Other GOP-led states are considering ‘Alligator Alcatraz' knock-offs, according to survey
Last week, Rep. Nancy Mace of South Carolina tweeted a desperate plea to the Department of Homeland Security for an 'Alligator Alcatraz' in her state.
'Dear DHS: We've got a swamp and a dream. Let's talk. South Carolina's gators are ready. And they're not big on paperwork. If I was Governor, we'd be bringing Alligator Alcatraz to South Carolina,' she wrote.
In the wake of that message, a Fox News survey found that a handful of the 26 states with Republican governors have plans for a similar migrant prison camp in their states.
Representatives for the governor's offices in Georgia and Arkansas confirmed that construction is underway on facilities that can hold thousands of migrants.
A spokesman for South Carolina's Governor Henry McMaster said that the administration is 'exploring how the Palmetto State's unique assets and resources can be utilized to provide additional and enhanced support in the weeks and months to come.'
Other states responded positively to Florida's efforts and the Trump administration's controversial policies involving the detention of migrants, but did not specify plans for their own 'Alligator Alcatraz.'
On Tuesday, the White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, called on other state s to follow Florida Governor Ron DeSantis' lead and to build similar prisons in their states during an appearance on Laura Ingraham's show.
'We want to go to every Republican state – now, of course, in a sane country, Democrats would do it, too, but they love the illegals and they hate the Americans. We want every governor of a red state, and if you are watching tonight: pick up the phone, call DHS, work with us to build facilities in your state so we can get the illegals out and we can get the criminals out,' Miller said.
The first detainees arrived Thursday at the facility, which will cost $450 million to operate and consists of tents and trailers surrounded by razor wire on swampland about 45 miles west of downtown Miami.
Republicans named it after what was once one of the most notorious prisons in the U.S. and have billed it as a temporary lockup that is essential to Trump's immigration crackdown.
Opponents decry it as a political stunt and fear it could become a permanent fixture. The Republican Party of Florida has taken to fundraising off the detention center, selling branded T-shirts and beer koozies emblazoned with the facility's name.
'The proposal was rolled out without any public input in one of the most ecologically sensitive regions of Florida, and arguably the United States,' said Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, which is among environmental groups that have sued to stop the project.
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The Independent
3 hours ago
- The Independent
Nursing homes struggle with Trump's immigration crackdown
Nursing homes already struggling to recruit staff are now grappling with President Donald Trump's attack on one of their few reliable sources of workers: immigration. Facilities for older adults and disabled people are reporting the sporadic loss of employees who have had their legal status revoked by Trump. But they fear even more dramatic impacts are ahead as pipelines of potential workers slow to a trickle with an overall downturn in legal immigration. 'We feel completely beat up right now,' says Deke Cateau, CEO of A.G. Rhodes, which operates three nursing homes in the Atlanta area, with one-third of the staff made up of foreign-born people from about three dozen countries. 'The pipeline is getting smaller and smaller.' Eight of Cateau's workers are expected to be forced to leave after having their Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, revoked. TPS allows people already living in the U.S. to stay and work legally if their home countries are unsafe due to civil unrest or natural disasters and during the Biden administration, the designation was expanded to cover people from a dozen countries, including large numbers from Venezuela and Haiti. While those with TPS represent a tiny minority of A.G. Rhodes' 500 staffers, Cateau says they will be 'very difficult, if not impossible, to replace' and he worries what comes next. 'It may be eight today, but who knows what it's going to be down the road,' says Cateau, an immigrant himself, who arrived from Trinidad and Tobago 25 years ago. Nearly one in five civilian workers in the U.S. is foreign born, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but as in construction, agriculture and manufacturing, immigrants are overrepresented in caregiving roles. More than a quarter of an estimated 4 million nursing assistants, home health aides, personal care aides and other so-called direct care workers are foreign born, according to PHI, a nonprofit focused on the caregiving workforce. The aging of the massive Baby Boom generation is poised to fuel even more demand for caregivers, both in institutional settings and in individuals' homes. BLS projects more growth among home health and personal care aides than any other job, with some 820,000 new positions added by 2032. Nursing homes, assisted living facilities, home health agencies and other such businesses were counting on immigrants to fill many of those roles, so Trump's return to the White House and his administration's attack on nearly all forms of immigration has sent a chill throughout the industry. Katie Smith Sloan, CEO of LeadingAge, which represents nonprofit care facilities, says homes around the country have been affected by the immigration tumult. Some have reported employees who have stopped coming to work, fearful of a raid, even though they are legally in the country. Others have workers who are staying home with children they have kept out of school because they worry about roundups. Many others see a slowdown of job applicants. 