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due process
Stop Alligator Alcatraz Now, Before They Build Another in a Remote Area Near You
America stands at a crossroads. Down one road lies the fragile promise of democracy: messy, imperfect, but built on the belief in human dignity and the rule of law. Down the other lies the swamp—where cruelty is policy, and fear is law.
Jul 02, 2025
When Louise and I lived in Germany in 1986-87, we visited Dachau with our family. The crematoriums shocked our children, but even more so because this was simply a “detention facility” and not one of Hitler’s death camps. The ovens were for those who had been worked to death or killed by cholera.
The death camps, it turns out, were all located outside of Germany so Dear Leader could deny responsibility for them. You know, like Gitmo.
Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” (aka the “GOP Donor Fellatio Act”) contains a 13-fold increase in Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s budget, turning it into the largest single (secret, masked) police force in America, along with, in aggregate, close to $100 billion to build a new series of “detention facilities” all across America.
The most dangerous thing about Alligator Alcatraz isn’t the alligators. It’s the message.
If this passes, soon the country will pockmarked by concentration camps. As Trump said yesterday:
Well, I think we'd like to see them in many states, really, many states. This one, I know Ron’s doing a second one, at least a second one, and probably a couple of more. And, you know, at some point, they might morph into a system where you’re going to keep it for a long time.
Let’s stop pretending. Let’s stop dancing around the language, around the morality, and around the history.
What’s being built in the Florida Everglades, for example—what they’re calling “Alligator Alcatraz”—is not just another immigration facility. It’s a political prison engineered not merely to detain, but to humiliate, dehumanize, and broadcast terror.
It’s America’s first open-air symbol that our democracy is not just dying: it is being dissected publicly, cruelly, and with calculation.
Donald Trump is back in the White House. The Republican Party controls Congress. And with a permanent “immigration emergency” in place, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is running point on an experiment in authoritarian governance.
Alligator Alcatraz is the proof-of-concept.
Rising in a remote wildlife preserve in Big Cypress National Preserve—Indigenous land, no less—Alligator Alcatraz is expected to hold thousands of undocumented migrants. Some reports say 1,000 at launch; others say 5,000. Either way, it is the largest civilian detention project built on U.S. soil in a generation.
It’s surrounded by dense marshland, home to pythons and alligators.
“Let them try to escape,” Trump smirked at a recent rally. “They better know how to run from an alligator.”
This isn’t just cruelty. It’s performance. It’s state-sponsored sadism, broadcast as patriotism. DeSantis and Trump are now competing in a bizarre effort to show who can be more cruel.
But it’s not unprecedented. If you want to understand what’s happening in Florida, you have to travel back to 1933, to a small, remote town in Bavaria.
When Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany, the first thing he built wasn’t a tank or a warship. It was a “detention facility.”
The Dachau concentration camp, opened in March 1933 just three months after he became Chancellor, was described at the time as “the first concentration camp for political prisoners.” As the Dachau memorial site explains,
From the very beginning, the camp was a place of brutality. During the first years, most prisoners were political opponents of the Nazi regime.
They weren’t criminals. They weren’t traitors. They were “undesirable immigrants.” Trade unionists. Communists. Jews. Catholics. Writers. Teachers. Students. They were anyone the regime considered a threat or a convenient enemy.
The Nazis didn’t hide Dachau. They advertised it. It was a warning. A message. Step out of line, and this is where you go.
Sound familiar?
Alligator Alcatraz is not Dachau. It’s not exterminating people. Yet. But Dachau didn’t begin as a death camp either. It began as a “protective custody” facility, built on the idea that “certain people” posed a threat to the national body simply by existing.
That’s what Florida’s new facility represents. Not immigration enforcement. Not public safety. Protective custody for political purposes.
Under Trump’s new national emergency framework, virtually anyone deemed “unlawfully present” can be detained indefinitely without trial.
That means asylum-seekers. Victims of trafficking. Children.
And if you believe this won’t expand—if you believe this power will remain solely focused on brown-skinned migrants fleeing violence in Central America—then you haven’t read a history book lately.
Stripping people of their citizenship is called denaturalization, and it was one of Hitler’s favorite tools against his enemies and Jews, who were referred to as “undesirable foreign elements” and denaturalized en masse in 1935.
