Latest news with #concentrationcamp
Daily Mail
12 hours ago
- Politics
- Daily Mail
BREAKING NEWS 'Alligator Alcatraz' worker fired after massive security breach amid claims of deplorable conditions at facility
A Florida man claiming to have worked at the notorious 'Alligator Alcatraz' detention facility says he was fired for posting videos from the site to social media. The TikTokker, only identified as @skitheteamroski, started posting videos from the migrant detention center on Monday - just days after the first group of detainees arrived at the hastily-built facility in the swamps of the Florida Everglades. In his first video, which showed him lying on an orange and navy blue bunkbed wearing light-colored jeans, the videographer wrote that he was 'LIVE FROM ALLIGATOR IN FOR THE ONLY AVAILABLE LIVE FOOTAGE FROM THE "CONCENTRATION CAMP" THAT TRUMP BUILT.' As of Saturday, the video received 5.2 million views. Other videos showed him and his coworkers rescuing a turtle at the site, driving around the facility in a golf cart and sitting at a table poking at a mysterious food item. 'Doesn't look very appetizing does it,' the man tells his followers, using an application to change his voice. It is unclear what the man's role was at the facility, but the TikTokker has since started an online fundraiser saying he was fired for sharing footage from the site and is now trying to raise money to get a lawyer. 'Many people want me to share my side of the story of what's actually going on inside, but I can't fully explain and show what I know without having a lawyer just in case this situation gets pushed to the next level,' he wrote in the fundraiser, which identifies him as a Jacksonville, Florida resident. 'I have life changing information and they are trying to stop me from exposing what's really going on, so before I go completely public with this issue, I need to make sure I'm fully protected and that I have a lawyer to help out when things start to get serious,' the videographer vowed. 'As long as I'm able to afford a lawyer, I have no problem exposing and posting what information I have,' he continued, noting that the 'next step is to try and get Alligator Alcatraz shut down.' The facility has already come under fire amid claims that migrants were forced to bathe in toilet water and are being held in freezing cold tents while they battle 'elephant-sized mosquitoes' at the former site of the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport. One detainee, Cuban musician Leamsy Isquierdo has even claimed that the center's roughly 400 inmates are only given one meal a day - which is often infested with maggots. Other detainees have reported pest infestations, with one telling his wife that grasshoppers 'the size of his hand' were invading their tents, along with the largest mosquitos he has ever seen, the Miami Herald reports. Eveling Ortiz, whose boyfriend Vladimir Miranda is detained at the facility, also told NBC Miam i that one detainee was taken to the hospital because his face was swollen from so many bites. Adding to the concerns are the neurological virus-carrying mosquitoes that already infest the area. 'You can get bitten like 50 times in a minute and its really difficult to be outside with mosquitos fighting you... Especially in the summer time and especially this year,' said Durland Fish, professor emeritus of epidemiology at the Yale University School of Public Health, who has studied the specific location of the facility, Big Cypress Swamp. 'If you put a bunch of people in this area, there's a big chance that somebody can get infected with some of these viruses' like St. Louis encephalitis, West Nile encephalitis and the Everglades virus, which is the most common. State representative Anna Eskamani also told the Daily Mail her office has been receiving reports that there is no running water at the facility. One particularly concerning report said detainees had been using toilet water to bathe themselves. But whenever an employee tried to help out the inmates, @skitheteamroski said they would be reprimanded. 'A lot of officers quit just because they were trying to help out the residents/inmates,' he said in a TikTok story on Tuesday, according to the Miami New Times. 'And their bosses kept telling them, "If you help them out, like give them water, take them to the bathroom, you will be fired."' He then explained in another story the next day that he started the GoFundMe to protect himself. 'I have no reason to try and profit off of the people they have locked up in cages,' he reassured his followers, the Herald reports. 'Trump is a messed up individual,' he added. Daily Mail has reached out to the TikTokker and the Florida Division of Emergency Management, which runs the site, for comment about his claims. But state officials have previously denied the reports about inhumane conditions at the detention center. 'Detainees have access to potable water from on-site tanks refilled by 6,000-gallon trucks. Each individual is issued a personal cup they can refill at any time, and bottled water is provided at meals. Tanks are regularly sanitized, flushed, and tested to ensure water quality. Full-size showers are available daily with no restriction on bathing water,' the Division of Emergency Management earlier told Daily Mail. 'Detainees receive three meals per day plus the option of a late evening meal upon request, and there is working air conditioning throughout the facility. 'Detainees have access to regular phone and video calls with their attorneys or families.' The Department of Homeland Security has also said it is 'SHAMEFUL that the fake news media continues to peddle the false narrative of criminal illegal aliens convicted of rape, homicide, and child sex crimes.' 'ICE has higher detention standards than most U.S. prisons that hold actual U.S. citizens,' the agency wrote in a post on X. 'All detainees are provided with proper meals, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with lawyers and their family members.'
