perch, spiny lobster, oysters, and clams thrive amongst the mangrove roots.
The mangrove branches harbor herons, pelicans, and egrets; there are red cockaded woodpeckers, fox squirrels, and Florida panthers in the pinelands, and some of the world’s rarest orchids in the cypress swamps.
The land is a vital ecosystem for plants and animals and humans, too. Its water flows are essential to the aquifer on which South Floridians depend for their drinking water.
DeSantis likes to cast himself as the savior of the River of Grass and waxes petulant if you suggest his pet prison will damage the ecosystem: “I’m the governor who’s poured more money into Everglades restoration than anyone!”
And now he’s poured more money into Everglades destruction than anyone.
The camp will cost $450 million a year to run.
Don’t be gaslit
Don’t let the man gaslight you: Claims they’re not desecrating Big Cypress are complete rubbish.
Friends of the Everglades has aerial photographs showing the building of new roads and paving once-wild areas.
Runoff from asphalt pollutes. The huge trucks lumbering in and out of the site, carrying construction materials, also pollute.
You can’t house and feed hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people, without terrible damage to already fragile nature.
They’ll need pesticides to keep the Everglades’ vigorous mosquitoes at bay; they’ll need generators and microwaves and machinery to pump out the sewage.
The gulag is even sullying the night sky.
One of the lawsuits filed by conservation groups points out the huge prison lights make the place “look like Yankee Stadium, visible from 15-miles away.”
Big Cypress has been designated an International Dark Sky Place. You used to be able to see the Milky Way arching over the marshes and hammocks like a necklace of diamonds and pearls.
Trumpists probably don’t look up at the heavens. They don’t look down at the wonders of the earth.
So why would they care if one of Florida’s greatest treasures gets trashed?
Diane Roberts is an 8th-generation Floridian, born and bred in Tallahassee. Educated at Florida State University and Oxford University in England, she has been writing for newspapers since 1983, when she began producing columns on the legislature for the Florida Flambeau. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Times of London, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Oxford American, and Flamingo. She has been a member of the Editorial Board of the St. Petersburg Times–back when that was the Tampa Bay Times’s name–and a long-time columnist for the paper in both its iterations. She was a commentator on NPR for 22 years and continues to contribute radio essays and opinion pieces to the BBC. Roberts is also the author of four books.
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