'This is just like a punch in the gut,' she says. Rachel Blumberg, CEO of the Toby and Leon Cooperman Sinai Residences in Boca Raton, Florida, has already lost 10 workers whose permission to stay in the U.S. came under a program known as humanitarian parole, which had been granted to people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. She is slated to lose 30 more in the coming weeks with the end of TPS for Haitians. 'I think it's the tip of the iceberg,' says Blumberg, forecasting further departures of employees who may not themselves be deported, but whose spouse or parent is. Blumberg got less than 24 hours' notice when her employees lost their work authorization, setting off a scramble to fill shifts. She has already boosted salaries and referral bonuses but says it will be difficult to replace not just aides, but maintenance workers, dishwashers and servers. 'Unfortunately, Americans are not drawn to applying and working in the positions that we have available,' she says. Front-line caregivers are overwhelmingly female and a majority are members of minority groups, according to PHI, earning an average of just $16.72 hourly in 2023. Long-term care homes saw an exodus of workers as COVID made an already-challenging workplace even more so. Some facilities were beginning to see employment normalize to pre-pandemic levels just as the immigration crackdown hit, though industry-wide, there is still a massive shortage of workers. Some in the industry have watched in frustration as Trump lamented how businesses including farming and hospitality could be hurt by his policies, wondering why those who clean hotel rooms or pick tomatoes deserve more attention than those who care for elders. Beyond rescinded work authorizations for people living in the U.S., care homes are having difficulty getting visas approved for registered nurses and licensed practical nurses they recruit abroad. What used to be a simple process now stretches so long that candidates reconsider the U.S. altogether, says Mark Sanchez, chief operating officer of United Hebrew, a nursing home in New Rochelle, New York. 'There are lines upon lines upon lines,' says Sanchez, 'and now they're saying, 'I'm going to go to Canada' and 'I'm going to go to Germany and they're welcoming me with open arms.'' Looking around a facility with a majority-immigrant staff, the son of Filipino immigrants wonders where his future recruits will come from. 'I don't have ICE coming in my door and taking my people,' Sanchez says, 'but the pipeline that was flowing before is now coming in dribs and drabs.' Long-term care workers are routinely lured away not just by hospitals and doctors' offices, but restaurants, stores and factories. Half of the average nursing home's staff turns over each year, according to federal data, making the attraction and retention of every employee vital to their operation. Robin Wolzenburg of LeadingAge in Wisconsin began working to place an influx of people from Afghanistan after the U.S. pulled out its final troops four years ago and thousands of refugees arrived in her state. Care homes began hiring the refugees and were so delighted with them, some facilities began hiring refugees who arrived from Ukraine, Somalia and Congo. Though many homes had employee retention rates around 30%, Wolzenburg said the figure was above 90% with refugees. Trump has halted most refugee admissions, meaning Wolzenburg's successful outreach program has no new arrivals to target. 'It's been really devastating,' Wolzenburg says. 'Our communities that were actively working with the resettlement agencies are not seeing those referrals to long-term care like we were. There's no refugees coming in.' Lynne Katman, the founder of Juniper Communities, which runs 21 facilities across five states, says it's hard enough to find the right workers with a passion for older adults. Now, just as homes gird for an influx of residents brought on by the country's demographic shift, they're facing another challenge to a stable workforce. 'The work is hard. It's not always been the highest paying job that one can get,' she says. 'But many of the immigrants who actually have chosen this work consider caregiving a noble profession.' ___
The Guardian
3 hours ago
- The Guardian
How US immigration raids hurt summer pleasures, from berries to barbecues
From his father's strawberry farm in central California, Tomás Diaz noticed a border patrol vehicle driving toward a field of workers. Diaz, himself Mexican American and a US citizen, yelled in Spanish: 'Run for your life! That's immigration!' As the men scattered, the agents grabbed whom they could. In the chaos, six workers escaped, and Diaz was detained for interrogation. 'Why did you yell at the Mexicans to run?' an officer pressed. 'No reason at all,' Diaz calmly replied. This did not happen yesterday, but in 1953. Driven by fears of border infiltration by communists and 'criminal' and 'diseased' migrants, the Immigration and National Service (the Department of Homeland Security's predecessor) carried out 'Operation Wetback' from 1954 to 1957. Border patrol officers raided public spaces, workplaces and homes and formally deported about 400,000 Mexicans (hundreds of thousands more repatriated out of fear). More than 70 years after Operation Wetback, the mass deportation campaign orchestrated by Trump, homeland security (DHS) adviser Stephen Miller and DHS secretary Kristi Noem is using Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers to conduct Orwellian raids. Trump's administration knows that targeting workers in the food chain is the easiest way to reach Miller's quota of 3,000 arrests a day. Labor department data affirms that 42% of US farm workers lack proper documentation. Ice agents are