The Guardian
17 hours ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘Alligator Alcatraz' showcases Trump's surreal brand of stylized cruelty
The concentration camp seems to have been erected largely for the sake of a photoshoot. Florida's governor, Ron DeSantis – eager to rehabilitate his reputation among the Maga right in the wake of his humiliating and disastrous 2024 presidential run – has been among the most eager foot soldiers of the Trump administration's mass deportation agenda. He has dedicated funding to capturing migrants and holding them at facilities like the Krome detention center in Miami, where dramatic overcrowding, the absence of air conditioning, rapidly spreading disease, and a shortage of food, sanitation, and medical care have contributed to an outcry among immigrants imprisoned there and the deaths of multiple detainees, including a 29-year-old man from Honduras, a 44-year-old man from Ukraine and a 75-year-old Cuban national who had lived in the United States since his teens. For his efforts, DeSantis has received praise from Donald Trump and the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem. This kind of abuse of immigrants – rounding them up, cramming them into detention centers that are little more than cages, and letting them die there of heat, illness or neglect – is exactly the kind of policy that aligns with the Trump administration's aims. And so it should not be surprising that the initial proposal for the so-called 'Alligator Alcatraz' – a small tent city on an airstrip in the Florida Everglades that has been erected as a concentration camp for immigrants captured by Trump's forces – came from within the DeSantis administration. The camp was first proposed in a video posted to X by Florida's DeSantis-appointed Republican attorney general, James Uthmeier. Uthmeier, who has mimicked Trump officials in ignoring judicial orders in order to carry out deportations, coined a name for his proposed camp that seemed especially designed to appeal to Trump's fantasies of high-drama, cinematic domination of his enemies. Trump has reportedly mused both about creating a moat filled with alligators along the Mexico border and about reviving Alcatraz, the former federal island prison in the San Francisco Bay which has been the subject of action movies, including a 1979 film starring Clint Eastwood and a 1996 Sean Connery vehicle, which the president has probably seen playing on cable television. In the video, Uthmeier walks along a rural airstrip, presumably the one he had earmarked as the camp site, flanked by uniformed law enforcement officers. He can be heard in a voiceover saying that immigrants, whose illegal entry into the United States is a civil violation and who often have not been convicted of any crime, will not be able to escape the facility without encountering alligators and pythons in the Florida wilderness. In another shot, a helicopter sits on the asphalt as rock music plays. Donald Trump apparently liked what he saw, because the camp was erected over the course of mere days, and Trump toured the facility on 1 July, standing in a red hat that read 'GULF OF AMERICA' before a series of chain-link cages filled with rows of bunk beds. The facility received its first prisoners the next day. Almost immediately, DeSantis's team began selling merchandise for the facility, for Trump supporters who want to advertise their enthusiasm for mass deportation. It has long been a feature of Trump's regime that displays of domination and cruelty have to be made in public, in a style of vulgar, over-the-top obviousness. Branded like a low-budget movie, the Everglades site combines the extraordinary racism and contempt for human rights of the Trump anti-immigration effort with the sleazy camp of his movement's style of masculinity. 'Alligator Alcatraz' is the kind of place the hero would have to escape from in a television show, or in a level of a video game, and its stylized cruelty is supposed to seem hyperreal, even uncanny. Perhaps this sense of scripted unreality surrounding what is in fact a concentration camp is supposed to help Trump's supporters and the rest of the American people partake in the pleasures of domination while avoiding the recognition that the horror and pain they are inflicting is real. But it is real. The camp has been open, now, for just over a week, and already one prisoner has been hospitalized, reportedly as a result of the camp's inhumane conditions. According to news reports, many of the men there were not permitted to shower for days. Broken air conditioning left men alternately freezing and sweltering in the heat. Detainees report that