#ethniccleansing

I must confess I am discouraged by the alarming countercurrent in US discourse, pushing back on the idea that "Alligator Alcatraz" is an "actual" concentration camp. Some of this is fascist ideological flak, some is "enlightened centrists" whistling past the graveyard, and some of this is even coming from cynical folks on the left who know enough about the American carceral industrial complex to confidently (and to be fair, correctly) state America had "concentration camps" long before Trump. Frankly however I can think of few things less productive than entering into a semantic debate about the wholly accurate term concentration camp; I thought it might be better to just talk about the horrifying observed conditions inside Alligator Alcatraz instead, and let reasonable folks figure it out for themselves. To that end I want to share two stories about the same highly-controlled visit to Alligator Alcatraz by 3 Dem politicians, that each focus on different aspects of why I think the term fits and disputing the characterization borders on apologia. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/14/alligator-alcatraz-lawsuits Hundreds of detainees with no criminal charges sent to Trump’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ "The notorious new “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration jail in the Florida Everglades contains hundreds of detainees with no criminal records or charges, it was disclosed on Sunday, as lawmakers decried “inhumane” conditions inside after touring the facility. Donald Trump has insisted that the remote camp in swamp land populated by pythons and alligators was reserved for immigrants who were “deranged psychopaths” and “some of the most vicious people on the planet” awaiting deportation. But at least one detainee shouted out to politicians during Saturday’s visit that he was a US citizen, the Democratic Florida congressman Maxwell Frost said. And the Miami Herald obtained and published a list of 700 people held in cages showing that at least 250 had committed no offense other than a civil immigration violation." So let's briefly touch on the important revelations in this article. First of all immigration officials are purposely obscuring the numbers and identities of detainees in the camp. Florida politicians are also lying about who runs the camp, which is clearly ICE, to deny opposition (Democrat) oversight of the facility. Please keep in mind that this is in addition to the migrant cages being located in a remote area in the Florida Everglades, far away from the prying eyes of the media and making official oversight all the more difficult. Furthermore, Trump and regime officials who are justifying keeping migrants in appalling conditions that amount to a concentration camp by saying only the worst types of criminals are being held at Alligator Alcatraz, are once again lying; as I stated repeatedly in prior articles hundreds of people in the camp are simply in the US without permission, which as the article notes is a civil violation, not a criminal charge - let alone a violent one. So, can you articulate what perfectly innocent reason a fascist government might have for building a semi-secret migrant cage complex, demonizing all the brown inhabitants as violent criminals even though many of them have committed no crimes, and are actively working to hide what is actually going on inside Alligator Alcatraz from media, regulators, and opposition officials? Yeah, me neither. Now let's take a look at the conditions the 3 Dem politicians were allowed to see despite the regime's efforts to hide occupied cages from them: https://www.commondreams.org/news/alligator-alcatraz-lawmakers-visit 'This Is an Internment Camp': Lawmakers Horrified by Inhumane Conditions in 'Alligator Alcatraz' "Wasserman-Schultz described it as an "internment camp" where detainees are "essentially packed into cages." "Wall-to-wall humans. 32 detainees per cage," she said. This, she noted, is unusual for immigration facilities, like the nearby Krome detention center in Miami-Dade County, where detainees are allowed to roam freely between buildings." Whatever I think of Debbie Wasserman-Schultz as a politician, it is inarguable that she's objectively describing a type of concentration camp. With dozens of brown bodies packed into small cages, inadequate access to washroom facilities and water, purposely reduced caloric counts inadequate for the preservation of healthy adults, exposure to elements and insects; what exactly would you call it? It's not an accident Wasserman-Schultz references America's dark history with the term "interment camps" but I think she's still being too generous to the Trump regime here; this is a camp of cages for cruelty concentrating migrants without any concern for their wellbeing at all - a concentration camp if you will. Folks, this is not a question of semantics. This is a concentration camp, for brown people, on US soil and word games aren't going to stop the nightmare we're speeding towards now. #Fascism #Trump #DHS #AlligatorAlcatraz #Noem #EthnicCleansing #Immigration #ConcentrationCamps

