‘Alligator Alcatraz’ and Why Mass Deportation is Doomed

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.