they are only being fed one meal a day, and that the food has been infested with maggots. There is no secure line by which the prisoners – who, again, are being detained on civil, not criminal, violations – can speak to their lawyers without being monitored. Toilets don't flush, and the facility is infested with bugs. It is not clear that the concentration camp, housed in the low-elevation swamps of south Florida, can withstand the rains and winds that are typical of the east coast's summer hurricane season. It has already flooded. Sign up to This Week in Trumpland A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration after newsletter promotion If the immigrants are kept in these conditions, more of them will die. They will die of heat, disease and exposure; they will die when heavy winds from a hurricane rip the camp's tents apart or send their metal beams flying; they will die when they are left without edible food or drinkable water for long stretches in severe weather; they will die when the stagnant human waste in the unflushed toilets and the tight quarters with scores of other immigrant strangers causes disease to spread. These are not conditions that can sustain human life, let alone human rights or dignity. For Trump and his followers, that might be the point. Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
The Guardian
a day ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘Alligator Alcatraz' showcases Trump's surreal brand of stylized cruelty
The concentration camp seems to have been erected largely for the sake of a photoshoot. Florida's governor, Ron DeSantis – eager to rehabilitate his reputation among the Maga right in the wake of his humiliating and disastrous 2024 presidential run – has been among the most eager foot soldiers of the Trump administration's mass deportation agenda. He has dedicated funding to capturing migrants and holding them at facilities like the Krome detention center in Miami, where dramatic overcrowding, the absence of air conditioning, rapidly spreading disease, and a shortage of food, sanitation, and medical care have contributed to an outcry among immigrants imprisoned there and the deaths of multiple detainees, including a 29-year-old man from Honduras, a 44-year-old man from Ukraine and a 75-year-old Cuban national who had lived in the United States since his teens. For his efforts, DeSantis has received praise from Donald Trump and the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem. This kind of abuse of immigrants – rounding them up, cramming them into detention centers that are little more than cages, and letting them die there of heat, illness or neglect – is exactly the kind of policy that aligns with the Trump administration's aims. And so it should not be surprising that the initial proposal for the so-called 'Alligator Alcatraz' – a small tent city on an airstrip in the Florida Everglades that has been erected as a concentration camp for immigrants captured by Trump's forces – came from within the DeSantis administration. The camp was first proposed in a video posted to X by Florida's DeSantis-appointed Republican attorney general, James Uthmeier. Uthmeier, who has mimicked Trump officials in ignoring judicial orders in order to carry out deportations, coined a name for his proposed camp that seemed especially designed to appeal to Trump's fantasies of high-drama, cinematic domination of his enemies. Trump has reportedly mused both about creating a moat filled with alligators along the Mexico border and about reviving Alcatraz, the former federal island prison in the San Francisco Bay which has been the subject of action movies, including a 1979 film starring Clint Eastwood and a 1996 Sean Connery vehicle, which the president has probably seen playing on cable television. In the video, Uthmeier walks along a rural airstrip, presumably the one he had earmarked as the camp site, flanked by uniformed law enforcement officers. He can be heard in a voiceover saying that immigrants, whose illegal entry into the United States is a civil violation and who often have not been convicted of any crime, will not be able to escape the facility without encountering alligators and pythons in the Florida wilderness. In another shot, a helicopter sits on the asphalt as rock music plays. Donald Trump apparently liked what he saw, because the camp was erected over the course of mere days, and Trump toured the facility on 1 July, standing in a red hat that read 'GULF OF AMERICA' before a series of chain-link cages filled with rows of bunk beds. The facility received its first prisoners the next day. Almost immediately, DeSantis's team began selling merchandise for the facility, for Trump supporters who want to advertise their enthusiasm for mass deportation. It has long been a feature of Trump's regime that displays of domination and cruelty have to be made in public, in a style of vulgar, over-the-top obviousness. Branded like a low-budget movie, the Everglades site combines the extraordinary racism and contempt for human rights of the Trump anti-immigration effort with the sleazy camp of his movement's style of masculinity. 