First group of detainees arrive at Trump's brutal 'alligator Alcatraz'
Days ago, Trump visited the makeshift facility at the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport in Ochopee, Florida, which received federal approval to house thousands of undocumented immigrants.
The president said that 'some of the most vicious people on the planet' will be held at the detention centre.
Today, the Florida Division of Emergency Management wrote: 'The first group has arrived at Alligator Alcatraz. Florida is proud to help facilitate Trump's mission to enforce immigration law.'
It will cost an estimated £330,000,000 to operate each year when it's fully established.
Deep in the Florida Everglades and surrounded by miles of swampland, the facility has been likened to early-stage concentration camps by some.
'Alligator Alcatraz' was coined by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who shared a video about it on X (formerly Twitter) a week-and-a-half ago and called it 'the one-stop shop to carry out President Trump's mass deportation agenda'.
It has 3,000 beds and was built in eight days after DeSantis authorised its construction. The Trump administration said it will eventually hold up to 5,000 people.
It is slated to become the biggest migrant detention facility in the country in the heart of the Everglades, which is home to alligators, pythons, mosquitoes and other dangerous wildlife.
The 11,000-foot runway at the airport has recently been used for training, but officials indicated that it could soon be used for deportation flights.
But the facility isn't without concerns.
In an opinion article for MSNBC, author Andrea Pitzer, who researches concentration camps, wrote: 'When people think of concentration camps, they think of more than a million people murdered at Auschwitz.
'But extermination camps appeared only after nearly a decade of Nazi rule and several evolutions in wartime detention. We're still in the early stages of this arc, but Americans aren't helpless before the administration and its allies.' More Trending
In addition to humanitarian concerns, historic worries and environmental issues have been brought up.
The Miccosukee Tribe of Indians has also gotten involved in the matter, slamming the use of its ancestral lands in the Big Cypress National Preserve for detention purposes.
Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, pointed out that the site posed an 'existential threat' to the national park.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.
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The Guardian
13 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Ghislaine Maxwell was not Jeffrey Epstein's sole enabler. So why is she the only one in prison?
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Metro
26 minutes ago
- Metro
Netanyahu and Trump's Nobel Peace Prize comments made feel sick
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The Guardian
36 minutes ago
- The Guardian
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As more and more activity occurs online, and often from services provided from abroad, countries are losing revenue from sales, employment and profits taxes. Just because an activity is provided digitally doesn't mean it should not be taxed; indeed, economists argue that digital taxes are among the easiest to administer, precisely because there is a digital record. The idea of the digital service tax is to help countries recoup revenue by taxing any kind of digital service provided from anywhere in the world: online sales, digital advertising, data usage, e-commerce or streaming services. They might include consumption taxes on internet purchases. Indeed, more than 18 countries have such taxes and some 20 others have proposed them. When it looked like the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) would get a global agreement to raise corporate taxes, the agreement included a prohibition on digital taxes. 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A country may be foolish, levying taxes that are not good for its economy, but so be it: that is a matter for the country to decide. In this case, the tax is actually good for the economy. What Trump has been doing has violated international norms in several ways: using the threat of tariffs or taxes against corporations headquartered in a country whose policy he dislikes, and walking away from what were supposed to be binding trade agreements, without even a pretense of using the mechanisms for dispute resolution embodied in those agreements. The question now: will countries cave in to these threats or can they stick together and collect the billions they are rightly owed? Make no mistake: what is at stake is more than money that will be collected. It is a matter of the rule of law, which Trump has trampled on so fiercely, both within the US and globally. The rule of law is essential not just for economic performance, but for social justice and democracy. 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