The New Yorker:

By Erin Neil

Earlier this month, a detention facility known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” which can house up to three thousand migrants, opened in the Florida Everglades. I called Jonathan Blitzer, a staff writer who has written extensively about Trump’s border policies, to discuss why this facility stands out—and what it tells us about the Trump Administration’s immigration crackdown. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

How bad is this particular detention facility?

This is something that the incoming Trump Administration fantasized about because it allowed them to really scale up their capacity both to instill terror and to arrest as many people as possible.

What is utterly horrifying about it in practice is it’s just a recipe for mass racial profiling. Lawyers are already reporting that some people being held in this facility were arrested for traffic violations or just the most minor offenses, likely because they look Hispanic.

How does it compare to other detention facilities in the U.S.?

Two things immediately strike me as being unprecedented with the opening of this facility. The first is the idea that a state is doing this on its own. It’s not the federal government making those immigration arrests. State agents are making them, and using this facility specifically to hold those arrested.

The Administration—Stephen Miller and others—are already calling on other red states to do the same. The federal government would give these states money, in part, to open these facilities. And the money is largely coming from fema’s budget. We’re seeing flash floods all across the country, including the devastation in Texas. But fema has basically been gutted in its capacity to deal with those sorts of things, and instead money from fema is being used to help stand up these facilities.

The second striking thing is quite simply just the horror of the conditions that are being reported from this facility already. The facility opened on July 3rd. We’re seeing reports of everything from wastewater sloshing around on the floor to worm-infested food to multiple people crammed into individual cells, cuffed, denied medical care. Every manner of horror.

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