Yes, "Alligator Alcatraz" is a Concentration Camp
...and there's a much better name for it than "Alligator Alcatraz."
We need to talk about the concentration camp the president recently toured in Florida: and yes, it’s a concentration camp. I’ll explain.
The first thing I want you to do is read this article I wrote in 2019, about the child separation policy and the detention centers in the first Trump Administration, because tragically, it’s all still relevant. Go ahead and read it; I’ll wait right here.
All right, now let’s talk about terminology. Back in 2019 I said it didn’t really matter whether you called the immigrant detention centers concentration camps or not, as long as you understood where things were headed. Right now, I think terminology is extremely important. The current Republican party is engaged in some genuinely Orwellian propaganda tactics: they tell a transparent lie, and just expect their followers to believe it because they said it. We need to respond to that by being truthful and exact in our speech. And truthfully, the detention facility in the Florida everglades which is being colloquially referred to as “Alligator Alcatraz” is a concentration camp.
The Holocaust Encyclopedia of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum explains that “generically defined, a concentration camp is a site for the detention of civilians whom a regime perceives to be a security risk of some sort. What distinguishes it from a prison (in the modern sense) is that incarceration in a concentration camp is independent of any judicial sentence or even indictment, and is not subject to judicial review.” And that’s exactly what the prison camp in Florida is.
The camp in Florida is a camp for the detention of civilians who the current government of the United States thinks are a security risk. The president and his cronies keep insisting that undocumented migrants, as well as immigrants and refugees who had visas but suddenly had the visas revoked, are a risk to the security of the United States because they’re all in gangs and trying to commit terrible crimes against United States citizens. The president has gone so far as to insist that we’re experiencing an invasion by the Tren de Aragua gang, which is why he gets to invoke the Alien Enemies Act against undocumented immigrants. The Trumpies are also insisting more and more frequently that immigrants who are American citizens, and even natural born American citizens, whom they think pose a risk to other sorts of American citizen, ought to have their citizenship revoked and be put in those camps before being sent out of the country.
The prisoners who are already being sent to the camp are not being sent there as a sentence for a crime they’ve been convicted of in a court of law. Some of them are criminals who were already tried, convicted, and punished or had the punishment suspended for breaking the law, and some are people whose only crime was illegal immigration but they weren’t put on trial and fined or imprisoned when a jury found them guilty of illegal immigration. Some may well be American citizens who are there by mistake, and some are surely one-time legal residents who had their legal residency taken back. They are people who have been arrested for their immigration status and have not been convicted of or pleaded guilty to anything yet. They’re going to the camp in case they hurt anyone or try to run away while they’re processed and sent out of the country. That’s a concentration camp. It just is.
The Holocaust Encyclopedia also tells us that the term “concentration camp” predates the Nazis. It’s a term from the end of the nineteenth century; it refers to a place to imprison civilians during the Boer and Spanish-American wars, and was used again as a term for a civilian prison camp in World War One. So, you can use that fact on people who accuse you of TDS and Godwin’s Law when you’re calling the camp a concentration camp. “I’m not saying they’re Nazis! I’m just saying it’s a concentration camp, like the ones in the Boer and Spanish-American wars. Oh, honey, you don’t know about the Boer and Spanish-American wars?” Try it out the next time you have to talk to your MAGA relatives at the family reunion.
The Nazis used the term “Konzentrationslager,” which just means “concentration camp” in German, at first to refer to the makeshift prisons for their political enemies, and eventually to refer to the famous prison camps run by the SS. The Nazi concentration camps had three purposes, and again I’m copying and pasting this word for word from the Holocaust Encyclopedia:
To incarcerate indefinitely people whom the Nazi regime perceived to be a security threat in the broadest possible sense (for example, from a Jew with presupposed "international connections" or perceived racial deficiencies, to an alcoholic who was incapable of holding a job)
To eliminate—by murder—individuals and small, targeted groups of individuals
To exploit the so-called labor-potential of the prisoner population.
So, if you want to be scrupulously fair to President Trump and Governor DeSantis, you can say that we only know that Alligator Alcatraz is definitely fulfilling Purpose Number One of a Nazi concentration camp. You could be forgiven for saying it fulfills TWO purposes of a Nazi concentration camp: maybe they don’t MEAN for any prisoners to be “eliminated— by murder,” unless they try to escape, since Trump is reveling in the thought of prisoners being eaten by alligators. But the conditions in the camp are being called inhumane, as the isolation of the location and the terrible Florida heat might well kill prisoners, and I don’t think Trump or DeSantis would be terribly upset if they found one of the prisoners had died there. I think they’d be happy. But in any case, it’s still a concentration camp.
And “Alligator Alcatraz” is a bad name for a concentration camp.
Alcatraz Island wasn’t a concentration camp. It was a lighthouse, and then a military prison, and then a penitentiary for convicted criminals. Now it’s owned by the National Park Service. You may have any number of opinions on any of those things, but they’re not concentration camps.
There have been better suggestions for what we ought to be calling the camp. A lot of people simultaneously came up with “Alligator Auschwitz,” which isn’t terrible. Auschwitz was a complex of three camps; one was a killing center, but there was also a labor camp and a concentration camp there. But I don’t like “Alligator Auschwitz,” because I don’t think we should think of genocide as some kind of German thing that other countries imitate. I think we ought to accept that this is happening on our own soil, at the express direction of our own elected officials and to the delight of their creepy supporters. So I don’t want to give it a German Nazi name. It needs an American one.
I think we should just call the camp “DeSantis’s Concentration Camp.”
Ron DeSantis wants this. He’s in charge of it. It’s his. He’s doing it to ingratiate himself to the Trump administration, who snubbed him and didn’t give him a cabinet position. He’s desperate to look like Trump’s heir apparent, but he just can’t pull it off because he has absolutely no charisma and can’t command an audience. He’s doomed to always be the sniveling bruiser who backs up the lead bully; he can’t command a gang of bullies himself. So, let’s give it to him.
Call it “DeSantis’s Concentration Camp.” Don’t call it anything else. Keep doing it until the name sticks.
One day, Donald Trump will be gone. He’s seventy-nine and visibly sundowning. He’s not going to last forever. But DeSantis is forty-six. He’ll live to see the end of Trump’s MAGA movement. The day will come when some people, probably not Trump himself, are put on trial and punished for this human rights abuse— not in a concentration camp, but in an actual prison. The day will come, not as soon as we like but much sooner than you’d think, when people are ashamed of the sycophants who kissed up to Trump. Ron is one of them. Make Ron famous. Make “Ron DeSantis” roll off the tongue like “Heinrich Himmler” and “Joseph Goebbels.”
DeSantis’s Concentration Camp is a human rights abuse and a disgrace.
Every American ought to denounce it by name.
( Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.
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