Making Gulags and Concentration Camps Great Again

The destroyers of democracy are sinking to new lows in the Florida swamplands.

Jul 03, 2025

Trump, DeSantis, Noem tour "Alligator Alcatraz" — President Trump touring ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ with Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, July 1, 2025

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis gave President Trump and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem a tour of ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ this week.

The new detention center, sitting on a 30-square-mile site in the Florida Everglades, is being built to hold up to 5,000 immigration detainees who will be rounded up by heavily armed, masked ICE Agents and incarcerated without due process.

The Florida GOP was quick to get ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ merch up for sale on its website.

Please let that sink in. The Republican Party of Florida immediately seeking to profit off a massive detention center that echoes gulags and concentration camps by hawking merch on its website.

To me, the words that immediately come to mind are despicable and depraved, like they’re snickering down there in the bottom of their swampy souls.

And it’s just a beginning: President Trump has explicitly expressed his desire to see new detention centers like ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ constructed across the country.

While the budget bill, which President Trump is demanding be passed by the 4th of July, will cut Medicaid by an estimated $1 trillion over the next decade, and reduce health services for veterans, children, and residents of rural areas, it will provide $30 billion for ICE's arrest and deportation operations and $45 billion to build and operate new immigration detention centers.

A Soviet Gulag and a German Concentration Camp, circa 1930s

“Soon, the country will be pockmarked by concentration camps.”

I’m going to quote author Thom Hartmann now, whose Substack post this week really hits home about what is happening here:

Let’s stop pretending. Let’s stop dancing around the language, around the morality, and around the history.

What’s being built in the Florida Everglades, for example — what they’re calling “Alligator Alcatraz” — is not just another immigration facility. It’s a political prison engineered not merely to detain, but to humiliate, dehumanize, and broadcast terror.

It’s America’s first open-air symbol that our democracy is not just dying: it is being dissected publicly, cruelly, and with calculation.

This isn’t just cruelty. It’s performance. It’s state-sponsored sadism, broadcast as patriotism. DeSantis and Trump are now competing in a bizarre effort to show who can be more cruel.

But it’s not unprecedented. If you want to understand what’s happening in Florida, you have to travel back to 1933, to a small, remote town in Bavaria.

When Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany, the first thing he built wasn’t a tank or a warship. It was a “detention facility.”

The Nazis didn’t hide Dachau. They advertised it. It was a warning. A message. Step out of line, and this is where you go.

Sound familiar?

Alligator Alcatraz is not Dachau. It’s not exterminating people. Yet. But Dachau didn’t begin as a death camp either. It began as a “protective custody” facility, built on the idea that “certain people” posed a threat to the national body simply by existing.

That’s what Florida’s new facility represents. Not immigration enforcement. Not public safety. Protective custody for political purposes.

Under Trump’s new national emergency framework, virtually anyone deemed “unlawfully present” can be detained indefinitely without trial.

That means asylum seekers. Victims of trafficking. Children.

And if you believe this won’t expand — if you believe this power will remain solely focused on brown-skinned migrants fleeing violence in Central America — then you haven’t read a history book lately.

Postscript:

Tomorrow is the 4th of July, a national celebration of the day the Continental Congress adopted the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.

The Declaration laid the foundation for a new nation, free from British rule, based on principles of liberty, equality, justice, and fundamental rights considered inherent to all human beings that cannot be taken away or denied.