Trump’s DOJ just updated their guidelines relating to the 25 million American citizens who first came to this country as immigrants and then obtained citizenship through the naturalization process. It used to be that you could only lose your citizenship if you committed a serious enough crime.
And, yesterday, Trump said:
Many of them were born in our country. I think we ought to get them the hell out of here, too, if you want to know the truth. So maybe that'll be the next job that we'll work on together.
So now, the DOJ says, Trump can choose to denaturalize anybody and then immediately send them to Alligator Alcatraz:
“Any other cases referred to the Civil Division that the Division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue [may be stripped of citizenship]. These categories are intended to guide the Civil Division in prioritizing which cases to pursue; however, these categories do not limit the Civil Division from pursuing any particular case, nor are they listed in a particular order of importance. Further, the Civil Division retains the discretion to pursue cases outside of these categories as it determines appropriate. The assignment of denaturalization cases may be made across sections or units based on experience, subject-matter expertise, and the overall needs of the Civil Division.” (emphasis added)
And as a special bonus, the memo notes that stripping American citizens of their citizenship is a civil, not criminal, process so you are not entitled to have a lawyer or any of the other normal aspects of legal procedure like a trial that we generally think of as our rights. Franz Kafka would be proud.
Dachau didn’t just hold communists. Over time, it expanded to include denaturalized Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma, and anyone who opposed Nazi policy. It became a national crucible of cruelty. It normalized the idea that “certain people do not deserve legal protections.”
That is the fire that Alligator Alcatraz is stoking today.
How is this being done? Through a cunning abuse of emergency powers.
Florida has been under a rolling immigration “state of emergency” since 2023, a legal status that allows the governor to bypass environmental protections, override public procurement processes, and redirect funds without oversight.
Sound familiar? It should. The Nazis used the 1933 Reichstag Fire Decree to grant themselves emergency powers in perpetuity. One crisis, one convenient boogeyman, and suddenly all democratic guardrails are removed.
Today, DeSantis is using Federal Emergency Management Agency funds intended for hurricane victims to build migrant cages. Tomorrow, it could be protesters. Journalists. Teachers. You.
This isn’t alarmism. It’s precedent.
Let’s talk about the location, because it matters.
Big Cypress is a remote and largely inaccessible swamp, home to endangered species, sacred Indigenous land, and—now—a prison surrounded by natural predators.
Human rights lawyers and journalists will find it hard to access. Escapes will be all but impossible. Oversight will be nonexistent. That’s by design.
Dachau, too, was deliberately chosen for its isolation. As the memorial website explains:
The camp was constantly expanded and served as the prototype and model for all later concentration camps.
It became a template. A blueprint. And its very existence reshaped what the German public considered “normal.”
Alligator Alcatraz is the same. A testing ground. If it succeeds—not as a legal institution, but as a political spectacle—there will be more. One in Texas. One in Arizona. One in Arkansas. Maybe even one in your backyard.
The most dangerous thing about Alligator Alcatraz isn’t the alligators. It’s the message.
The message that some people are less than human. That caging them is acceptable. That they deserve no rights, no hearing, no compassion. Just mud and barbed wire.
That was the logic behind Dachau.
And it’s becoming the logic behind Trump’s America.
This facility is being built not to solve a problem, but to create one. To manufacture outrage. To train the public to see brown-skinned immigrants not as workers or families or survivors but as invaders. Intruders. Animals.
And that’s when the door opens for something far worse.
We cannot afford to wait. We cannot afford to be polite. The time for half-measures and technocratic rebuttals and “strongly worded letters” is over.
America stands at a crossroads. Down one road lies the fragile promise of democracy: messy, imperfect, but built on the belief in human dignity and the rule of law. Down the other lies the swamp—literal and figurative—where cruelty is policy, and fear is law.
Alligator Alcatraz isn’t just a prison. It’s a mirror. And it’s asking us: Who are we, really?
The answer, as always, is up to us.
We must engage:
- Lawsuits: Civil liberties groups and Indigenous tribes must continue challenging this facility in court. Environmental statutes, tribal treaties, and international human rights laws can still be leveraged.
- Documentation: Journalists must risk everything to document the construction, conditions, and policies of Alligator Alcatraz. We need eyes in the swamp, or darkness will reign.
- Direct Action: Peaceful protest, civil disobedience, and national mobilization must become central. This is a fight for the moral compass of our country.
