Florida's ‘Alligator Alcatraz' detention center is set to receive its first group of immigrants
'Alligator Alcatraz will be checking in hundreds of criminal illegal aliens tonight,' Florida Republican Attorney General James Uthmeier said on the X social media platform. 'Next stop: back to where they came from.'
It wasn't immediately clear precisely when the detainees would arrive or where they were coming from. They were being brought to the facility on buses, officials said.
The facility, at an airport used for training, will have a capacity of about 3,000 detainees when fully operational, according to Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said. The center was built in eight days over 10 miles (16 kilometers) of Everglades. It features more than 200 security cameras, 28,000-plus feet (8,500 meters) of barbed wire and 400 security personnel.
Environmental groups and Native American tribes have protested against the center, contending it is a threat to the fragile Everglades system, would be cruel to detainees because of heat and mosquitoes, and is on land the tribes consider sacred.
It's also located at a place prone to frequent heavy rains, which caused some flooding in the tents Tuesday during a visit by President Donald Trump to mark its opening. State officials say the complex can withstand a Category 2 hurricane, which packs winds of between 96 and 110 mph (154-177 kph), and that contractors worked overnight to shore up areas where flooding occurred.
DeSantis and other state officials say locating the facility in the rugged and remote Florida Everglades is meant as a deterrent, and naming it after the notorious federal prison of Alcatraz, an island fortress known for its brutal conditions, is meant to send a message. It's another sign of how the Trump administration and its allies are relying on scare tactics to try to persuade people in the country illegally to leave voluntarily.
State and federal officials have touted the plans on social media and conservative airwaves, sharing a meme of a compound ringed with barbed wire and 'guarded' by alligators wearing hats labeled 'ICE' for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 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.
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Business Insider
an hour ago
- Business Insider
A conservative crackdown on advertisers has forced a 'brand safety' reset
Conservative media company The Daily Wire is celebrating the downfall of " brand safety," and benefiting from the new state of play in the ad business during the second Trump era. Last week, The Daily Wire's commercial team received a request for proposal, or RFP, from Omnicom, one of the world's biggest ad agency groups. An RFP typically indicates an agency or advertiser's interest in buying ad space. The RFP was a huge win for The Daily Wire. It was only the second time it had received an inbound ad request from Omnicom. The first was in May, but the latest was a much bigger buy. Last year, The Daily Wire's famous cofounder and podcaster, Ben Shapiro, testified that the site had been unfairly shunned by major advertisers and ad agencies who, he said, had deemed its content unsafe for their brands. "Brand safety was being defined by people with a severe bias against a certain point of view," The Daily Wire's editor in chief, Brent Scher, told Business Insider in an interview. But since President Donald Trump's return to the White House, the power dynamics around "brand safety" — the practice of brands seeking to avoid their ads appearing next to, or otherwise supporting, "unsafe" content — have shifted, with some advertisers scrambling to avoid any whiff of anti-conservative bias. The situation is particularly acute for Omnicom, making its outreach to The Daily Wire both unprecedented and unsurprising. Last month, Andrew Ferguson, chairman of the Republican-led Federal Trade Commission, gave conditional approval to a proposed $13.5 billion merger of Omnicom and fellow ad company IPG, which would create the world's largest ad agency. It had an unusual caveat: Omnicom agreed to a consent order that would prevent it from colluding with other companies to encourage its advertiser clients to boycott media based on publishers' "political or ideological viewpoints." 'Brand suitability' versus 'brand safety' The FTC's move is the latest victory in the battle against brand safety waged by US conservatives. Brand safety in 2025 has become such a political flash point that some ad execs are changing the way they talk about the topic. "I hear the phrase 'brand suitability' far more than 'brand safety' now," said Liam Brennan, a marketing consultant and former ad agency director. "It makes it sound like a cop out, but it's a shift in the approach brands are taking. Before it was 'block, block, block,' now it's more about where my brand should be appearing. It's a more positive approach." While the Trump administration's actions have turned up the heat on brand safety practices, a broader backlash has been building for some time. Brand safety began as a seemingly innocuous practice of preventing brands from appearing next to the worst of the internet, such as violence, pornography, and illegal content. But it gradually expanded, with brands seeking to avoid a wide variety of political issues, or platforms that supported them. In investigations and lawsuits, lawmakers and other high-profile conservatives have argued that ad practitioners, brand safety tech vendors, and industry groups forced the brand safety pendulum to swing too far into partisan areas, unfairly depriving right-leaning outlets of ad dollars. Media companies on the left have said they, too, have been harmed by advertisers who deemed news sites as unsafe for brands. "What