Alligator Alcatraz Isn’t Just An American Fantasy

Alligator Alcatraz was a blueprint. Creating an ICE detention center out of tents, trailers, and cages amid the sawgrass wetlands of the Florida Everglades, and all of the dangerous reptiles that live there, is equally sadistic and laughable—ludicrously cruel, medieval in form and concept, legible more as a taunt than a security measure. Before it closed in June, the conditions of that concentration camp were dismal and inhumane. Disease ran rampant, adequate medical treatment was rarely given, and prisoners were subjected to disciplinary measures that Amnesty International found edged into torture. The security perimeter, beyond the usual fences and wire, was the harsh Florida elements and the alligators that gave the facility its nickname.

Why would a country that pours billions of dollars into its military and policing, money that pays for torture programs and mass technological surveillance of its civilians, need to use tents as a prison in an area where the heat index can reach over 100 degrees and even the grass has teeth? Despite Alligator Alcatraz costing nearly $1 billion, it was defiantly and even proudly medieval in form and concept. It fits, too, that government officials engaged in manic rounds of cost-cutting as they tried to build more permanent facilities. Perhaps the Trump administration thought they would fund the project with all of the themed merch capitalizing off the racist bloodlust of the American conservative. Perhaps they didn’t think about it very much at all.

And yet, among the world leaders with which the sort of stagey brutality of Alligator Alcatraz would find its most appreciative audience, it has been an inspiration. For all of the billions of dollars that despotic states spend building and enforcing a system of control and surveillance upon non-consenting populations, this turn toward such cruelty feels oddly inevitable. On the merits, though, it is just another part of the deadly exchange of policing tactics between Israel and the United States.