From Autoworker Heaven to Immigration Hellscape

Fighting Trump's ethnic cleansing agenda in South Florida

Twenty years ago, I retired to Naples, Florida, along with seven of my United Auto Workers caucus members at General Motors, Framingham. Others from our plant went to southwest Florida as well. We picked that spot because Walter and Victor Reuther had built a fishing camp outside Fort Myers in the early 1960s. It became a mecca for union members thereafter. Once there we ran into other auto workers, mostly from Detroit. Thanks to retirement pay, first negotiated in 1949, UAW workers could afford a vacation home.

It turns out we loved southwest Florida. It is true you can roll a penny from Naples to Miami. But along the way you learn to appreciate the subtlety of the Everglades. In its own way it matches the majesty of the White Mountains in New Hampshire. In the early 2000s, southwest Florida was still “old Florida.” There were lots of 1950s motels with jalousie windows and ceiling fans. Flamingos—plastic and real—littered the lawns of the area’s motels and tiny cottages. The mansions of Jeff Bezos, Rick Scott, and the like were still 10 years in the future.

Now my paradise is a hellscape of white supremacy, Christian authoritarianism, toxic misogyny, purposeful cruelty, eugenics, great replacement theory, and worse. Florida, it seems, wants to win the race to the bottom.

Not So Fast, Texas: We Want Camps Too

To much hoopla and fanfare, on July 1^st, Alligator Alcatraz was opened in Ochopee, Florida, smack dab in the middle of the fragile Everglades. It is a 5,000-bed facility consisting of rows of bunk beds behind chain link cages. Alligator Alcatraz fits the classic definition of a concentration camp: mass civilian detention without trials, targeting vulnerable groups for political gain based on identity rather than for crimes committed. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem notes that the camp is meant to encourage immigrants to self-deport before ending up there–echoing early Nazi dreams that German Jews would self-deport.

April through December (the subtropical rainy season) is the notorious hurricane season, peaking in September. Mosquitos swarm. It is impossible to swat them away. Although daytime temperatures may peak at 93 degrees, they only drop to 87 at night. Humidity is an unforgiving 98 percent. Even before the first detainee arrived the camp was flooded by a regular late afternoon cloudburst. Of course, there is no infrastructure like water and sewage systems.

But there are alligators nearby. Trump gloated that the site has “a lot of cops that are in the form of alligators” and advised prisoners to run in a zig-zag motion to improve their chances of escaping by 1 percent. MAGA finds all this hilarious and worthy of merchandising. Trump’s de facto national security advisor Laura Loomer wrote that “the good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now.” This is not the number of immigrants in the US—it is the entire Latino population of the country.

We’ve been here before. In the Jim Crow era, “alligator bait” was a slur that white people commonly used to refer to Black infants and children. Now we’re seeing the same racist vitriol return to dehumanize Latino and immigrant communities.

Racist postcard, c. 1910 (Source: New York Public Library Digital Collections)

Just the Beginning

Alligator Alcatraz is part of a larger detention and expulsion program, detailed in Florida’s so-called “blueprint” to use state property to quickly construct “soft-sided” housing (yes, tents) next to state-owned runways. They’re “one-stop shops,” in the words of DeSantis: “They come here, you drive them 2,000 feet to the runway and then they’re gone!” The other two are Camp Blanding in north central Florida and a yet-to-be named location in the Panhandle. Each is expected to house 2,000 people.

Alligator Alcatraz is located at the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport inside the Big Cypress National Preserve in Ochopee. The Dade-Collier airport, begun in 1968, was to be the largest airport in the world. It was planned to accommodate planes like the Concorde. Flights all over the globe would land and take off there. It was an adjunct to the massive Miami-Dade airport which was already hemmed in by new neighborhoods. Construction of this Cold War vision was halted in 1970, due to massive environmental concerns. Soon afterwards, Gerald Ford created the national park surrounding it. The Ochopee site was seized by DeSantis on June 23, 2025. A mere eight days later, the tent internment camp was opened.

Camp Blanding, constructed in 1939, was the largest military facility of its kind in Florida. More than 800,000 soldiers passed through. After WWII ended it was turned into training grounds for Florida’s National Guard. The third camp, while not yet identified, will be somewhere in the Panhandle. There are at least three major military installations in Pensacola, Milton, and Fort Walton. Each has idled airstrips, called OLFs (Outlying Fields), that would fit neatly into the DeSantis vision.

