Welcome to Alligator Alcatraz

Concentration Camps, Eugenics, and Genocide in Trump's America

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Welcome to Alligator Alcatraz

From WINK News.

The idea of a concentration camp within the borders of the United States is almost unbelievable.

Almost.

Well, actually, now that I think about it, it’s not.

Our country has been built entirely on the backs of the poor, the marginalized, and the abused. We have been exploiting the bodies of poor, black, brown, and indigenous people for centuries. So while it is jarring to hear the president make jokes about feeding human beings to alligators, the sentiment isn’t new. There is a large contingency of Americans who, in their attempt to “Make America Great Again,” want to rid our country of “the parasite class.”

If you have paid attention to Trump’s rhetoric, this is where he always planned to lead us. His father was a raging racist over a century ago (he was sued by the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ in 1973 for refusing to rent the apartments he owned to non-white tenants), and he spoon fed these hateful ideologies to Donald, who eagerly lapped them up. The Trumps’ racism is deeply based in the field of Eugenics, which Merriam-Webster defines as “the practice or advocacy of controlled selective breeding of human populations (as by sterilization) to improve the populations' genetic composition.”

Eugenics was a growing field of study before World War II. Hitler is often credited with some version of the following quote, but it was originally spoken by French biologist Jean Rostand in Thoughts of a Biologist (1938). I couldn’t find a direct link between Rostand’s work and Hitler, but you can see where the former’s ideas, and the field of Eugenics more broadly, influenced Hitler and Naziism.

“Kill one man, and you are a murderer. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill them all, and you are a god.”

Jean Rostand

Thankfully, Eugenics was largely dismissed by the general public after the Holocaust, but, as we are clearly seeing now, the ideology persisted in a quieter way. This quote from Rostand feels like a prophecy:

One may wonder if, sooner or later, humanity will not take control of its physical and moral progress by practicing on itself an 'artificial selection' similar to what it applies to domestic animals when aiming to reinforce traits deemed advantageous. Whether through negative eugenics, by eliminating the defective, or positive eugenics, by favoring the reproduction of the best, the collective conscience remains quite resistant. For now, any control over human reproduction would provoke social discomfort disproportionate to any potential benefit. It is possible, however, that in the future, such scruples may weaken. Undoubtedly, a 'eugenic awareness' is forming, and humans will gradually come to illuminate their sense of responsibility toward their offspring or the species.

Jean Rostand, What I Believe, 1953

Trump is a shining example of what Rostand proposed almost seventy-five years ago. “Make America Great Again” is not new, neither the phrase nor the meaning behind it. Ronald Reagan coined “Let’s Make America Great Again” during his 1980 presidential campaign, although with a more inclusive approach. Here is an excerpt from Reagan’s Republican Nomination acceptance speech on July 17, 1980:

Our message will be: we have to move ahead, but we’re not going to leave anyone behind. Thanks to the economic policies of the Democratic Party, millions of Americans find themselves out of work. Millions more have never even had a fair chance to learn new skills, hold a decent job, or secure for themselves and their families a share in the prosperity of this nation. It is time to put America back to work; to make our cities and towns resound with the confident voices of men and women of all races, nationalities, and faiths bringing home to their families a decent paycheck they can cash for honest money. For those without skills, we’ll find a way to help them get skills. For those without job opportunities, we’ll stimulate new opportunities, particularly in the inner cities where they live. For those who have abandoned hope, we’ll restore hope and we’ll welcome them into a great national crusade to make America great again!¹

Reagan’s inclusive language here is shocking. From a Republican presidential nominee? I almost fell out of my chair. Can you imagine if Trump got up at the Republican National Convention and talked about offering skilled training to minorities who had been left behind? For those in the inner cities from different “races, nationalities, and faiths”? (Did Reagan mean any of it? He is responsible for coining the term “welfare queen” four years earlier, so I’ll let you be the judge.)

There is absolutely no chance this could happen today. The rhetoric has shifted. Trump is flooding the zone² until what was once taboo becomes typical. How do you start a fascist regime rooted in national and/or ethnic superiority? With language. You dehumanize those you wish to remove until others start to believe you. These paragraphs from Stat News prove my point:

When Donald Trump talks about undocumented immigrants, he often brings up genetics. Immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country,” he said at a rally last year.

