“Alligator Alcatraz” is the insulting name Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has given the inhumane detention center he has erected in the Everglades to house immigrants rounded up in the Trump administration’s draconian assault on allegedly undocumented people living in the United States.
Far from being filled with the dangerous criminals President Donald Trump claims are the target of his harsh immigration policy, the people being held without due process for an undetermined amount of time in the swampy hellhole are just unlucky folks who got caught up in the nationwide sweep by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. The same is true regarding all the other people throughout the country whose lives are being ripped apart for the sake of craven jingoism and politics.
When Americans look back on this period, the treatment of these immigrants — most of whom are taxpaying workers, many of whom have been in the U.S. for years — may be ranked among the most shameful episodes in the republic’s history, right up there with the incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, the genocide against Indigenous tribes and the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow.
This moral and legal outrage is happening right before our eyes. The question is — this time — what will we do to stop it?
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