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Paul Schwiep, the attorney representing the plaintiffs, described the judge's ruling as "a temporary but appropriate pause on any further destruction of a sensitive area."
A federal judge on Thursday ordered a temporary halt to the construction of an immigrant detention center being built in the Florida Everglades dubbed "Alligator Alcatraz."
The Associated Press reports that U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Florida has order that all construction at the facility be halted for the next 14 days, although the government can continue to operate the center and detain immigrants there.
The judge's ruling was in response to a lawsuit filed by the local Miccosukee Tribe and some environmental organizations who had argued that further construction at the site risked damage to protected wetlands nearby.
"The crux of the plaintiffs' argument is that the detention facility violates the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires federal agencies to assess the environmental effects of major construction projects," wrote the AP.
Florida attorney Jesse Panuccio, representing the state, argued that the facility shouldn't be subject to this federal law because it is entirely under the control of the Florida state government. However, Williams rejected this argument and said that the detention center was at the very least a joint operation between Florida and the federal government given that it was handling people detained by the federal government.
Florida officials have outlined ambitions to double the capacity of the current facility, according to The New York Times.
Paul Schwiep, the attorney representing the plaintiffs, described the judge's ruling as "a temporary but appropriate pause on any further destruction of a sensitive area, to allow the parties to present their evidence and arguments on the preliminary injunction request" that would potentially permanently halt construction at the site.
The facility was first announced earlier this summer when Republican Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier unveiled a plan to renovate the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport and transform it into a mass detention center for immigrants. During a press event touting the new facility last month, Republican Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis boasted that detainees being held there had little hope of ever escaping given that it was surrounded by miles of alligator-infested swamps.
The center has drawn criticism from human rights groups as well as from Democrats who visited the facility last month. Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), one of the lawmakers to visit the facility, said afterward that "what I saw made my heart sink," referring to the conditions where detainees are being held.
The displaced and bereaved in Gaza, and the disappeared in America, are not the only ones experiencing injury. We who witness and cannot stop it also lose confidence in our ability to effectively support decency and justice.
"Moral injury is the social, psychological, and spiritual harm that arises from a betrayal of one's core values, such as justice, fairness, and loyalty."—"Moral Injury," Psychology Today, emphasis added.
I became interested in the term "moral injury" when I read of suicides of Israel Defense Forces soldiers who have served in Gaza. One reservist who committed suicide by self-immolation is quoted as saying, "I smell and see burning bodies all the time."
It's the concept that violence and injustice have more victims than the directly victimized. And can affect how we function and are able to fight back when we participate in, witness, or fail to prevent something of intolerable evil.
Part of the horror is doubting that the values ever existed. Certainly the inmates of the most incarcerated nation on Earth—the USA—might have different attitudes to the claims of minimal justice, fairness.
We are in a season of injustice and cruelty. Do fascist periods occur like seasons? Is there a periodicity?
Every day has a new horror. A video of a huge ICE raid in a strawberry field in California's Central Valley, terrorizing workers, shows "rounding up" of 100.
The quote that is attributed to Voltaire—that belief in absurdities leads to atrocities—is being acted out, stupidly.
We're now exposed—often in real time—to video of abducted mothers torn from their children, workers taken at their jobs, green card holders handcuffed when reporting to Immigration and Customs Enforcement appointments, in the USA—and to videos of people in Gaza shot, burned, or bombed, or herded, starving, from blasted place to blasted place by pitiless IDF operations in a not-so-hidden logic of extermination.
The displaced and bereaved in Gaza, and the disappeared in America, are not the only ones experiencing injury. We who witness and cannot stop it also lose confidence in our ability to effectively support decency and justice, or be confident that we live in a world of such things.
Unlike trauma from an accident or natural disaster, this "moral injury" is to our social sense—what we can expect from our society. Masked, heavily armed men grabbing men, women, children, brutalizing them as if they were enemies, on our streets, and knowing they are government agents, bruises our sense of moral order.