may have started as a good idea expanded, and then became too broad," said Mark Penn, CEO of the advertising holding company Stagwell. "Consequentially, it wasn't really about brand safety — it became almost brand censorship." The emergence of brand safety The practice of brand safety arose as advertisers shifted from analog media buying — placing deals directly with the TV stations, billboard owners, or newspaper proprietors they wished to buy space with — toward digital. Using technology, advertisers could target their audiences across swaths of websites, social platforms, and apps with just a few clicks. However, this meant they had less visibility about the content their ads were likely to appear next to. Brand safety technology was created to give advertisers more control over the types of content they wanted to fund or avoid. Keyword block lists were an early but somewhat blunt tool, helping advertisers avoid appearing in articles about grisly news topics like murders or natural disasters. However, marketers often didn't maintain good block list hygiene. Mike Zaneis, CEO of ad industry accreditation organization the Trustworthy Accountability Group, said he was recently reviewing brand block lists that still had the term "Ariana Grande" on them, years after the deadly terrorist attack that took place at the pop star's Manchester Arena, UK, concert in 2017. "Never mind that she's won two Grammys since then," Zaneis said. Enter: The conservative backlash The scrutiny on brand safety notably dialed up in 2024 and took on a partisan tone. Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, released an investigation that accused advertisers of illegally colluding to withhold ad dollars from conservative-leaning media like The Daily Wire, X (after Elon Musk's takeover of the company), and "The Joe Rogan Experience." The report took aim at an initiative called the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, which developed brand safety frameworks and common definitions that advertisers and Big Tech platforms like Meta and YouTube could universally adopt. Elon Musk's X then sued several major brands, including Mars and CVS Health, alleging their participation in GARM involved a conspiracy to withhold ad dollars from the platform formerly known as Twitter. The conservative video platform Rumble also sued GARM and some of its members, making similar claims in its suit. GARM shut down shortly after X's suit was filed. Its parent organization, the World Federation of Advertisers, denied wrongdoing but said GARM didn't have the resources to fight the legal action. In a May legal filing seeking to dismiss the X case, the defendants said the lawsuit was an attempt to use the courts win back business X had "lost in the free market when it disrupted its own business and alienated many of its customers." In a statement, the WFA said GARM provided tools to help advertisers better exercise their freedom to choose where to place their ads in the best interests of their brands, and that it was always voluntary and pro-competitive. "WFA will continue to fight these allegations, and we are confident that the US judicial system will find in our favor," the statement said. While GARM is no more, the lawsuits and the Judiciary Committee's investigation continue, and the FTC has joined the brand safety battle under the Trump administration. Ferguson, the FTC chair, has said that maintaining a free ad market and free speech is a top priority and that he hopes other ad companies will adopt policies similar to those in the Omnicom-IPG consent decree. That notice extends to other advertising vendors in the brand safety sphere. In May, the FTC sent sweeping civil investigative demands to media watchdogs and rating firms, including Media Matters and Ad Fontes Media, seeking information about their brand safety practices. In one such letter, viewed by BI, the FTC sought documents related to relationships with GARM, the publicly traded ad verification firms Integral Ad Science and DoubleVerify, and other entities that track and characterize "misinformation," "hate speech," "false" or "deceptive" content, and other similar categories. While the FTC's actions have made many in the ad industry nervous, some execs consider much of brand safety to be, as Stagwell's Penn puts it, a "fabricated issue." Penn said there were only limited situations in which brands might really be negatively affected by where their ads appeared. "From the polling I've done, conservatives think that they were being censored and demonetized, and liberals think they were being censored, so nobody was particularly happy about what was going on," Penn said. (Stagwell owns the public opinion and advisory firm The Harris Poll.) Will the brand safety crackdown benefit news publishers? Execs at The Daily Wire say the scrutiny on brand safety was warranted and has gotten results. "My team is inside of the bigger agencies, having discussions, whereas the door was automatically shut 12 to 16 months ago," said The Daily Wire's SVP of ad revenue, Christine Hoffmann. "We're getting business from Fortune 500 companies, like Chevron, like Amazon, like Paramount, and that was business that was nonexistent to us." Other conservative news outlets, including Fox News and The National Review, have also noticed a bump in advertising interest since Trump took office for the second time. Ad industry insiders previously told BI this reflected advertisers' realization that half of the country voted for Trump, but that it could also be a signal of advertisers hedging against political risk. The notion that the crackdown on brand safety will provide a long-term bump to news publishers is untested and, for many industry insiders, feels unlikely. An executive from the