At this point, I think we're probably still a long way from identifying the full web of influence, corruption, and misappropriation of resources behind Governor Ron DeSantis' concentration camp in the Florida Everglades, the obnoxiously named "Alligator Alcatraz." As such I'm going to keep this post pretty brief; more or less to keep the issue on our radar as more information emerges. With that caveat noted however, this Talking Points Memo article talks about the outlet's extremely nascent investigation into how DeSantis built the concentration camp, who paid for it, and who profits from it. Would it surprise you to learn that Florida's fascist governor is using a fake "emergency" to make this monstrous bullshit happen, the money trail is a hot mess, and Florida taxpayers are going to be the folks footing the bill for Ron's nazi apology to Downmarket Mussolini? Yeah, it didn't surprise me either. https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/contracts-desantis-alligator-alcatraz Contracts Show Millions of Dollars and Diverted Disaster Resources Were Used to Build DeSantis’ ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ "TPM has obtained and analyzed over a dozen contracts and invoices related to the construction and operation of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ so-called “Alligator Alcatraz” migrant detention camp in the Everglades. The documents identify eight previously undisclosed companies — including two firms with a Fortune 500 pedigree — involved with the controversial facility. They also show that, in at least one instance, resources allocated for the state’s “disaster preparedness” apparatus were diverted to the site as DeSantis’ office used emergency powers to quickly establish the camp, causing a shortfall that needs to be addressed during the ongoing hurricane season." I must confess that part of me feels like I'm insulting my readers' intelligence when I remind folks, over and over again, that nightmare concentration camps for migrants, many of whom are guilty of nothing more than a civil violation, would be an unacceptable eliminationist outrage even if nobody was profiteering from it and it cost the public coffers zero dollars. In the grand scheme of things the lies, corruption, and misappropriation of public funds are a side story compared to the fact that we've just opened a real as fuck concentration camp in a remote part of Florida and there are already reports of widespread human rights abuses and unsafe conditions emerging mere weeks after "Alligator Alcratraz" opened. With that having been said, informed observers must know by now that the rich nazis running the larger American fascist movement do have designs on profiting from fascist repression, ethnic cleansing, and the migrant carceral complex - and projects like Alligator Alcatraz demonstrate how that odious business functions. If you want to know the names of the eleven companies already identified as working with the government of Florida to make this eliminationist bullshit possible, who is getting paid for what, and how many of the folks directly profiting from this are DeSantis donors (there are several) I recommend you just read the article. The short version here however is that like Trump, DeSantis has declared "an alarming number of migrants in Florida" to be a state level crisis, he then used emergency powers to divert a bunch of money, including from disaster prevention and relief funding in a state notorious for having a "hurricane season," to build a fucking concentration camp surrounded by alligators as a make up gift for his ally and former GOP nomination opponent, President Trump. Along the way a bunch of very shitty companies are raking in the money for substandard work, and the entire DeSantis administration is working overtime to keep as much of this as possible a complete secret from anyone who might be in a position to conduct any oversight on this genocidal nazi boondoggle. Think "Halliburton in post-Saddam Iraq" but on a smaller scale. #Fascism #Trump #RonDeSantis #AlligatorAlcatraz #Racism #ConcentrationCamp #MigrantRights #Immigration #EthnicCleansing #Corruption #Graft #Bribery #Eliminationism #EthnoNationalism #Investigation

