Trump administration taunts detained migrants with ICE alligators at proposed Florida prison
Work has begun on the so-called 'Alligator Alcatraz' immigration detention center that's expected to cost $450 million a year in the heart of Florida's Everglades.
'Coming soon!' DHS said in a post on X Saturday, with the meme of the alligators donning Immigration and Customs Enforcement baseball caps.
The department was called out on social media for the post.
'A horrendous lack of humanity,' wrote former U.S. diplomat and Georgetown lecturer Brett Bruen.
Christopher Burgess, a global security expert and former CIA officer, simply said: 'Disgusting.'
'This is not a joke, it's psychological warfare dressed as meme culture,' another person said. 'This isn't a warning. It's a threat and DHS just made it official propaganda.'
Some Trump administration supporters were also not impressed. 'This administration is doing good things, but the utter lack of seriousness of your comms team really sucks,' one person said. 'No one takes you seriously with posts like this.'
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, an ally of President Donald Trump, boasted this week in a social media video that the center will require minimal additional security due to its remote, swampland location, which is home to dangerous wildlife, including alligators and pythons.
'Alligator Alcatraz' would detain roughly 1,000 people in a facility on an abandoned airfield in the heart of the sprawling conservation area made up of mangrove forests and 'rivers of grass.'
The idea recalls Trump's own suggestion during his first term that a medieval moat be built alongside his still-unfinished southern border wall, inhabited by deadly creatures.
Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit Friday challenging the move to open the facility.
The government's plan has not been through an environmental review as required under federal law, and the public has had no opportunity to comment, the groups claim in the suit, which named the Department of Homeland Security, ICE and the Florida Division of Emergency Management as the defendants.
'The site is more than 96 percent wetlands, surrounded by Big Cypress National Preserve, and is habitat for the endangered Florida panther and other iconic species,' Eve Samples, executive director of Friends of the Everglades, said.
'This scheme is not only cruel, it threatens the Everglades ecosystem that state and federal taxpayers have spent billions to protect,' she added.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said the state would oppose the lawsuit.
'Governor Ron DeSantis has insisted that Florida will be a force multiplier for federal immigration enforcement, and this facility is a necessary staging operation for mass deportations located at a pre-existing airport that will have no impact on the surrounding environment,' Bryan Griffin, the governor's spokesman, said. 'We look forward to litigating this case.'
State Republicans have also been flogging 'Alligator Alcatraz' T-shirts, baseball caps, and beverage coolers from $15 to $30 on their website.
More than 56,000 people are being held in immigration detention, the highest level in years and what may be an all-time record.
There were 56,397 people are currently jailed in immigrant detention, according to Syracuse University's TRAC database.
Internal government data obtained by CBS News suggests an even higher figure, with roughly 59,000 immigrants behind bars — or 140 percent of the agency's ostensible capacity to hold them.
The figures top both the 39,000 people held in the final days of Joe Biden's administration, and the previous recent record of 55,654 in August 2019, set during the first Trump administration, which is pushing an aggressive anti-immigration agenda to revoke legal status for tens of thousands of people with a goal of arresting thousands of immigrants a day.
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Telegraph
27 minutes ago
- Telegraph
How bull---t took over our lives
'One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bull---t.' So begins American philosopher Harry Frankfurt's unexpectedly delightful essay, On Bull---t, first published in an academic journal in 1986 and later as a bestselling book in 2005. Today its message is even more resonant. Greta Thunberg may think we are living in a climate emergency, but what is clearer, if less trumpeted, is that we are living in a bulls--- emergency. Thanks to – among other things – the democratising effect of the internet, the resultant decline in deference to 'experts', rising scorn for the political establishment, online echo chambers, the blurring of fact and fiction online – a problem recognised in 1995, by the journalist John Diamond: 'The problem with the internet is everything is true'' – we live in a post-truth era. All these factors favour the liar, but they favour the bull---ter even more. How astute then of Princeton University Press to reissue Frankfurt's essay, in a 20th-anniversary edition the neat size and colour of Mao 's little red book. (You might carry it around in your pocket so that you too can become a bull---t detector.) Heaven knows that it's the superpower we need today: Frankfurt perhaps didn't know when he wrote those words how high the tide of bull---t would rise in the ensuing two decades. And he surely had no inkling that the defecatory business model of Thames Water would provide an obvious parallel for his subject. But what is bull---t and how is it different from lies? Frankfurt draws on philosopher Max Black's 1983 essay, The Prevalence of Humbug, to help make that distinction: 'humbug' is 'deceptive information, misrepresentation, short of lying, especially by pretentious word or deed, of somebody's own thoughts, feelings and