‘Alligator Alcatraz’ and Why Mass Deportation Is Doomed

The more voters hear about the crazy shit Trump is doing, the less they like it.

(Composite / Photos: Shutterstock)

LET ME TAKE YOU BACK TO MAY 2011. Then President Barack Obama, frustrated with what he took to be increasingly unreasonable demands from Republicans on immigration reform, joked that next they would demand a moat at the border—one stocked with alligators.

Five months later, then-presidential candidate Herman Cain officially made the moat part of his Republican primary campaign platform. He was inspired to do so, he said, by a trip to China to see the Great Wall—and by Obama’s ribbing.

“I think we can build one if we want to! We have put a man on the moon, we can build a fence! Now, my fence might be part Great Wall and part electrical technology,” Cain explained. “It will be a twenty-foot wall, barbed wire, electrified on the top, and on this side of the fence, I’ll have that moat that President Obama talked about. And I would put those alligators in that moat!”

Alligators were just one feature. Cain also supported agents on the wall carrying weapons loaded with live rounds, presumably to shoot and kill immigrants.

The public was largely repulsed. And following the negative reaction, Cain spent days walking back his comments, apologizing and saying they were a joke before admitting they weren’t. Republican pro-immigration reform groups (yes, they exist) called on him to drop out of the race.

Fourteen years later, Republicans are at it again with the moats and alligators. But instead of being the cracked dreams of a flash-in-the-pan primary candidate, the idea has become proof that the whole party is overcome by a nativist fever dream. This time, Republicans across the board are giddily extolling what they’ve appallingly decided to call “Alligator Alcatraz”—a Florida facility built to become a major node in Trump’s network of mass-deportation infrastructure, and currently housing hundreds of detainees who have no criminal records. The president happily toured the facility recently and praised it for being a place where “we’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator if they escape prison.”

The Republican Party of Florida thinks this is so hilarious that they’re selling Alligator Alcatraz merchandise depicting giant alligators and snakes primed and ready to kill detained immigrants should they try to flee.

“I think it’s the first time in human history a detention camp, a concentration camp, an internment camp is selling merch, so that’s pretty depraved,” Thomas Kennedy, a veteran immigration advocate and consultant for the Florida Immigration Coalition, told me.

He noted that while the Chinese have internment camps for Uyghurs—whose treatment by China Secretary of State Marco Rubio has condemned—we learned of them through satellite imagery and hacked documents, not a CCP marketing campaign.

“They’re embarrassed by it,” he said. “We sell merch.”

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Accelerating Their Own Demise

“ALLIGATOR ALCATRAZ” IS JUST THE LATEST in a series of cruel spectacles that mark Trump’s deportation and detention efforts. Collectively, they are contributing to a turn in public opinion.

A new Gallup poll released July 11 found a sharp drop in Americans who want immigration decreased: Just 30 percent of respondents did, compared to 55 percent last year. A “record-high” 79 percent “consider immigration good for the country,” while support for Trump’s signature proposals—mass deportation and the border wall—were also down. The context of the poll, which was conducted throughout the month of June, is important. Consider how busy that month was for the administration: Trump mobilized the military to stomp out anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles, “Alligator Alcatraz” was announced and opened, soon after reports of inhumane conditions there multiplied, and the administration continued sending masked, anonymous, virtually unaccountable ICE agents into working communities to forcibly seize anyone they could find.

In addition to 7 in 10 independents disapproving of Trump’s handling of immigration, the poll showed an 8-point overall increase in “support for giving immigrants living in the U.S. illegally the chance to become U.S. citizens.” This new support came from members of all parties, with Republicans showing the largest gain—up 13 points from last year to 59 percent.

“I’ve never seen numbers like that,” said former Republican Mike Madrid, who has worked in the Latino voter data space for decades.

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Gallup found that Latinos, who shifted notably to Trump during the 2024 campaign, were also more opposed to his actions on immigration, with his approval rating sitting at 21 percent with that demographic compared to 35 percent nationally. A new Navigator poll out July 10 found that net support for mass deportation had gone from +10 before Trump’s inauguration to -4 now. Major drops in support came from black voters (from -4 to -41) and from Hispanics (-4 to -19).