rushing into fruit orchards, vegetable fields, dairy barns, processing plants and restaurant kitchens to arrest people on the spot. The consequences of these raids will be profound in our food labor system and greater society. First and foremost, these raids are traumatizing people. Many arrestees are 'disappeared', their locations unknown by loved ones and lawyers. Second, the raids will affect summer food chains and other industries throughout the year. The juicy watermelons and peaches, berry pies, barbecue, ice-cream and lobster rolls we are currently enjoying come from the labor of a heavily immigrant workforce. Almost every bit of American food and drink passes through the hands of an immigrant, and the DHS is denying this reality while terrorizing food workers with brutal efficiency. In the seafood industry, Latin American and Caribbean workers in fish-processing plants in New England and on the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf Coast ensure cod, crawfish, crab, scallops and lobster get to our markets and restaurants. An early Trump 2.0 raid targeted a seafood depot in Newark, New Jersey. Without warrants, agents demanded documentation from workers who looked Latino, and detained three immigrants and the warehouse manager, a Puerto Rican veteran who was eventually released but distressed that his citizenship and military service meant nothing. In New Bedford, Massachusetts (the nation's highest-value fishing area), at least two dozen Guatemalan men have been taken. Latin American and Caribbean workers stepped into New England's seafood industry at the turn of the century, a critical juncture when the children of Euro American fish workers rejected their occupational inheritance. If these workers are deported in large numbers, seafood circulations will decline precipitously across the nation and globe. Summer ice-cream is made possible by the milking labor of (mostly undocumented and male) Latino dairy workers. In April, a raid occurred at a dairy farm in Vermont, a US state that would topple economically if not for milk's production. Sixty-eight per cent of the state's milk (and 43% of New England's milk) comes from farms reliant on immigrant workers. Enjoyed meat at a Fourth of July or weekend barbecue? A whopping 71% of animal-processing workers in the US are immigrants from Latin America, Asia and Africa. When Ice agents raided the Glenn Valley meat-processing plant in Omaha, Nebraska, and detained 76 workers, they took half of the plant's workforce. Though Omaha has been a home for Mexican meatpackers for more than a century, the local police and sheriff cooperated with Ice dragnets by blocking traffic around multiple production plants. Raids on food workers in California (which provides a third of the vegetables and more than half of the nation's fruit and nuts) have gone the most viral. Video captured a fieldworker being chased down in the fog, while berry and citrus workers were harassed across three counties. Ice agents raided a grocery store; grabbed a tortilla truck driver; and arrested a female street vendor outside a Home Depot who held desperately onto a tree as bystanders filmed and yelled: 'They're kidnapping her!' It's already happening, but food sellers in our informal economy will stop working in public in greater numbers. Meanwhile, in brick-and-mortar establishments, Ice detained employees at nine restaurants in Washington DC; an Italian restaurant in San Diego; two Mexican restaurants in the Rio Grande Valley; and a Mexican restaurant in Pennsylvania. Food workers are often rendered invisible in spaces like fields, warehouses and kitchens. Trump's administration is hoping that this food precariat is expendable enough that Americans won't care or fight back against these workers' arrests and detentions. They're wrong. Food workers are increasingly visible as the public records and spreads word of Ice incidents. Protesters showed up at the Omaha meat plant, and locals decried the arrest of a beloved Salvadoran bagel shop manager on Long Island, New York. Chilling videos of Ice agents invading private homes and smashing car windows to grab Latino drivers are inspiring popular backlash. And, as in the 1950s, US-born Latinos realize the hunting of 'illegal' bodies leads to their own racial profiling. In the 1950s, many agricultural employers railed against the INS and border patrol for deporting undocumented workers, claiming citizens were too unavailable or unreliable (in reality, this was often a union-busting argument). Today, food industry bosses are similarly pushing back against government. Glenn Valley owner Chad Hartmann accused the federal government of traumatizing his employees and failing to improve the E-Verify system that checks immigration status. The dairy industry has called out the deportations as myopic and reckless. Employers surely remember the first year of Covid, when food labor flows halted. Foreign workers were held up or quarantined at the border, while some US citizen farm workers stayed away from harvesting sites for fear of contagion and death. Suddenly remembering his agribusiness donors, Trump declared a stop to immigration raids in the food industry on 12 June. Five days later, DHS leaders reversed Trump's reversal, telling Ice agents to carry on. This whiplash reveals the administration's internal dysfunction and callous denial of immigrant workers as fuller human beings with longstanding ties to the United States. Their ideal is a white America, with foreigners used for labor but considered return to sender at a moment's notice. What can the past tell us about what's to come? Consumers will feel the financial pinch first, and growers will blame increasing workforce instability and losing time on training new employees. Agriculture scretary Brooke Rollins's ridiculous idea of using