Judith Levine in The Guardian wrote:
The colossal buildup of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will create the largest domestic police force in the U.S.; its resources will be greater than those of every federal surveillance and carceral agency combined; it will employ more agents than the FBI. ICE will be bigger than the military of many countries. When it runs out of brown and Black people to deport, ICE—perhaps under another name—will be left with the authority and capability to surveil, seize, and disappear anyone the administration considers undesirable.
There is no doubt of our direction. Billions have been appropriated to build detention for ICE targets. Random exile to a torture prison in El Salvador and a concentration camp in the Florida Everglades making it clear that arbitrary abuse and inhumanity is the intention. Government terror.
Every day has a new horror. A video of a huge ICE raid in a strawberry field in California's Central Valley, terrorizing workers, shows "rounding up" of 100.
The United States government is overtly voicing white supremacy, of a "pure" historic "Homeland," more suited to 1925.
The Klu Klux Klan marches in Washington, D.C. on August 8, 1925. (Photo: Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)
The vice president has proposed the idea that ancestral pedigree should add a qualitative weight in American discourse. Mr Vance has complained that Uganda-born New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is "ungrateful." The president campaigned with a complaint of immigrants "poisoning the blood" of the U.S.
"Legality" and due process is gone, in a country of ICE snatch gangs grabbing anyone who speaks a "foreign" language, has some profession or marker of "alienness," terrorizing swaths of the American community, tired, poor, huddled masses yearning to breathe free.
The following are two posts from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security:
The stupidity and vulgarity of this government department harkening to an imaginary "white" American kitch is unbearable.
(Their vacuous, absurd Hollywood America elides
MAGA erasure of transgender people mirrors the 1933 Nazi burning of Magnus Hirschfeld's Institute of Sex Research library nearly 100 years ago—and the Nazi purge of "Jewish degeneracy" in German scholarship is mirrored in the purge of "woke influences" in universities.
In a May 10, 1933 book burning, a member of the SA throws confiscated books into the bonfire during the public burning of "un-German" books on the Opernplatz in Berlin. (Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum)
Am I—a secular non-Zionist Jew with roots in Brooklyn, descendant of the Jewish Great Migration 120 years ago from Eastern Europe—part of the "Homeland" they work to protect with all the powers and monopoly of violence of the federal government? I'm not without fear for my life and comforts. And nauseated that by skin color and class I am part of what they "protect."
In my Jewish immigrant culture, weaned on the stories of the Holocaust and of Eastern European persecution, we are warned to be alert for what might come to us.
In a mendacious way, this administration has taken up antisemitism as a cause, mixing Judaism with Zionism, and casting resistance to the Israeli state as terrorism. (Eurocentric Americanism is yoked to a Jewish supremacist concept of Palestine.) I may easily be not who they "protect," but who they target as a terrorism advocate.
Absurd, stupid. Not without precedent. Both Mussolini and Hitler and their appointees were comical, but it didn't matter, they managed deadly transformations of their societies for a time. That's why I wonder about periodicity—that it's a time of fascism, much as a season.
The president on July 24 issued an "executive order" declaring unhoused people a threat to public order, and saying the "vast majority" of them are drug addicts or mentally ill, and declaring public policy to "clear them" from public spaces into detention by "civil commitment."
Unquestionably, this administration is choosing the most vulnerable people—immigrants, those without housing, transgender people—to target, and has shown that it intends to deprive human rights of those it stigmatizes. We can Niemöller the trend from here.
Once we've created concentration camps like "Alligator Alcatraz" and many other unofficial miserable holding sites for people beyond the law's protection, the only question is the rate of further construction—and the funding has been voted.