Trump is frequently accused of racism, but the fact that he is embracing eugenic thinking has not drawn sufficient attention, according to Shannon O’Brien, a political scientist at the University of Texas, Austin, who has written a book on eugenics in American politics.

While racists harbor hatred for others because of their ethnicity or the color of their skin, eugenicists take it a step further and “like to legislate people out of existence,” O’Brien said. “They are OK with sterilization. They’re okay with extermination, and they believe that certain groups are superior and it’s OK to enact things that make it difficult for other ones to exist. I find that far scarier than racism.”

The former president also has a history of statements suggesting that certain people are genetically superior. A 2016 documentary pointed out Trump’s father, Fred, introduced him to “racehorse theory” as a child — the idea that “that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get superior offspring.”

Even well-intentioned scientists have fed into this shift by promoting genetic determinism — the idea that genes are the primary driver of traits and behaviors — and by platforming problematic work in the name of academic freedom.

“I wasn’t surprised that people are being demagogic about this stuff, but I am a little surprised that they’re so clearly not even hiding [it],” said Paul Lombardo, a professor of law at Georgia State University who has done extensive work on the legacy of eugenics. “This is not just saying the quiet part out loud. This is coming up with quotations in which, instead of using quotation marks, you’ve got swastikas at each end of the sentence.”³

He’s not trying to hide it; he is singing it loudly to his base who loves every hateful word. And that base just supported the passage of a bill that has now allocated an additional $170,000,000,000 “to support the Trump's administration's border and immigration goals,”⁴ even though it works agains their own interests. Some of these people hate immigrants so much that they got lost in their own fervor of hatred and are now surprised to learn that they lost their own rights along the way.

Alligator Alcatraz (which I wish I had to put in quotes as a slang term but an official government sign has been erected with this title) has opened for business. Our government officials are making jokes about the deplorable conditions and not joking about their hope that some of these “illegals” try to escape and become food for the abundant wildlife whose ecosystem is being threatened yet again by a cruel and greedy administration.

It’s rare that so many violations of human rights and integrity are performed publicly, and with such zeal. The American government has built a “detention facility” in a fragile ecosystem which is sacred to indigenous peoples. This “detention facility” and the agency which supports it (ICE) are blatantly denying the constitutionally protected rights of the people it will imprison while simultaneously ignoring the further damage it will cause to indigenous people who have been fighting for centuries to maintain their way of life on this land.

“It’s like a theatricalization of cruelty,” Maria Asuncion Bilbao, Florida campaign coordinator at the immigration advocacy group American Friends Service Committee, previously told The Associated Press.⁵

When we talk about people as if they’re vermin … The location, the manner in which it’s done, the dehumanizing language … there’s nothing about this detention camp that is not cruel and inhumane.

Thomas Kennedy, policy analyst at the Florida Immigrant Coalition

The groundwork is also being laid for this system to expand. As if the kidnapping of people in broad daylight by masked, armed “agents” in Three Percenter t-shirts isn’t horrific enough, the aforementioned bill (H.R. 1) will provide substantial resources to beef up the operation. The money has been allocated, the facilities are being built, and the bounty hunters will continue to be hired. One of the more concerning pieces I read on the subject states the following:

DeSantis authorized the construction of the illegal immigrant detention center on a sprawling property in the Everglades' swamplands of Miami–Dade County under an emergency order. It took eight days to construct, will cost $450 million per year to operate and the Sunshine State will be fully reimbursed by the federal government.

The governor said the center will be used to fast-track immigration cases. “We’re offering up our National Guard and other folks in Florida to be deputized to be immigration judges,” De Santis said.

“We’ll have people here in this facility that can make [legal decisions]... So we want to cut through that so that we have an efficient operation between Florida and DHS to get the removal of these illegals done.”