'Alligator Alcatraz' is the kind of place the hero would have to escape from in a television show, or in a level of a video game, and its stylized cruelty is supposed to seem hyperreal, even uncanny. Perhaps this sense of scripted unreality surrounding what is in fact a concentration camp is supposed to help Trump's supporters and the rest of the American people partake in the pleasures of domination while avoiding the recognition that the horror and pain they are inflicting is real. But it is real. The camp has been open, now, for just over a week, and already one prisoner has been hospitalized, reportedly as a result of the camp's inhumane conditions. According to news reports, many of the men there were not permitted to shower for days. Broken air conditioning left men alternately freezing and sweltering in the heat. Detainees report that they are only being fed one meal a day, and that the food has been infested with maggots. There is no secure line by which the prisoners – who, again, are being detained on civil, not criminal, violations – can speak to their lawyers without being monitored. Toilets don't flush, and the facility is infested with bugs. It is not clear that the concentration camp, housed in the low-elevation swamps of south Florida, can withstand the rains and winds that are typical of the east coast's summer hurricane season. It has already flooded. Sign up to This Week in Trumpland A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration after newsletter promotion If the immigrants are kept in these conditions, more of them will die. They will die of heat, disease and exposure; they will die when heavy winds from a hurricane rip the camp's tents apart or send their metal beams flying; they will die when they are left without edible food or drinkable water for long stretches in severe weather; they will die when the stagnant human waste in the unflushed toilets and the tight quarters with scores of other immigrant strangers causes disease to spread. These are not conditions that can sustain human life, let alone human rights or dignity. For Trump and his followers, that might be the point. Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
Yahoo
02-07-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Grand Opening of an American Concentration Camp
What were you doing the day the president attended the opening of an American concentration camp in the Everglades? Dubbed 'Alligator Alcatraz' by Republican officials because of the predators living in the surrounding swampland, it has been built to cage thousands of people rounded up by ICE and allied law enforcement agencies as part of President Trump's mass deportations. ''Alligator Alcatraz' is a concentration camp,' Andrea Pitzer, author of One Long Night, a history of concentration camps, said on Tuesday. That morning, Trump attended the camp's opening in Ochopee, Florida, along with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. 'We'd like to see them in many states,' Trump said at a press conference there. 'And at some point, they might morph into a system where you're going to keep it for a long time.' He complained about the cost of building jails and prisons, then complimented his team, who 'did this in less than a week.' For the event, Trump wore one of his signature red ball caps, this one reading 'Gulf of America,' his jingoistic name for the nearby Gulf of Mexico; Noem wore a white 'Make America Great Again' ball cap with gold stitching. The flimsy camp offered them some shelter from the punishing humidity, which would later give way to a downpour. A C-Span camera followed them into one of the massive tents, where rows of chain-link cages contained numerous bunk beds—for the moment, empty. Photographers raced ahead of Trump and Noem to get shots of them entering, taking in the cells, pausing to ask inaudible questions. DeSantis stood as if he did not know where to put his hands. 