Six months in, the confidence with which the Trump administration has turned the guiding philosophy of government from aspirations to equality to criminalization of non-whiteness—unleashing of police power, contempt of any sort of "queer" nonconformity, prioritization of a standard "white" model of American, and mockery of scholarship—makes me feel there is a momentum that is… tidal, and as King Canute demonstrated, impervious to commands to fall back before its fullness is reached.
How long it will be before the U.S. does not simply “do deals” with Bukele’s El Salvador, but become Bukele’s El Salvador on a much grander scale?
“Immigrants at Florida Detention Facilities Faced Life-Threatening Delays, Report Says,” reports the HuffPost.
“Report Finds ‘Dehumanizing’ Conditions in Florida Immigration Centers,” reports the Miami Herald.
“Migrants at ICE Jail in Miami Made to Kneel to ‘Eat Like Dogs,’ Report Alleges,” reports The Guardian.
Pick your headline from yesterday’s news. The story is the same. Every day, the Trump administration is transforming the U.S. government into more and more of a police state. And Human Rights Watch, a long-respected NGO that monitors the most egregious human rights violations throughout the world, from Darfur to Teheran to Gaza to Florida, has just published a carefully documented and judiciously written 98-page report, ’You Feel Like Your Life Is Over’: Abusive Practices at Three Florida Immigration Detention Centers Since January 2025. The report’s summary is worth quoting:
Between January and June 2025, thousands were held in immigration detention at the Krome North Service Processing Center (Krome), the Broward Transitional Center (BTC), and the Federal Detention Center (FDC), in Florida, under conditions that flagrantly violate international human rights standards and the United States government’s own immigration detention standards. By March, the number of people in immigration detention at Krome had increased 249% from the levels before the January inauguration. At times in March, the facility detained more than three times its operational capacity of inmates. As of June 20, 2025, the number of people in immigration detention at the three facilities was at 111% from the levels before the inauguration.
The change was qualitative as well as quantitative. Detainees in three Florida facilities told Human Rights Watch that ICE detention officers and private contractor guards treated them in a degrading and dehumanizing manner. Some were detained shackled for prolonged periods on buses without food, water, or functioning toilets; there was extreme overcrowding in freezing holding cells where detainees were forced to sleep on cold concrete floors under constant fluorescent lighting; and many were denied access to basic hygiene and medical care.
Based on extensive interviews, the report also draws on a number of other sources, including a 2020 ACLU Report, done in collaboration with HRW and National Immigrant Justice Center, entitled Justice-Free Zones: U.S. Immigration Detention Under the Trump Administration, and an April 2025 report on immigrant detention abuses done by Americans for Immigrant Justice. It notes that two of the three Florida facilities investigated are operated by private contractors under Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) supervision; that all three operate under the public radar and without any regular public oversight; and that all three refused to comment on the extensive abuses outlined in the report.
Human Rights Watch, as its website notes, began, in 1978, as “Helsinki Watch.” Originally centered on human rights abuses in the Soviet bloc—whose countries had all signed on to the 1975 Helsinki Accords yet routinely violated its human rights provisions—the NGO eventually extended its remit to document human rights abuses across the globe, establishing “watch” committees in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East.
Does there exist an organized political force capable of resisting the dehumanization and repression that is spreading before our eyes?
I first encountered the organization in connection with its first offshoot “watch” committee, America’s Watch, which was established in 1981 to document the extensive human rights violations by Central and South American regimes that were strongly backed by the Reagan administration. During those years I assiduously read the organization’s reports on Salvadoran and Guatemalan imprisonment and torture of dissidents, and on the police-and-military-linked death squads that regularly assassinated peasants, workers, Catholic nuns and priests, and solidarity workers. A young assistant professor at Fordham University, I taught courses on the human rights violations in Central America and the Caribbean, and on Reagan-administration support for violent rebel groups seeking to overthrow the very new Sandinista government that has just overthrown the repressive Somoza regime in Nicaragua. And together with a handful of other junior colleagues, I helped to organize teach-ins and special lectures on the atrocious human rights violations regularly documented and publicized by America’s Watch.