attitudes'. For Frankfurt, bull---t is humbug's vulgar bastard sibling but somehow worse. That Frankfurt never really defines his key term beyond 'humbug' may seem a shortcoming. Or maybe not. Maybe bull---t is like what pornography was for the US Supreme Court Judge Potter Stewart who famously failed to define the term but added: 'I know it when I see it.' Likewise, we often sense bull---t. We recognise it when the government minister, asked about a policy about-turn, begins their reply: 'The prime minister has been very clear about this…', only to continue with some sub-Chat GPT dross that doesn't even start to address the question. Or when a police officer tells the media in tone-deaf boilerplate, 'Our thoughts and prayers are with the friends and family…'. We see it thriving in greenwashing ads for oil companies; virtue-signalling gender fluid sign-offs in flyers from estate agents; why the AI Overview at the top of your Google search is plausible but on closer examination obviously wrong. We see it, most topically, when Donald Trump, like an overtired toddler, bless him, issues a raging 4am caps-lock policy initiative on Truth Social – yet the following day announces something that contradicts his nuit blanche fever tweet. The great thing for Frankfurt about such bull---ters is that they are not liars – not quite. As he explains: '[The bull---ter] does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bull---t is a greater enemy of truth than lies are.' At least liars, in principle, can be argued against, and their lies exposed. (What bull---ters and liars have in common, as Frankfurt recognised, is that they take the rest of us for mugs. True, some of us are attuned to bull---t, but not all of us and not always.) At the same time, the virtuoso of bull---t can be regarded as smart and deserving of promotion. In his sub-Machiavellian 1998 bestseller, The 48 Laws of Power, for instance, pop psychologist Robert Greene might have heralded bull---t. I imagine the 49th law of power should read as follows: any human seeking airtime, status and, in extremis, the big chair in the Oval Office, better become a bull---t artist. Frankfurt also quotes a passage from Eric Ambler's spy novel Dirty Story, in which a character relates the sage advice he got from his father: 'Never tell a lie when you can bull---t your way through.' Bull---t was certainly part of Trump's skill set before he was elected president. His butler, Anthony Senecal, related in a 2016 interview a particularly summative anecdote about the US president's relationship to truth: one day, Senecal was reading Trump's book The Art of the Deal, and was puzzled by a passage in which Trump mentioned that the tiles in the nursery of Mar-a-Lago, West Palm Beach club, had been personally made by Walt Disney. 'Is that really true?' the butler asked the billionaire. Trump replied: 'Who cares?' The great virtue of Frankfurt's book is that he called out such bull---t long before Trump and other populist bull---t artists got elected. That said, perhaps even Frankfurt, who died in 2023, might not have foreseen how central the art of bull---t would be to his president's second term. Consider more recent Trumpisms: during last year's presidential race, he claimed illegal immigrants were eating pets. In March this year, speaking at a joint session of Congress, he alleged that the Biden administration had spent '$8m for making mice transgender'. The claims had journalists scurrying around like, well, transgender mice (if such rodents exist) to debunk or substantiate the claims. But, in a sense they missed the point. The truths of these matters – most likely that there are no transgender mice nor pet-eating illegal immigrants – didn't matter. What Trump did here was apply his former adviser Steve Bannon's notion of 'flooding the zone' with bull---t, in order to occupy the media's time and effort, which in itself takes a kind of genius. Since he wrote On Bull---t, other intellectuals have extended Frankfurt's analysis. Among them was the late American anarchist anthropologist David Graeber who, in his jolly 2013 piece, 'On the Phenomenon of Bull---t Jobs', paid tribute to Frankfurt's essay. Graeber's all-too-convincing argument was that many of us are working in jobs that are bull---t: 'A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble. But it's not entirely clear how humanity would suffer were all private equity CEOs, lobbyists, PR researchers, actuaries, telemarketers, bailiffs or legal consultants to similarly vanish.' (When I interviewed him, Graeber conceded that some might argue that his own work is bull---t. He didn't include book reviewers like me as bull---t artists, but he could have done.) In 2018, philosopher George Lakoff proposed an anti-bull---t remedy for journalists called the truth sandwich. Confronted by the quotidian pump of Trumpian bull---t, the thing to do is not to repeat it. Or if one did repeat it, envelope it in – as it were – the nourishing bread of truth. As you may have noticed, that hasn't happened: the hopeful notion that we might have reached peak bull---t has been disproved by politicians ever since – from Boris Johnson's stints at the No 10 Covid lectern to risibly gaudy yet impotent threats against Israel and the US from Iran's supreme leader. The foregoing may seem to suggest only men do bull---t. Not so. Think of Liz Truss who, in her hilariously self-serving memoir, wrote of her battles with proponents of trans rights: 'I am not prepared to leave the field until the battle is won.' Pure bull---t, especially from someone who left the battlefield as prime minister after 49 days of chaos at Number 10. Meanwhile, journalist Matthew d'Ancona has argued that the post-truth era was only made possible by Sigmund Freud. In psychoanalysis, he claimed, the imperative is to treat the patient successfully, irrespective of the facts. 