"The Goal is Terror": ON THE GROUND at Alligator Alcatraz

Our Ashley Bishop spoke with Native Americans and concerned residents outside the dystopian ICE prison smack dab in the center of Florida's alligator-filled Everglades

"The goal is terror, the goal is for us to suffer the most,” Lupita Vazquez, a resident living near the new 5,000-bed, $450 million ICE prison known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” told our Ashley Bishop as she reported ON-THE-GROUND outside the prison camp (WATCH INTERVIEW ABOVE).

Protesters lined up on Tuesday as President Trump toured the ICE prison; a hastily-erected outdoor prison that will house thousands of undocumented immigrants in the scolding Florida heat awash in swarming mosquitoes. Alarmingly, the so-called Alligator Alcatraz has been gleefully boasted about by Trump, Florida Governor DeSantis, and other Republicans as a cost-efficient security solution for the immigrant “invasion” because…

Prisoners who try to escape will be eaten by the alligators and pythons surrounding the prison; a notion that President Trump openly—and gleefully—boasted about on his way to touring the prison.

“Snakes are fast, but alligators, we’re gonna teach them how to run away from an alligator if they escape prison; don’t run in a straight line, run like this, and you know what, you’re chances go up about one percent,” President Trump said amidst giggles.

Dakota, a local Native American resident—the prison surrounds local Miccosukee and Seminole Native American tribes—spoke with Ashley to condemn Trump and his Republican allies’ gleeful cruelty toward immigrants.

“These are humans, there’s human trafficking, there’s kidnappings happenings, there are people being torn from their family, there are young mothers who will not be able to raise their children, and there’s people who will never be able to become an elder, and these are indigenous people with medicine, with culture, with love, with communities, and they don’t deserve to be ignored.”

And less than 24 hours into the opening of the ICE facility, there’s already red flags that confirm many local residents’ concerns: videos circulated showing flooding already occurring inside the facility.

Then there’s the concern over the prison standing outside in punishing heat—when, as Status Coup had already exposed at other ICE facilities—prisoners are often not provided adequate water.

Vasquez warned that prisoners will grow dehydrated and faint—which is already occurring at another ICE detention center in Miami-Dade County.

“We’re already seeing that at the Krome Detention Center, people all over who have come to this protest have been sharing…in the news we’ve already had another two deaths in these detention centers.”

She warned that ICE prisons like Alligator Alcatraz are for-profit prisons meant to make people rich—at the expense of the local community and environment.

“There hasn’t been transparency when it’s a for-profit industry and they’re building this detention center industry to make somebody rich…and when you follow who is benefitting financially and economically from this it is not the local, working-class economy.”

***Status Coup will be ON-THE-GROUND in South Florida for several more days covering this critically important, and heinous, story. This reporting is critically important, and takes a lot of resources to deliver—flights, hotel, rent-a-car, food, etc—so please support Status Coup’s INDEPENDENT ON-THE-GROUND reporting by becoming a paying member for as low as $5 bucks a month.***

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