'They're going to sweep this six times to make sure there's nothing that could be used as contraband, as weapons,' DeSantis told Trump a bit too brightly, 'before the detainees come in.' He smiled as he told reporters about how soon their prisoners would 'check in.' The American concentration camp on view Tuesday was erected within the Big Cypress National Preserve, traditional Miccosukee land. The tribe was not consulted, said Betty Osceola, a member and activist who lives a few miles from the camp's entrance. She was one of hundreds of people protesting on the road outside the camp over the last several days as massive trucks streamed into the site. 'People should be concerned about the secrecy of this,' Osceola told the Fort Myers News-Press. 'It's a big deal. Our ancestors were laid to rest in this area, and they talk about it like it's a vast wasteland. It's not.' The site of the camp is also public-owned land, most recently occupied by the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, 'a remote facility for promising pilots to practice their touch-and-goes amid disinterested herons and alligators,' according to The Palm Beach Post. An executive order issued by DeSantis cited a nonexistent 'emergency' to get around the legal process for building on the site. Two environmental groups working in the area, Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity, filed a lawsuit Friday 'to halt the unlawful construction of a mass federal detention facility for up to 5,000 noncitizen detainees.' Friends of the Everglades noted that their group was founded in part to stop construction of a major jetport on the same site. Members of the Miccosukee and Seminole tribes fought against the jetport too—generations ago. The state of Florida contended in court on Monday that the 'risks' of not locking up immigrants on the site (on this expedited pseudo-emergency basis) 'overwhelm any incidental environmental harm.' They also claimed the site was 'temporary.' There is no reason to believe any of the claims from the Florida and federal governments. The same day the concentration camp opened, ABC News reported that despite Trump's campaign refrain that his mass deportations would target 'criminals,' 'new data shows a recent shift toward also arresting those who have not been accused of crimes.' This was foretold by Tom Homan, Trump's 'immigration czar,' who was the face of the mass deportation plan long before Trump returned to the White House. 'No one's off the table,' Homan said at the Republican National Convention last summer. 'The bottom line is: Every illegal alien is a criminal. They enter the country in violation of federal law. It's a crime to enter this country illegally.' Every immigrant—every person the Trump administration said was an immigrant—was a target from the beginning. On Monday, a reporter asked Homan about an ailing 75-year-old Cuban man who died in ICE custody recently. His response: 'People die in ICE custody.' He complained, 'The questions should be, how many lives has ICE saved?' He challenged reporters to look into ICE's detention standards. Last week, Wired reported on a chilling pattern of apparent neglect inside immigrant detention centers, based on nearly 400 calls made to 911 from the 10 largest ICE facilities. Incidents included seizures, self-harm, and sexual abuse. Some calls were made by the people caged inside, desperate for help. At his press conference at the concentration camp, Trump learned that his massive budget bill had passed the Senate. The funding in the bill will make ICE the largest jailer in the world, with $200 billion at its disposal. As Felipe De La Hoz wrote last month for TNR, the bill 'would take everything we've seen so far'—the targeting of activists for their speech, masked agents grabbing people off the street, sudden flights to Guantánamo or out of the country, ramping up detentions—and crank it to 11.' A storm blew through the concentration camp during the press tour. Florida reporter Jason Delgado captured videos showing a layer of rainwater blowing across the floor of the cells, while the soft roof of one tent rippled in the wind. Water pooled at the base of the American and Florida state flags and around extension cords for lights. 'The state says the sites here are rated to withstand a category two hurricane,' he posted on X. Two stronger hurricanes that made landfall last year —Helene and Milton—brought flooding and tornadoes to the area. People in jails and prisons in Florida were not evacuated. Outside the concentration camp, when the storm hit, the protesters were still there. Some had been there for days. No one can say, years from now, that nobody knew about the camp, or that no one pushed back.
Daily Mail
01-07-2025
- Politics
- Daily Mail
Joy Reid blasts Alligator Alcatraz as a 'concentration camp for brown people'
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.