The politics of immigration have long been thermostatic. Trump knows this better than most. During his first term, voters recoiled at his family separation. But he was able to win back office in large part because the border became overwhelmed under Joe Biden. With the border now effectively shut, it stands to reason that voter concerns around immigration have softened a bit. But that would explain, largely, why they no longer prioritize the issue.

As for why they’re turning on Trump, there is little doubt that as Americans learn more about what mass deportation actually entails, their opposition to it has grown. Intended in part to spur “self-deportation,” cruel and draconian facilities like “Alligator Alcatraz” might actually be compelling voters to leave the Republican tent.

Rick Swartz, who founded the National Immigration Forum and worked on the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 (the “Reagan amnesty”), said there is a key truth about American political culture around immigration being missed by those whom he calls “Trumpinistas.” It’s that they seem to think they can scare Americans into turning on their friends and neighbors.

“The only poll on immigration that I have taken seriously over forty-five years was one of the first done about forty years ago, by Rita Simon of American University: Americans don’t much like immigration, but they like the immigrants they know,” he told The Bulwark. “The more immigration and the border are abstract in the minds of most Americans, the more they’re susceptible to propaganda. But the more personal and immediate immigration is to Americans, the more they think about the human face behind the numbers and propaganda.”

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DEMOCRATIC LAWMAKERS, who have been using congressional oversight of Trump detention centers to go on the offensive against the administration, were finally given the opportunity to do the same with “Alligator Alcatraz.” Recently, they were given access to the Everglades detention facility and reported finding “inhumane” and “appalling” conditions there. Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) said he heard a detainee yell that they were a U.S. citizen, while Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz called the facility an “internment camp” and said a thermometer she brought into the building showed 85 degrees in the medical area. Detainees have alleged sweltering conditions throughout the facility, with air conditioning often turned off.

Democrats and advocates have also taken issue with the state of Florida using 287(g) contracts with local municipalities to expand detention capability for this new facility and immigration enforcement capacity across the country. Those contracts allow for coordination between local law enforcement agencies and federal agencies, including ICE, without having to justify any part of it to the public.

“What’s happening in Florida is a gross abuse of power. The DeSantis administration and ICE are using the 287(g) program as a back door to massively expand federal immigration enforcement—without the consent of Congress or the American people. That’s not how our democracy works,” Frost told The Bulwark, calling it a deeply flawed program with a history of racial profiling, civil rights violations, and due process failures.

“Now, Florida is weaponizing it to funnel people (many with no criminal record) into an internment camp in the Everglades where even members of Congress have been denied full access,” he added.

Kristian Ramos, who works with progressive donor network Way to Win, said the organization’s focus groups over the past year have consistently shown that Trump’s policies were unpopular. But it also revealed why Trump remained above water: Participants in the focus groups seemed skeptical that he actually meant what he said, and they didn’t expect him to actually carry out his most extreme ideas.

Yet that’s just what Trump is doing. And with the enactment this month of the Republican budget bill, ICE is going to be better funded than most law enforcement agencies—with a bigger budget, in fact, than the FBI, DEA, and Bureau of Prisons combined. The agency will have more money at its disposal than many countries’ entire militaries. Trump and his fellow Republicans rushed to celebrate that expenditure. But immigration proponents see it as a political vulnerability.

“The other shoe hasn’t even dropped yet, prices are still rising on everything and they’re about to spend billions on a solution in need of a problem,” Ramos said. “No one is experiencing an issue related to immigration in this country except the families being ripped apart and the Americans watching their working neighbors being thrown into vans and sent to ‘Alligator Alcatraz.’”

What do you guys think? Are you feeling a shift in your communities when it comes to the excesses and, frankly, lack of humanity from the Trump administration regarding immigration enforcement? I’d love to hear some stories from your towns and your lives, if you think something is turning—or even if you think it’s too little or too slow, as we descend into a police state and our democracy dims.