An American Concentration Camp

It is impossible to overstate the significance of yesterday’s launch of “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Florida Everglades. The fenced-in compound is nothing short of a concentration camp, built in just eight days and showcased by the dictator himself. Where is the sudden need for so much more detention capacity in the world’s most incarcerated country?

The camp is built as a long series of tents covering cages of beds, and toilets set up to face the beds, without the slightest privacy or dignity for anyone sent there.

It runs along the taxiway of Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport (KTNT), an uncontrolled airport with runways big enough for any type of large aircraft, situated over 40 km from the nearest town. People can be brought in and out of there in vast numbers, far from prying eyes or public consciousness.

It is deep in the Florida Everglades which is an alligator-filled swamp covering an area roughly half the size of Switzerland.

The images of the site are jarring. They’re meant to be jarring.

Even if this facility were truly built to house dangerous criminals, it would not be an acceptable setup. But this camp is not intended to house criminals, foreign or otherwise. It is intended to dehumanise those who are inside. And those inside are, for now, meant to be the undocumented workers on whom the billionaire class is pinning the blame for the economic and social carnage they themselves are causing.

It is designed to hold 3,000 people at a time, staging them for deportation, slipped into the facility from the cities in which they are captured by roving gangs of unidentifiable secret federal agents known only as “ICE,” slipped back out in transport planes to countries still willing to accept them.

In dehumanising foreign nationals — anyone who is not a pure-bred, born-in-the-USA American, unless they’re married to the President of course — and attacking “diversity, equity, and inclusion” to cover their ingrained racism, the American fascists are looking to past examples of how to blame minorities for the problems created by an entirely different group of people.

We know from 1933-1945 Germany where this goes. That the United States has not yet reached 1945 does not mean that they have not advanced well into the late 1930s. The Nazi-era need to construct concentration camps, to solve an ethnic problem they invented, took its precedent from the United States in the first place.

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In the German example, the concentration camps evolved out of a profound racism primarily against the Jews, but also other ‘undesirables’ like gay and trans people, other minorities, and of course political opponents. As the empire expanded, these unwanted people were removed in the acquired lands to make room. For Canada and Trump’s constant talk of annexing us, of the Anschluss the Conservatives would have given him, this should be extra terrifying. It is not only the people Trump does not want in his country; if he takes our country, it will be our neighbours at Alligator Alcatraz, too.

The people sent to this American concentration camp are there to be deported. Not all are going to the country from which they arrived. Eventually other countries will tire of taking them. When that happens, the camp populations will grow faster than new camps can be built and operated.

At that point, the American dictator, wearing his red hat in place of the red armband that inspires him, will have to decide what to do with the 15-20 million people he intends to deport if there is nowhere left to deport them. He has already described his plans as a “bloody story.” Believe him.

Which all takes us back to Alligator Alcatraz. It is a staging area, built at an airport rather than a train station to be sure, designed to be accessible to both send and receive massive numbers of people, to be both invisible to the public in its daily operations and yet a symbol of what Trump and his royal court truly stand for. It is set up in a place and in a way where anything can happen, but where nobody has to see it take place.

The historical precedent of concentration camps many miles from prying eyes disappearing systematically dehumanised, unwanted populations, does not even bear thinking about.

That the American people have allowed their government to get as far down this road as they already have does not, however, offer any prospect of a different outcome.