Noem acknowledged the collaboration between Florida and DHS, framing it as a potential model for other states” (emphasis mine).⁶

Who are these “other folks?” The same people who are volunteering to play policemen (and women) by assaulting immigrants on our streets and placing them in unmarked cars to transport them to god knows where? What training do they and the Florida National Guard have to become immigration judges? Who’s to say that they won’t literally feed these people to the alligators?

Unsurprisingly, De Santis continues to dehumanize and people for his own political (and personal) gain, and he is now paving the way for other states to follow the model and receive their own contracts for these facilities.

Let’s follow the money, shall we?

We all know that America has a prison problem. According to the American Civil Liberties Union, “The United States spends over $80 billion on incarceration each year,” with “local, state, and federal governments spend[ing] anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000 annually to keep an individual behind bars.”⁷

“Mass incarceration” refers to the reality that the United States criminalizes and incarcerates more of its own people than any other country in the history of the world and inflicts that enormous harm primarily on the most vulnerable among us: poor people of color. In 2018, more than 10.7 million people entered U.S. jails and prisons—the equivalent of locking up every single person in Portugal, Greece, or Sweden. On any given day, nearly 2 million people are behind bars in this country and 4.5 million people are on probation or parole, under the “supervision” of the state. The majority of the people we criminalize and incarcerate are Black and Latino, even though these two groups constitute less than one third of the national population.”⁸

But why does America want to lock up its citizens, you may be asking? The students at Tufts University explain it here:

Roughly three-quarters of private prison contracts include minimum occupancy clauses (also known as “bed guarantees”) which “state that the government contracting with a prison must maintain a specific percentage of occupancy at that prison” (American University Business Law Review). A study of private prison contracts by the Brennan Center for Justice found that “the majority of these contracts guarantee that the state will supply enough prisoners to keep between 80 and 100 percent of the private prisons’ beds filled. If the state fails to fulfill this “bed guarantee”, it must pay a fine to the company running the prisons – in effect, paying for each prison bed regardless of whether it holds a prisoner.” Because governments are financially penalized when they do not meet or exceed the minimum occupancy requirements, governments are incentivized to arrest and incarcerate more and more people. By incorporating minimum occupancy clauses, private prison corporations reinforce mass incarceration through their contracts with governments.

In addition to contract clauses that further mass incarceration, private prison corporations also engage in lobbying efforts and campaign funding in order to sway policies and politicians and uphold mass incarceration. In its 2014 report, CoreCivic stated that, ‘the demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws’ (The Washington Post, 2015). Because the profitability of private prisons is contingent on these policies and practices, private prison corporations are heavily involved in political lobbying as they seek to maintain and strengthen carceral policies.⁹

What used to be said quietly is now being screamed by the highest official of our land. It’s printed on red hats atop the heads of people who have regained their “freedom” to talk about how just much they hate people who are unlike them.

It’s disgusting. And I wish it was just about the money they were making through the private prison system, but I no longer believe this. It isn’t just that they hate them, they literally want them to die horrific deaths. The prison contracts are just the cherry on top of the slur-filled sundae.

They hate black people. Poor people. Immigrants (of the darker skinned variety, because no one is going after lighter skinned immigrants, let’s be honest). Disabled people. Women. Liberals. Those who can’t work, don’t work enough, or don’t work the right kind of jobs.

RFK Jr. is talking about “wellness farms.” Healthcare is being slashed. “Detention centers” are being built. Women are losing access to their reproductive rights. Opposing journalists are being silenced and fired.

It’s all connected, and we’ve seen this before.

I read a lot about World War II. My grandfather served as a combat Marine in the Pacific Islands; I miss him and read as much as I can about this era to learn about what his life was like during the war and, subsequently, how it affected him for the next sixty years. Last year, I nonchalantly selected Lilac Girls by

Martha Hall Kelly

on my Libby app. I expected it to be one of many (excellent) historical novels I’ve devoured about this era, but Lilac Girls is different: it focuses on a group of seventy-four Polish Catholic women at Ravensbrück, the only all-female Nazi concentration camp, whose bodies were used in horrific experiments which left most of them disfigured for life. These operations were led by Dr. Herta Oberheuser, a Nazi physician, who saw these women as inhuman and worthy of torture. She fully endorsed the Nazi belief of superiority which led her to cut these women’s bodies open, inject toxic substances into them, and document the results as she denied them the most basic relief (including water during their extreme fevers caused by the purposefully introduced infections).

