Joy Reid blasts Alligator Alcatraz as a 'concentration camp for brown people'

Daily Mail​

01-07-2025

Former MSNBC host Joy Reid has labeled a proposed immigration detention center in Florida a 'concentration camp' for 'brown people.'
Reid, who was fired from the network in February, made the comments on her eponymous YouTube show on Tuesday.
'I try to forget about him, but Ron DeSantis is still governor of Florida,' Reid said, the same day De Santis gave President Donald Trump a tour of the facility in the Everglades known as as 'Alligator Alcatraz.'
'He took the [Fox & Friends] hosts on a tour of the concentration camp he is building in Florida in order to round up brown people and throw them in a camp because he doesn't want them in Florida.
'Surprise, surprise: The economy of Florida is going to be severely harmed by rounding up brown people who, by the way, all over this country, Latinos are afraid to go to work.'
The facility - part of the president's mass deportation effort - is surrounded by miles and miles of alligator-infested swamp and has been blasted by critics as inhumane.
Reid, who was joined on her show by former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Sherrilyn Ifill, also compared Trump's immigration crackdown to apartheid in South Africa.
'I know people who are not Latino but they're brown and so they look Latino to the naked eye,' she said.
'Even if you're not actually taken into custody, imagine being a brown person in this country right now.'
She claimed that 'brown' citizens have told her they no longer leave their homes without their passports.
'You can't even walk the streets without fear of being tackled by random people with masks on,' she said.
'That's who we are now. This is like being in apartheid South Africa in the 1980.'
Reid was known for making extreme comments prior to her firing, after which an insider at MSNBC told Politico that her social media rants 'gave the Standards Department heartburn.'
As a result, NBC News boss Cesar Conde and former MSNBC boss Rashida Jones began plotting to get rid of Reid in late 2023, the sources said.
They only offered Reid a one-year contract extension while also cutting her pay in the hopes she'd take the hint and quit.
A well-placed executive at the cable news station told the Daily Mail in March that Reid should have known her days were numbered after the offer.
'[MSNBC execs] have wanted to saw off the Joy Reid problem for years now,' Megyn Kelly's Executive Producer Steve Krakauer told the Mail at the time.
'Her ratings were fine, but she was a headache.'
Following Trump's win in the 2024 election, Reid shamed Latino GOP voters for voting for him - despite a record 42 percent of the demographic doing so.
She also once claimed that the media's preoccupation with Russia's invasion of Ukraine was motivated by the fact that the victims were 'white and largely Christian.'
Reid had likened the Trump administration's deportation efforts to the Holocaust before, during an on-air discussion in January.
Reid even went as far as to compare Trump to Hitler, on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
'He [Hitler] and his minister of public enlightenment and propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, launched a massive propaganda campaign that labelled Jews as carriers of deadly diseases and violent terrorists,' Reid told Wallace at the time.