media buying giant GroupM testified in a House Judiciary Committee hearing last year that just 1.28% of its clients' global ad budgets went toward news outlets. Meanwhile, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon — with their superior scale and adtech — are set to take in more than half of global ad spending outside China this year, according to the latest forecast from the World Advertising Research Center. Omnicom has agreed to be audited to demonstrate its compliance with the FTC's proposed consent decree, which also includes an agreement not to create block lists, unless requested to do so by clients. The FTC's provisional agreement says Omnicom-IPG can't collude with other firms to steer client ad spend based on political ideologies, which might cause some advertisers to simply opt to avoid news altogether. As BI previously reported, some ad industry insiders and analysts think the government's crackdown on brand safety is an overreach that will hurt publishers of all kinds while further consolidating power with the tech giants. New tools could help brands avoid the censorship label, but there's no room for GARM 2.0 Some in the ad industry tell BI they're hopeful that brand safety could enter an apolitical era, powered by tech rather than individual decisions over blunt filters. "My view is that AI will bring greater nuance to brand safety — making it more effective for buyers and less restrictive for sellers," said David Kohl, cofounder of the performance marketing firm Symitri. Kohl said startups like Mobian are building models that assess context, user sentiment, and real-time ad performance to identify which media environments deliver and which don't. Elsewhere, Stagwell is creating what Penn describes as a politically neutral news marketplace, in partnership with the adtech company The Trade Desk, enabling advertisers to buy multiple news sites at once, according to demographics. While brand safety might become more tech-enabled, it seems unlikely there will be a GARM 2.0 for some time yet. "It would be far too easy to become a target," said Lisa Macpherson, a former marketing executive who now serves as the policy director of Public Knowledge, a tech policy consumer advocacy group. Just ask the advertising agency group Dentsu. Late last year, Dentsu quickly exited its involvement with the creation of a new coalition that had intended to encourage ad investments in "credible" news. Days after the press release about the coalition was published, the House Judiciary Committee requested documents from the ad firm, having noticed similarities to GARM. In response, Dentsu said it had decided "not to pursue the initiative" nor "pursue any other effort with similar aims." Macpherson said advertisers would continue to do what's necessary to protect their investments in their brands. Yet, as the threat of lawsuits and document demands related to GARM rumbles on, people in the ad industry will likely avoid using the phrase "brand safety" in emails or marketing materials. "They may describe it differently," Macpherson said. "They will be very careful to couch it in language that evokes their constitutional right" to send ad dollars or not spend money on certain media outlets based on the suitability for their individual brands, she added. Zaneis of TAG said the recent government and legal scrutiny of brand safety practices might have been the jolt the industry needed, forcing marketers to pay closer attention to an issue that had gotten out of hand. "We may not like how we got here as an industry, but it's where we should have been all along," Zaneis said.
Boston Globe
3 hours ago
- Boston Globe
It's time for a United States of Europe
Advertisement But history wasn't done with him. In 2030, Russia invaded Estonia, a former Soviet republic in northeastern Europe. It was Ukraine all over again. Estonia was a NATO member, but the United States, still led by the Republican Party's isolationist right wing, refused to intervene. Europe was on its own. Get The Gavel A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr. Enter Email Sign Up In those dark years, Macron emerged as Europe's moral and military leader. His cause: the creation of a single European nation — a United States of Europe. In 2035, seven European countries — France, Italy, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and Poland — merged and established the European Federation. Macron was elected its first president. Now, a decade later, Macron is finishing his second term. Under his leadership, the Federation has expanded to more than 20 countries. It has repelled the Russian threat. And it has grown into a global superpower to rival America and China. Advertisement Not just make-believe The idea of a United States of Europe might sound like a fantasy, but it is a serious proposition whose time has come. Threatened by Vladimir Putin on its eastern flank and abandoned by Donald Trump's America, Europe must evolve or fall apart. As the new German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, The best way to do that will be to form a European federation. A federation would unite Europe far more extensively than the European Union does — it would bind countries into a truly unified system of government like what exists in the United States. And it's the only way the continent can guarantee its security, protect its democratic values, and secure its influence in the 21st century and beyond. The current EU is a constitutional Frankenstein: a byzantine economic and political union whose power is split between the That's not all. There's also a Advertisement Oh, and 20 EU countries Confused? You're not alone. Everything would be simpler with a European federation. The historian Brendan Simms, who leads Cambridge