The Department of Homeland Security taunted detained migrants with an AI-generated meme depicting alligators guarding a proposed Florida prison, what critics called a “horrendous lack of humanity.”
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.