'Sharing your innermost feelings, shaping your life-drama, speaking from the heart: these pursuits are increasingly in competition with traditional forensic values.' Truth, in other words, is the leading victim in the spread of therapeutic culture. Frankfurt's essay concludes similarly: we have given up the ideal of correctness for that of sincerity, he claimed. He wrote: 'Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, [the individual] devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as though he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the fact, he must therefore be true to himself.' In that sense, Trump is the Humpty Dumpty of politics. Consider Alice Through the Looking Glass, where Lewis Carroll has Alice observe: 'The question is whether you can make words mean so many different things.' Humpty Dumpty retorts: 'The question is, which is to be master – that's all.' Power and mastery are all. Truth is beside the bull---ter's point. It's a sign of our cynical jaded times that even some of the president's fans know not to expect truth from him. No wonder, then, what happened in Selma, North Carolina in April 2022: 'I think I'm the most honest human being, perhaps, that God ever created,' Trump told a rally. His remark was greeted with laughter in the crowd. An equally valid reaction would have been: 'Bull---t!'
Times
43 minutes ago
- Times
Yvette Cooper's fast-track asylum plan — as protests erupt again
The home secretary is set to introduce a new fast-track scheme to tackle the asylum backlog so that decisions can be made in weeks rather than years. As the pressure to cut the number of people waiting in hotels for asylum decisions grows, Yvette Cooper is expected to introduce a new law this autumn to overhaul the appeal system. It comes as the first 60 migrants were moved into the four-star Britannia International Hotel in Canary Wharf, east London, on Friday night under cover of darkness. There was a small anti-migrant protest outside the Britannia on Saturday afternoon, while much bigger groups of both anti-migrant and anti-fascist protesters congregated outside the Thistle City Barbican Hotel in central London, which also houses asylum seekers, and in the centre of Manchester where hundreds of people marched as part of a protest organised by Britain First, a far-right group. Home Office figures show that more than 25,000 migrants have attempted to cross the Channel to the UK in small boats this year — the earliest the figure has been reached. Cooper will also tighten the rules surrounding the interpretation of 'exceptional circumstances' in immigration cases and the use of Article 8 of the European Convention of Human Rights, which protects the right to family and private life. In an interview with The Sunday Times, Cooper said: 'We need a major overhaul of the appeal [process] and that's what we are going to do in the autumn … if we speed up the decision-making appeal system and also then keep increasing returns, we hope to be able to make quite a big reduction in the overall numbers in the asylum system, because that is the best way to actually restore order and control.' • Migrants kept in hotels despite losing claims for asylum A source familiar with the plans said the aim would be to compress the process so that decisions and returns could be 'made within weeks'. It is understood the system would look similar to a scheme Labour operated while last in government, which was abandoned after judges ruled it was 'structurally unfair' after about 99 per cent of claims were refused. Asylum seekers who are refused sanctuary in Britain are seeing their appeals take an average of 54 weeks to be heard. There were 50,976 outstanding appeals as of March, which is almost double the number compared with 2024 and seven times higher than in 2023, figures show. It is the highest the backlog has ever been and comes on top of the almost 79,000 asylum claims awaiting an initial decision. While they wait, many asylum seekers receive state support in the form of accommodation such as hotels — with a bill of £2.1 billion for the taxpayer in the year to March — and a weekly allowance of between £8.86 and £49.18 per person depending on other support. Those who register appeals are entitled to legal aid, at about £820 a case. Of those who received an initial asylum decision in the year to March, just under half (49 per cent) were granted asylum. In the year to March 2024, it was 61 per cent. The proposed changes will cap a series of announcements this summer aimed at restoring order and control in the system. This weekend, Cooper has announced plans to outlaw social media adverts promoting journeys on small boats to asylum seekers or jobs in the black market aimed at luring migrants to the UK. Offenders could receive up to five years in prison and a hefty fine. Home Office analysis shows that approximately 80 per cent of migrants arriving via small boats told officials that they used social media during their illegal journey to the UK, including to locate or communicate with an agent or facilitator associated with an organised crime group. Under an amendment to the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Bill going through parliament, a new UK-wide offence will be introduced to criminalise the creation of material for publication online which promotes or offers services facilitating a breach of UK immigration law. This could include small boat crossings, the creation of fake travel documents like passports or visas or explicitly promising illegal working opportunities in the UK. Cooper said: 'Selling the false promise of a safe journey to the UK and a life in this country — whether on or offline — simply to make money, is nothing short of immoral. 