I think about this book often, and with the recent news about Alligator Alcatraz, Kelly’s words have been at the forefront of my mind. While reading Lilac Girls and dozens of other historical novels, I’ve wondered, How did this happen? Why didn’t someone step in? How does a real life person get to the point of thinking this was okay?— or, worse, that it was right?

And now I’m watching it play out in real time. Now I’m asking, Is Alligator Alcatraz a concentration camp? Are my fellow Americans truly so hateful—dare I say evil—as to support this with their full chests (and buy t-shirts and caps to signal their depravity?)

Most importantly, I’m asking, What can I do?

Is it a concentration camp?

Concentration camp, as defined by Oxford:

“A place where large numbers of people, especially political prisoners or members of persecuted minorities, are deliberately imprisoned in a relatively small area with inadequate facilities, sometimes to provide forced labor or to await mass execution. The term is most strongly associated with the several hundred camps established by the Nazis in Germany and occupied Europe in 1933–45, among the most infamous being Dachau, Belsen, and Auschwitz.” And, I would add, Ravensbrück.

As far as I can tell, mass execution has not begun. Yet.

Is it genocide?

Per the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:

The legal term “genocide” refers to certain acts committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group. Genocide is an international crime, according to the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948). The acts that constitute genocide fall into five categories:

Killing members of the group
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction, in whole or in part
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group

Although the term “genocide” is often used, its commission is rare when compared to other serious crimes that are not defined by an intent to destroy a targeted group, such as crimes against humanity and war crimes.¹⁰

I can think of a lot of ways we’ve done this throughout America’s history:

Forced sterilization and negligent healthcare practices for poor and minority groups, particularly African American mothers:

U.S. women of color have historically been the victims of forced sterilization. Some women were sterilized during Cesarean sections and never told; others were threatened with termination of welfare benefits or denial of medical care if they didn’t “consent” to the procedure; others received unnecessary hysterectomies at teaching hospitals as practice for medical residents. In the South it was such a widespread practice that it had a euphemism: a “Mississippi appendectomy.”¹¹

California prisons are said to have authorized sterilizations of nearly 150 female inmates between 2006 and 2010. The Center for Investigative Reporting reveals how the state paid doctors $147,460 to perform tubal ligations that former inmates say were done under coercion.¹²

Black women are three times more likely to die from a pregnancy-related cause than White women. Multiple factors contribute to these disparities, such as variation in quality healthcare and underlying chronic conditions. Social determinants of health prevent many people from racial and ethnic minority groups from having fair opportunities for economic, physical, and emotional health.¹³

Forced separation of Indigenous families through state sponsored kidnapping and assimilation schools¹⁴, and the forced removal of Indigenous people from their land, which we are doing in real time by building Alligator Alcatraz on the Miccosukee and Seminole homelands. Per AP:

For generations, the sweeping wetlands of what is now South Florida have been home to Native peoples who today make up the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida and the Seminole Tribe of Florida, as well as the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma.

“Rather than Miccosukee homelands being an uninhabited wasteland for alligators and pythons, as some have suggested, the Big Cypress is the Tribe’s traditional homelands. The landscape has protected the Miccosukee and Seminole people for generations,” Miccosukee Chairman Talbert Cypress wrote in a statement on social media.

There are 15 remaining traditional Miccosukee and Seminole villages in Big Cypress, as well as ceremonial and burial grounds and other gathering sites, Cypress testified before Congress in 2024.

“We live here. Our ancestors fought and died here. They are buried here,” he said. “The Big Cypress is part of us, and we are a part of it.”¹⁵

Forced family separation at the border

Kidnapping of immigrants by ICE

Hard labor for immigrants without adequate wages or medical care

Internment of 120,000 Japanese Americans during World War II

Kidnapping and forced labor through slavery

Forced family separation through slavery

Murder through slavery

Slavery!!!

Jim Crow

Continued mass incarceration, especially of black and brown men

Lack of access to basic necessities like healthy food, clean water, safe housing, and affordable healthcare.