These three are in addition to Krome, the notorious 30-year-old facility, on the western edge of Miami. Krome was constructed in 1960 as a missile base to counter Russian-made missiles positioned in Cuba. Left idle, in 1981 it was “repurposed” to house the Mariel Boat people (also Cuban). Krome has a long and ugly history of sexual abuse, little to no medical care, and daily rations of just one cup of rice and beans. In fact, less than a month before anybody ever heard of Alligator Alcatraz, a group of Krome detainees assembled in the patio to form a human "SOS" sign. It is estimated that between 700 and 1,700 people are detained there. Exact figures are not released.

Republican Oligarchs and Big Donors Cash In

At the top of the food chain in ICE world is Palantir, brainchild of Peter Thiel (JD Vance’s mentor/money person). It provides data software to ICE to keep track of targeted people. Started under Obama, it has recently been given an additional $30 million to develop “real time” tracking. It could further cash in on the $150 billion passed in the “Big Beautiful Bill” for military expenditures.

Alligator Alcatraz will cost $450 million a year to operate. Florida taxpayers will foot the bill until reimbursed by FEMA. It is unclear whether that reimbursement is guaranteed, however. If FEMA refunds the taxpayers, that leaves little money to bail out Floridians experiencing damage from hurricanes. By contrast, Krome is operated by Akima business systems for $685 million over 10 years. Akima is an Alaskan Native Corporation. That status allows it to secure government contracts quickly, especially those intended for small businesses.

Alligator Alcatraz has been a feast for DeSantis’s big donors. “No bid” contracts, awarded to vendors without a competitive bidding process, rule the day. There is an $18 million contract to CDR Logistics LLC—a joint venture that includes one of Ron DeSantis’s biggest campaign contributors. It is one of at least five new contracts and purchase orders totaling more than $25 million.There is also a $1.1 million dollar contract to a newly formed company, IRG Global Management, an offshoot of Access Restoration Services (ARC), to handle daily operations like sewage removal. ARC is a major donor to Florida Republicans.

The feast will continue as the two new “one-stop shops” get up and running.

Image: Daniel Varela, for Friends of the Everglades (June 22, 2025)

Resistance

When you think “resistance,” Florida doesn’t roll off the tongue. Trump won handily in Naples all three times he ran. The Congressional Representative is Byron Donalds, an election denier, and the only person to be refused entry into the Black Caucus because he denies there is racism in the US. Donalds is running for governor, since DeSantis is barred from another term.

Yet the unexpected has happened. April’s Hands Off protest in Naples drew a crowd of 7,000 or so. Prior to that demonstrations of this type could barely attract 200. No Kings in July had 1,200 or so.

In late June, Betty Osceola, a Miccosukee native and climate activist, called on organizations like the Love The Everglades Movement and Friends of the Everglades, along with other locals, to protest the facility. Alligator Alcatraz sits adjacent to Miccosukee lands. There isn’t even a breakdown shoulder on this remote part of the Tamiami Trail. This is the true/real Alligator Alley. Attempts by Congressional representatives to tour the facility have been refused. Word spread quickly and folks who came for Hands Off and No Kings joined, even though Ochopee is almost 50 miles from Naples. Hundreds of people withstood Florida heat, humidity, and mosquitos to protest this vile facility.

Camp Blanding is located in one of the most conservative rural areas of north central Florida. Dotted with cattle herds, a Lowe’s, and a few Speedways, the area is home to three of Florida’s biggest prisons. As yet no protests have materialized.

The Panhandle might prove more fertile. In the recent special election to fill the resignation of Matt Gaetz, the massive Republican majority was cut in half.

Our Duty to Struggle

What is being built now in South Florida and around the country is a system of concentration camps intended to facilitate an ethnic cleansing of Mexicano, Chicano, Latine, and immigrant communities from the United States. Trump’s huge hideous bill just gave that ethnic cleansing project an enormous boost, with $170 billion allocated to ICE over the next four years, of which $45 billion is allocated to the construction of new detention camps specifically. Not only does this make ICE the largest domestic police force in the US, it also makes it one of the largest militarized bodies internationally. With an average annual budget of $37.5 billion, ICE will spend only slightly less than the entire Canadian military ($41 billion) and slightly more than the Israeli military ($30.5 billion).

The people’s resistance to the ghoulish concentration camps, in Florida and nationwide, will matter. No matter how many billions of dollars they spend, Trump and his minions can’t build concentration camps or deport immigrants on their own; like all fascist projects, their program relies on the active compliance of millions of individuals, organizations and institutions. It is our moral and political duty to resist, contest and refuse compliance with this fascist program of ethnic cleansing using every available tool of nonviolent protest, noncooperation and intervention. Our future depends on it.

Elly Leary is a long-time labor activist, now retired. She was bargaining chair of her UAW local and co-chair of New Directions, the first national reform caucus. She has been a member of Liberation Road for more than 40 years.