University's Think of how the United Kingdom or the United States works: There is one central government, with devolved governments at the regional or state levels. As Simms outlines in his book ' A federal Europe isn't a new idea. It became a real possibility after World War II. In 1951, six countries — including France, West Germany, and Italy — formed a Advertisement At the end of the Cold War, Europe had another chance to become a federation with the advent of the EU in 1993. The German chancellor, Helmut Kohl, But Kohl's warning fell on deaf ears. Pundits predicted that the EU would soon rival the United States as the apex of liberal civilization. Books appeared with grand titles like ' They were all wildly mistaken. First there was the 2008 financial crash, then the eurozone debt crisis, the 2015 migration wave, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the war in Ukraine. Political power mattered more than ever. But under pressure, the EU has started to show some teeth. Take Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The EU has given Advertisement In recent years, the EU has also Macron deserves much of the credit for Europe's awakening, despite France's historic resistance to a unified Europe. 'Only Europe can guarantee genuine sovereignty or our ability to exist in today's world to defend our values and interests,' he said At the height of the pandemic, Macron spearheaded the creation of an Advertisement But Europe must unite more closely still. The circumstances demand it. It's become obvious that Russia At the same time, Europe's longstanding ally, America, is stepping back. Trump no longer wants the United States to underwrite the continent's security. Instead, he seems hellbent on going over the heads of Europeans Europe must strike out on its own Fortunately, both Macron and Merz seem to understand that Europe must now chart its own path. The United States of Europe would be a force to be reckoned with — thanks to a Europe should also become a federation to better rein in multinational corporations and build an economy that works for the many. The continent has a unique socioeconomic model: social democracy. But only if countries pool their resources will Europeans be able to preserve their cherished welfare states and long summer holidays. What's more, the two great challenges of the 21st century — climate change and artificial intelligence — will require sustained collective action. Again, only a federation can deliver that. There's only one way forward — and now is the time 'A United States of Europe isn't some utopian dream, it's a necessary evolution,' says Daniela Vancic of the History is also on the side of a European federation. 'Federations are established when there's an external threat,' says Matt Qvortrup, a senior research fellow at Australian National University's This was the case with the United States. After declaring independence in 1776, the states were But, even in a crisis, a European superstate won't magically appear. It has to be willed into existence. The political landscape across Europe isn't helping. The EU is divided between pro-European parties and Euro-skeptic nationalist parties. The pro-European faction must do more than simply defend against nationalist attacks; it must start advocating for a federation outright. Otherwise, it risks being seen as apologists for the EU's bureaucracy. The choice shouldn't be between the EU as it is now and nationalism. It should be between deeper integration and nationalism. If pro-Europeans don't offer that choice, nationalists will prevail. Far from pursuing a United States of Europe, some countries could even slam the door on the status quo: the EU. After all, Brexit showed that leaving the bloc is possible. But failure is not inevitable. Public opinion across Europe is complicated — and more pro-European — than it might seem. Voters may be frustrated with the EU, but they are not opposed to a unified Europe. To the contrary. According to Yet Europeans won't clamor for a federation if leaders fail to champion it. More than anyone else, that responsibility falls to Macron. Rumor has it he It will require all of his political courage. As a wise man
Fox News
4 hours ago
- Fox News
Texas police officer shot near ICE detention center as Trump officials promise zero tolerance
The Trump administration is taking a "zero tolerance" approach to attacks on law enforcement after a Texas police officer was shot outside a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention center. The message came after similar incidents in other cities amid backlash against President Donald Trump's immigration enforcement agency. An Alvarado, Texas, police officer was shot Friday night near the Prairieland Detention Facility, authorities said. "We are closely monitoring the attacks on DHS detention facilities in Prairieland, TX, and Portland, OR, and are coordinating with the [US Attorney offices] and our law enforcement partners," said Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on X. "The Department [of Justice] has zero tolerance for assaults on federal officers or property and will bring the full weight of the law against those responsible," he added. In Alvarado, a suburb of Fort Worth, several suspects were arrested after an officer with the Alvarado Police Department was shot at around 11 p.m. while responding to reports of a suspicious person, FOX Dallas reported. When the officer tried making contact with the person, shots were fired and the officer was struck in the neck. The officer was flown to a Fort Worth hospital for treatment and was later released. Several armed suspects fled but were arrested with the help of the Johnson County Sheriff's Office and other authorities, the news station reported.