'These criminals have no issue with leading migrants to life-threatening situations using brazen tactics on social media. We are determined to do everything we can to stop them — wherever they operate. 'We have to stay one step ahead of the ever-evolving tactics of people-smuggling gangs and this move, part of our Plan for Change to boost border security, will empower law enforcement to disable these tactics faster and more effectively, ensuring people face proper penalties.' The government's 'one in one out' deal with France is also expected to begin in the coming weeks, with people arriving in the UK via small boats being returned to France in exchange for the UK accepting an asylum seeker from France who can demonstrate a genuine family connection to Britain. According to The Times, the pilot scheme is expected to see only up to 50 asylum seekers a week being returned to France, with the same number coming in exchange to the UK. However, Cooper disputed the figure and said: 'We are not fixing numbers. We're very clear we want to operate this as extensively as possible.' • 'One in, one out' migrant deal: what are the key plans? Introducing a fast-track scheme to process asylum decisions is expected to require an injection of cash from the Ministry of Justice to increase the number of judges and court sitting days. Spelling out her ambition to the home affairs select committee in June, Cooper said: 'One of the things I have always been keen to do is to have a system for fast-track decisions and appeals. 'If people arrive from predominantly safe countries, they should not be sitting in the asylum system for a long time. We should be able to take those decisions really quickly, and make sure that those people go through the appeals system really quickly and are returned really quickly as well. That would mean a fast-track system alongside the main asylum system, and it would be really important in making sure that the system is fair. It will require legislation in order to be able to do that, as well as new system design … I think there should be faster tracks for those cases so that we can get them through the system really quickly.' Last week, as he arrived for a visit to Scotland, President Trump said the 'invasion' of migrants is 'killing' Europe and told politicians to 'get their act together'. Responding to his claims, Cooper blamed the previous Conservative government. 'We inherited a broken immigration system and a broken asylum system,' she said. 'And what we're doing is putting in place the foundations to restore order and control to both systems.'
The Independent
an hour ago
- The Independent
Blow for Trump's ICE raids as court upholds ban on snatching people based on appearance or job
The Trump administration suffered another blow to its mass deportation agenda on Friday after an appeals court upheld a lower court's ruling that prevents Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from detaining a person based on their appearance, native language, or job. A three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in Los Angeles said the plaintiffs, a cohort of five individuals and three immigration advocacy organizations, were likely to succeed on their claim that ICE agents violated the Fourth Amendment by relying on four factors to form reasonable suspicion to support detention stops. Those four factors include apparent race or ethnicity, speaking Spanish or English with an accent, presence at a particular location such as a laborer pick-up site, and the type of work a person does. Three plaintiffs who are day laborers said in their original lawsuit against Trump administration officials that they were waiting to be picked up to go to a construction site job when ICE agents swooped in and intimidated them. The plaintiffs said the immigration law enforcement officers never identified themselves, stated they had arrest warrants, nor informed the plaintiffs of the bases for the arrests. The Ninth Circuit panel upheld a previous temporary injunction set by District Court Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong in June. In keeping with Trump's mass deportation agenda, immigration law enforcement officers were deployed throughout Southern California to begin conducting sweeping raids. Many of those raids, according to the lawsuit, were conducted at 'certain types of businesses' such as car washes, because immigration law enforcement officials determined those businesses were more likely to hire people without legal documentation. Plaintiffs in the lawsuit referred to those as 'roving patrols' and said they were being detained without reasonable suspicion. The Fourth Amendment protects people from unreasonable search and seizures. The raids, which led to protests in downtown Los Angeles back in May, have been challenged by multiple individuals and immigration advocacy groups. One plaintiff, Jason Brian Gavidia, said ICE agents stopped him in June after he stepped onto the sidewalk outside of a tow yard in Montebello, California. Gavidia, who is an American citizen, identifies as Latino and said ICE agents pushed him up against a chain-link fence and interrogated him. Even after Gavidia gave ICE agents his Real ID, they seemingly did not believe him. In her earlier ruling, Frimpong said Gavidia and other plaintiffs were likely to succeed 'in proving that the federal government is indeed conducting roving patrols without reasonable suspicion and denying access to lawyers.' Frimpong ordered immigration law enforcement not to rely solely on the four factors 'except as permitted by law.' While the appeals court panel upheld much of Frimpong's ruling, they did strike the 'except as permitted by law,' saying that language was too vague.