Yeah, I did not stutter. While I was away, news emerged that the US government is spending potentially billions of dollars to buy up warehouses all around the country and transform them into concentration camps. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-01-29/us-spends-hundreds-of-millions-on-warehouses-for-ice-detention-centers ICE Begins Buying ‘Mega’ Warehouse Detention Centers Across US "The 23 proposed sites would range in size from 500 to 9,500 beds. If completed as planned, the larger facilities would be some of the biggest detention centers of any kind in the country. For example, the 9,500-bed facility ICE is planning for Hutchins, Texas, could fit the entire average daily jail population of Dallas County with thousands of beds to spare. In recent weeks the federal government has given tours of potential sites in more than 20 cities to contractors and shared with them the designs, including preferred layouts, for at least 15 of the sites, according to people familiar with the confidential process. Contractors — the ones who will turn these warehouses into jails — were required to send in their proposals for the first sites this week, starting with Hagerstown, according to those sources. To reach its goal of deporting 1 million people a year, the Trump administration has said it needs more than 100,000 detention beds. Currently, there are more than 73,000 people in ICE custody, a record. The new sites could give the agency an additional 76,500 beds, according to documents shared with Bloomberg News. To fill all of them, the administration would have to expand immigration arrests beyond what it is already doing, said Emma Winger, deputy legal director at the American Immigration Council. “To reach these kinds of numbers, they’d need to go out into the communities and find people who’ve been living their lives and been here a long time,” Winger said. “They’d have to dramatically increase their presence in communities across the country.” It's unfortunate that I don't have more time to go over this article with you. It's pretty rare that I find myself admiring a piece published in Bloomberg, but this is actually a really in-depth look at the way Trump's mass deportation agenda can't be established without what amounts to a nation-wide network of concentration camps, and those camps are threatening and harmful to both migrants and American citizens, regardless of their political affiliation. Like most mainstream corporate outlets covering the Trump regime's ethnic cleansing program however, they're still far too focused on this merely being a waste of astronomical amounts of taxpayer money. It certainly is, but again, I think the fact that they're building concentration camps out of former online retail distribution warehouses as part of an ethnonationalist project to reshape America according to Stephen Miller and Trump's whims would be a major crisis and a crime against humanity even if they were doing it for free. Maybe that's just me. What Bloomberg does provide the space to stress however, is that you don't build this many concentration camps unless you're planning to lock up a lot more people than the Gestpo is currently detaining; which in turn means that far from backing down in Minneapolis, the Trump regime is clearly headed towards a lot more operations just like it. Where the mainstream corporate media always falls down however, is in forgetting that concentration camps for migrants, can just as easily be concentration camps for anyone the Trump regime wants to dispose of for any reason at all. One simple review of Trump's National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) makes it pretty clear that Trump and his Gestapo have spaces in camps lined up for "terrorists" who oppose his absolute rule over a fascist America. #Fascism #Trump #StephenMiller #ICE #ConcentrationCamps #DHS #Warehouses #NSPM7 #EthnicCleansing #Gestapo #WhiteNationalism

"But wait," I hear you saying. "Even with 23 new concentration camps, and 150,000 beds, that's still not enough capacity to do either Trump's ethnic cleansing operation, or the regime's plan to start locking up its political opponents." That may be so, but would if surprise you to learn that the Trump administration is also working with the Navy to create at least six more tent city style concentration camps, and the capacity to literally sprout new ones anywhere they like? https://www.commondreams.org/news/military-contract-concentration-camps US Military Helping Trump to Build Massive Network of ‘Concentration Camps,’ Navy Contract Reveals “This $45 billion increase, published just weeks ago, converts the US into a ‘geographic region’ for expeditionary military-style detention,” he wrote. “It signals a massive, long-term escalation in the government’s capacity to pay for detention and deportation logistics. In the world of federal contracting, it is the difference between a temporary surge and a permanent infrastructure.” He says the use of the military funding mechanism is meant to disburse funds quickly, without the typical bidding war among contractors, which would typically create a period of public scrutiny. Using the Navy contract means that new projects can be created with “task orders,” which can be turned around almost immediately, when “specific dates and locations are identified” by DHS. “It means the infrastructure is currently a ‘ghost’ network that can be materialized anywhere in the US the moment a site is picked,” Manríquez wrote. Amid its push to deport 1 million people each year, the White House has said it needs to dramatically increase the scale of its detention apparatus to add more beds for those who are arrested. But Manríquez said documents suggest “this isn’t just about bed space; it’s about the rapid deployment of self-contained cities.” So much of the good dirt in this article stems from the reporting of Pablo Manríquez from Migrant Insider, who in turn is working from actual government contract information; so this is definitely real. As the report notes, the Navy currently has about 55B dollars set aside to fund this nightmare, so in addition to the six 10K person-sized, tent city concertation camps expected to be built in Louisiana, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Utah, and Kansas, they're also creating the infrastructure and capacity to build many more such camps anywhere the federal government wants to, provided they own the land. If you want to know what a Trump regime program to create a gulag complex for migrants, trans people, and anyone left of Otto von Bismarck, might look like - this is pretty much what it would look like. #Fascism #ConcentrationCamps #ICE #DHS #USNavy #Trump #EthnicCleansing #Gestapo #WhiteNationalism #Gulags