Dr Stacey Patton

puts it so succinctly:

Last summer I read this book called "Health Communism." I pulled it off my shelf again this afternoon to look at all the pages I highlighted.

The authors argue that healthcare cuts are designed to kill off the poor, the disabled, the sick, and the marginalized. And to do it quietly enough so that it looks like budget policy instead of violence. Capitalist health policy isn’t about keeping everyone well. It’s about deciding who deserves to live.

It’s about dividing people into the productive and the unproductive, the deserving and the undeserving. If you can’t work, if you’re poor, if you’re sick, if you’re undocumented, too bad. You don’t count. Die.

This is a system designed to kill off the people it considers what the authors call "surplus." And we know who the surplus populations are.

17 million people are set to lose their healthcare. These cuts will disproportionately impact Black, Latino, Indigenous, and immigrant families who already face barriers to care.

These are the same communities already targeted by environmental racism, police violence, wage theft, voter suppression, and mass incarceration.

This government is deliberately engineering policies that will shorten the lives of millions of its most vulnerable citizens, including children and especially children of color because they will be America's future demographic majority.

Be clear, this is strategic murder. These monsters made a CHOICE to kill people slowly, quietly, bureaucratically, while gaslighting us to make us think this is about fiscal responsibility.

Dr Stacey Patton

The list goes on and on. Our government is waging a public assault on our country’s most vulnerable populations while the wealthy take private jets to Venice for a week of partying with the only people they actually care about— other wealthy people. Or as they golf, sign bills that will kill millions of people, and tour future concentration camp facilities.

We can’t afford to look away any longer. Jesus was absolutely clear in his mandate to care for the poor, to protect the vulnerable, and to meet the needs of those who cannot do it themselves. History has shown us what is coming. Thoughts and prayers aren’t enough.

So keep giving. Keep speaking out. Keep writing. Use whatever influence you have to push back the darkness. Build community and share what you have. Support grassroots efforts to care for those in your community who are losing their healthcare, losing their loved ones, and losing their God-given right to live. We can’t bury our heads in the sand or become overwhelmed with the onslaught of cruelty— people’s very lives are at stake.

Persist. Persist. Persist.

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Recommended Reading:

1. The Undocumented Americans by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

2. Wandering in Strange Lands: A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims her Roots by Morgan Jerkins

3. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer

4. The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World by Robin Wall Kimmerer

5. The Seedkeeper by Diane Wilson

6. Lilac Girls by Martha Hall Kelly

7. The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI by Betty Medsger

8. Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

1. https://books.google.com/books?id=zJ-fDC_lj_sC&pg=PA22#v=onepage&q&f=false

2. https://www.newsweek.com/steve-bannon-flood-zone-strategy-explained-trump-policy-blitz-2027482

3. https://www.statnews.com/2024/10/28/eugenics-in-political-rhetoric-open-science-movement-expert-analysis/

4. https://www.npr.org/2025/07/03/g-s1-75609/big-beautiful-bill-ice-funding-immigration

5. https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/01/us/what-is-alligator-alcatraz-florida

6. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/self-deport-end-up-alligator-alcatraz-noem-warns-migrants-during-trump-visit

7. https://www.aclu.org/issues/smart-justice/mass-incarceration

8. https://endmassincarceration.org/what-is-mass-incarceration/

9. https://sites.tufts.edu/prisondivestment/prison-contracts

10. https://www.ushmm.org/genocide-prevention/learn-about-genocide-and-other-mass-atrocities/what-is-genocide

11. https://msmagazine.com/2011/07/21/sterilization-of-women-of-color-does-unforced-mean-freely-chosen/

12. https://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/unwanted-sterilization-and-eugenics-programs-in-the-united-states

13. https://www.cdc.gov/womens-health/features/maternal-mortality.html

14. https://www.hcn.org/issues/51-17/indigenous-affairs-the-us-stole-generations-of-indigenous-children-to-open-the-west/

15. https://apnews.com/article/florida-alligator-alcatraz-immigration-detention-desantis-trump-8856c0e2b9ecb8c0fb960f6e3e72a5ae