A child of the 60s and 70s, during these years I never viewed any aspect of U.S. politics through “rose-colored glasses.” I well understood that the U.S. was plagued by its own forms of injustice. I also understood that much of the U.S. Cold War rhetoric about “human rights” and “defending democracy” was hypocritical, and masked very bad things done both at home and abroad. At the same time, it was clearly abroad—in the American “near abroad,” and well beyond it—that the most egregious human rights abuses were being committed. Groups like Helsinki Watch and its adjuncts, Amnesty International, and others, played an important role in documenting the abuses and in motivating solidarity work intended to end them.
And for Americans, this was primarily a matter of foreign policy.
Obviously, it was never simply a matter of things “foreign.”
Just as obviously, the damage that was done by U.S. foreign policy, especially in the Western Hemisphere, has had enduring effects, for which the U.S. has never assumed responsibility. And the “immigration crisis” at the Southern border is in large part a consequence of the legacies of U.S. foreign policy choices, as millions upon millions of people have fled violent and unjust situations, and headed north, seeking refuge, asylum, and simple opportunity in the U.S. (see the writings of Greg Grandin, especially his 2025 America, America: A New History of the New World; William Connolly has recently underscored the importance of climate change in driving the migration crisis from the South).
And, in a way, what we in the U.S are now experiencing can be viewed as “chickens coming home to roost,” as the awful human rights conditions to our south—the consequence of a combination of U.S. malign intent and benign neglect—are now staring us directly in the face.
And, irony of ironies, the U.S. electorate has responded to this situation by returning to office a man, President Donald Trump, who emulates foreign dictators and is determined to emulate some of the worst forms of human rights abuse such dictators regularly inflict on their populations:
Here are a few of the many recent reports documenting Trump’s repressive measures:
The Trump administration, animated by a White, Christian, ethno-nationalist vision, is currently threatening human rights in every conceivable way.
But at the heart of its authoritarian agenda is the idea that many millions who live among us are “illegals,” rightless individuals whose presence and thus very existence is in question, and that these millions of human beings, and the scores of millions of citizens who offer them sanctuary or support or who merely defend the constitutional rights of all, are under suspicion as “enemies of the people” and haters of “American Greatness.”
How far will this go?
Regarding Trump’s illegal deportation of immigrants to El Salvador, where they have been detained in the country’s maximum security Terrorism Confinement Center, human rights experts recently wrote forThe Guardian that “Trump’s lawlessness is emboldening El Salvador’s brutal regime,” noting that the detention of a leading Salvadoran human rights lawyer “is part of a wave of repression sweeping the country under Nayib Bukele.”
That Trump likes and admires Nayib Bukele, the brutal and autocratic elected president of El Salvador, has long been a matter of grave concern for those who care about human rights and constitutional democracy. That Trump has enthusiastically made “deals” with Bukele to turn El Salvador into an offshore detention facility for “illegals” represents a real synergy of lawlessness that accentuates the concern.
As I read the new Human Rights Watch report about Florida’s ICE facilities, and as I think about Trump’s new “Alligator Alcatraz,” and his so-called “Border Czar’s recent comments on how ICE officers don’t need probable cause to detain people and how he plans to “flood the zone” in “sanctuary cities,” and about the Trump administration’s recent deployment of National Guard troops and active duty Marines to suppress Los Angeles protests, I wonder how long it will be before the U.S. does not simply “do deals” with Bukele’s El Salvador, but become Bukele’s El Salvador on a much grander scale.
Things would of course look and feel very different here in the U.S., given the country’s overall wealth, consumerism, and at least the patina of “democracy.” But how different would it really be, especially in a political sense? Does there exist an organized political force capable of resisting the dehumanization and repression that is spreading before our eyes? Can such a force be mobilized? Will it be mobilized? Or will the U.S. become the El Salvador of the North?