"The Trump years will be remembered for its cruelty and cover-ups. The level of sadism and brutality by the White House and its GOP enablers is both shocking and intentional, even as efforts to cover up or distract from crimes remain painfully obvious." ~ Jay Kuo #Trump #CBP #DHS #immigrants #EthnicCleansing #cruelty #ShahAlam /13 https://statuskuo.substack.com/p/the-cruelty-and-the-cover-ups

It's about cruelty, hostility, plain meanness, wrapped up in bible verses. It's about a rancid, twisted perversion of Christianity that has no gospel, no grace, and certainly no Jesus in it. #Trump #StephenMiller #immigrants #EthnicCleansing #deportations #detention #warehouses #EthnicCleansing #ProLife #ChristianNationalism #cruelty /10

So I'm up late, watching the news on YouTube when I stumble across this short (14m) Majority Report Segment, about an anonymized ICE employee, testifying to a local news station about the horrifying and inhumane conditions inside a concentration camp located in the Baltimore George H. Fallon federal building. This "detention center" recently made national news when a whistleblower leaked video showing dozens of migrants crammed inside a single cell like sardines in conditions that well, resembled a concentration camp more than even a jail. Look, I'm not going to lie to you; some of the testimony provided is hard to hear, but this is another story that I think probably has more impact when you hear a real, actual person who was in position to know, talk about the dehumanizing and dangerous conditions inside ICE concentration camps - which as we're learning, appear to be both intentional and systemic in nature, and not the result of one or two bad facilities. As an aside, shoutout to the WUSA 9 news guys here for going super old school on this high-quality journalism. They reported that the ex-ICE employee couldn't be identified because they'd signed an NDA (uh, should we be making people who work for the migrant carceral complex sign NDAs? Is there any innocent reason for that practice?) but confirmed that they did work at the Baltimore facility in question through employment records, so this is about as credible as an anonymous whistleblower interview can possibly be. If only every news organization still cared this much about doing the job right. ICE Worker Leaks Concentration Camp Ghoulish Conditions https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8fWTFnmH0w As I mentioned above, the leaker's account of the conditions inside the Baltimore concentration camp are difficult to hear, especially considering the fact that he's clearly still an extremely reactionary immigration hardliner himself. This isn't exactly a person sympathetic to the migrants he was paid to help confine. In very broad strokes the former ICE employee describes habitual and horrific overcrowding, people forced to lay in feces and urine, women forced to wear diapers due to lack of sanitary supplies, as well as physical and psychological abuse of detainees. Furthermore, much of this testimony was supported by headcount sheets, and screenshots from group chats with co-workers. This nightmare is real. I think perhaps the most important part of the leakers testimony however, is their articulation of the way running the concentration camps saw the ICE employees themselves to begin to see the confined migrants as less than human, even literal animals. As any historian worth her salt will tell you, this dehumanization is both an ever-present byproduct of locking people up en masse in concentration camps for the crime of their birth, and a necessary precondition for pogroms, genocides, and other mass extermination programs under reactionary fascist governments. After the segment featuring the ICE concentration camp whistleblower, the video then opens into a broader discussion between Sam Seder and Emma Vigeland about the growing evidence that all of this torture and mistreatment is intentional, to force kidnapped migrants to give up their legal attempts to stay in the country "voluntarily." And finally our hosts close by noting that the secrecy behind all of this dehumanization, torture, and abuse is rooted in the way DHS and ICE function as part of the specially empowered national security state that grew out of US political class reaction to 9/11 and the War on Terror. The chickens of racialized American imperial adventurism have indeed, come home to roost. #ICE #Fascism #TMR #DHS #ConcentrationCamps #Baltimore #FallonBuilding #EthnicCleansing #PoliceState #WhiteSupremacy