They built it in eight days.
Dropped it right in the Everglades.
Surrounded it with alligators and pythons like some kind of bad Florida joke.
Wrapped it in razor wire and gave it a name that belongs in a comic book: Alligator Alcatraz.
This isn’t a plotline from some dystopian movie. It’s real. And your tax dollars are paying for it.
On July 1, Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis stood grinning in front of their shiny new swamp prison, a $450 million detention center with enough beds for 5,000 people. People, not animals. People, not threats. People, most of whom haven’t been convicted of a damn thing.
It’s fast. It’s cruel. And now they’re asking FEMA to foot part of the bill—using money from the Shelter and Services Program, a fund meant to provide aid to families, not toss them into tents guarded by guys with rifles and surrounded by reptiles.
And if that doesn’t make you mad, maybe the T-shirts will.
“Alligator Alcatraz.”
“Try and Swim for It.”
They’re already for sale, because cruelty is now a brand in America.
Let’s get something straight. This isn’t about “border security.” It’s not about “law and order.” This is about political theater—and it’s being performed on the backs of the vulnerable.
This camp sits on federally protected wetlands and sacred Indigenous land. No environmental review. No tribal consultation. Just bulldozers and bravado. Lawsuits are coming, and they damn well should be.
And FEMA? Instead of saying “Are you out of your minds?” they’re keeping quiet. Letting emergency funds meant for food and shelter be twisted into a reimbursement scheme for a swamp gulag.
Let me make it simple: We’re using disaster relief money to build a prison camp for asylum seekers.
What the hell happened to us?
You don’t have to be a legal scholar to know this stinks. The Supreme Court ruled the Eighth Amendment—cruel and unusual punishment—doesn’t apply in immigration detention. But that’s not the point. We used to know, in our bones, that this was wrong. We didn’t need a judge to remind us what decency looked like.
I did once.
My father was a World War II veteran. Didn’t talk big. Didn’t call himself a patriot on social media. He just fed starving Filipino children from a makeshift mess kitchen in the Pacific during wartime because they were hungry and he had food.
Later, on a road trip through Deming, New Mexico, I saw him look up from his plate and notice a kid outside the diner window. Skinny. Quiet. Just watching us eat. My dad got up, walked to the counter, and bought that child breakfast.
No press. No applause. Just a man who knew what decency looked like.
That was the America I grew up in.
Imperfect. But kind.
Tough when it had to be—but never cruel just to send a message.
Now we’ve built a detention camp in a hurricane zone with no storm shelters and one road in or out. The plan—if a Category 3 rolls in—is to evacuate 5,000 people in a hurry. That’s not a plan. That’s a disaster waiting to happen.
Alligator Alcatraz isn’t a solution. It’s a stunt. A warning shot dressed up like policy. And the longer it stands, the more we erode whatever scraps of moral high ground we had left.
FEMA should say no. But it won’t.
No funding. No wink. No looking the other way.
You don’t use shelter money to build a swamp prison.
And you, dear reader, should ask yourself:
Would your father have built a place like this?
Or would he have burned it to the ground and handed the kid a sandwich?
Because this isn’t just about immigration anymore.
It’s about who we are.
And whether we still remember what it means to be decent.