Medicaid recipients as farm workers will likely be supplanted by Trump's expansion of the H-2A visa program. From 1942 to 1964, the bracero program (which offered around 5m labor contracts to Mexican men to work in US agriculture for six to nine months at a time) was shored up as the legal solution to the 'wetback' crisis. The H-2A program is bracerismo reincarnated; it binds a guest worker to one employer for the entirety of their contract, even if problems arise regarding wage theft, substandard living conditions or threats to physical safety. Swift backlash against grievances keeps guest workers feeling silenced and chronically deportable. Cruelty and dehumanization are the points of Trump's immigration schemes. We must not lose sight of this while protesting raids in food spaces. Immigrants' value lies far beyond 'doing the jobs Americans won't do'. Their mistreatment and unfreedoms are inextricably bound up with, and will affect, those of other Americans. Most recently, Maga acolyte Laura Loomer's X post about feeding the nation's 65 million Latinos to alligators in the Everglades generated loud condemnation. The US has long consumed the labor, cuisine and culture of Latinos, both citizen and immigrant. Loomer's rhetoric takes that consumption to a grotesque level of real, not just imagined, violence. Today's Ice raids are an echo of the past, and stem from the Trump administration's racialization of Latinos. At best, they can be instrumentalized for labor; at worst, they are a perpetually foreign population to be eradicated. Through showing solidarity with the diverse people who hold our food chains together, the public can give the Trump administration a much-needed reality check that it can't talk (or eat) out of both sides of its mouth. Lori A Flores is a professor of history at Columbia University and the author of Awaiting Their Feast: Latinx Food Workers and Activism from World War II to Covid-19
The Guardian
8 hours ago
- The Guardian
Kash Patel denies rumors he's quitting the FBI over DoJ ruling on Epstein files
FBI director Kash Patel has denied swirling resignation rumors over reported unhappiness at a justice department decision to close the book on Jeffrey Epstein after administration officials teased a big reveal earlier in the year. In a Saturday social media post, the agency director said: 'the conspiracy theories just aren't true, never have been. It's an honor to serve the President of the United States – and I'll continue to do so for as long as he calls on me.' Over the past week, Maga hardliners, including Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, former White House adviser Steve Bannon and – reportedly – FBI deputy director Dan Bongino, have been strongly critical of a joint decision by US attorney general Pam Bondi and the FBI to not release further information about Epstein held in government files, including a so-called client list. Critics have slammed the FBI-justice department conclusion about Epstein's official autopsy that the disgraced financier had hung himself in his cell. Many have refused to accept that, repeating a conspiracy theory that Epstein, who died in August 2019 while awaiting trial, was in fact murdered to silence him. 'This systematic review revealed no incriminating 'client list',' the memo stated. 'There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.' Rumors of a rift between the FBI and the justice department over the memo have been denied by deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, who wrote on social media that there is 'no daylight' between the FBI and the Department of Justice leadership on the issue. 'I worked closely with [Kash and Bongino] on the joint FBI and DOJ memo regarding the Epstein Files. All of us signed off on the contents of the memo and the conclusions stated in the memo. The suggestion by anyone that there was any daylight between the FBI and DOJ leadership on this memo's composition and release is patently false,' Blanche said. But on Friday, NBC News reported that Bongino is considering stepping down from his post at the FBI after a 'heated confrontation' with Bondi over the issue. 'Bongino is out-of-control furious,' the person who has spoken with the deputy FBI director said. 'This destroyed his career. He's threatening to quit and torch Pam unless she's fired.' Donald Trump has also grown testy with repeated questions about Epstein, who was once a neighbor in Palm Beach. He erupted on Tuesday when he was pressed on an apparent one-minute gap in a 10-hour video recorded outside of Epstein's cell. 'Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?' he said. 'This guy's been talked about for years … Are people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable.' Bondi has since explained that the missing minute of surveillance film was simply the recording equipment resetting itself, as it does every night. Still, it is not clear that Maga hardliners are willing to let the Epstein conspiracy theories go – they have provided a constant stream of material that supposedly supports their theories of a deep state. But no evidence has emerged that Epstein was engaged in a conspiracy to blackmail high-profile visitors, including Britain's Prince Andrew, to his homes in New York, Florida, New Mexico and the US Virgin Islands. The FBI-DoJ memo stated that it had uncovered 'a significant amount of material', including more than 300GB of data and physical evidence that included 'a large volume of images of Epstein, images and videos of victims who are either minors or appear to be minors, and over ten thousand downloaded videos and images of illegal child sex abuse material and other pornography'. 'Through this review, we found no basis to revisit the disclosure of those materials and will not permit the release of child pornography,' the memo said.