- Language: Stop calling this a “detention center.” Call it what it is: a political prison. A migrant concentration camp. Words matter.
- History: Teach your neighbors about Dachau. Show them how it started. Not with mass extermination, but with silence. With a single camp, surrounded by a fence, where people were put “for their own protection.”
Democracy doesn’t fall all at once. It decays from the inside. It erodes at the margins. It disappears not with a bang, but with a shrug.
The United States of America has reached a threshold. We can step back and reaffirm our commitment to human dignity, to due process, to liberty and justice for all.
Or we can cross into the swamp. And never come back.
Dachau was the beginning of something monstrous. Let Alligator Alcatraz be the end of something: the end of our innocence, the end of our complacency, and the start of a renewed resistance.
Because if we wait too long, we may wake up one day and discover we are no longer the land of the free, but only the home of the caged.
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The Supreme Court Just Granted Trump a License to Erase Moral Responsibility
By permitting the U.S. government to deport asylum-seekers and noncriminal undocumented immigrants to random third countries, the six Republicans on the bench handed a dangerous tool to a man most inclined to abuse it.
Jun 26, 2025
The American people just got a taste of authoritarianism wrapped in judicial robes. In a stunning 6-3 ruling this week, the Supreme Court green-lit the mass deportation of immigrants, not to their home countries but to third nations where they have no legal status, no family, and often no hope.
In her dissent, Justice Sonja Sotomayor, calling the shadow docket ruling “inexcusable,” pointed out how destructive this is to the rule of law (both U.S. and international law largely prohibit this) and to the lives of the people who may be deported without due process:
The Government has made clear in word and deed that it feels itself unconstrained by law, free to deport anyone anywhere without notice or an opportunity to be heard. The episodes of noncompliance in this very case illustrate the risks.
The Due Process Clause represents “the principle that ours is a government of laws, not of men, and that we submit ourselves to rulers only if under rules.” By rewarding lawlessness, the court once again undermines that foundational principle.
In matters of life and death, it is best to proceed with caution. In this case, the government took the opposite approach. It wrongfully deported one plaintiff to Guatemala, even though an Immigration judge found he was likely to face torture there. Then, in clear violation of a court order, it deported six more to South Sudan, a nation the State Department considers too unsafe for all but its most critical personnel.
This ruling by six corrupt Republican justices allows Donald Trump or any future president to designate any country they choose as a “safe third country” and deport people there without meaningful review, even if they’ve committed no crime and have a valid asylum claim.
If that sounds familiar, it should. It echoes one of the most cold-blooded decisions made by Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime: to locate their extermination camps not within Germany, but in the foreign lands of occupied Poland.
Let’s be clear: Deportation is not genocide. But both decisions—then and now—are grounded in the same logic of moral evasion through geographic displacement.
When regimes want to commit acts that would stir conscience or provoke backlash at home, they find ways to outsource the cruelty.
The decision wasn’t just about deportation. It was about moral laundering, washing the blood off our hands by putting it on someone else’s tarmac.
The Nazi leadership understood that while Germany’s public had been bombarded with antisemitic propaganda for years, they still might balk at the wholesale slaughter of millions of people inside German borders. So they built Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec far away, deep in Poland, where there were no German newspapers, no prying eyes, and no courts to second-guess their machinery of death.
As Raul Hilberg and other Holocaust historians have documented, Nazi leaders like Heinrich Himmler and Reinhard Heydrich made this decision deliberately to preserve the illusion of “moral cleanliness” at home while carrying out genocide abroad.
Today’s Trump version of this practice is more sanitized, but no less cynical.
By permitting the U.S. government to deport asylum-seekers and noncriminal undocumented immigrants to random third countries—often places they’ve never even set foot in—the Supreme Court has granted the executive branch a license to erase moral responsibility.
As long as the suffering happens somewhere else, we’re told, it’s not our fault. It’s not our soil. Not our responsibility.
That kind of logic is the death of democracy, human rights, and the rule of law. As Federal Judge Patricia Millett said of Trump’s deportation of Venezuelan prisoners to a concentration camp in El Salvador, compared with FDR’s actions in WWII, “Nazis got better treatment under the Alien Enemies Act.”
A future president with dictatorial ambitions could cite this ruling to round up political dissidents, journalists, or whistleblowers and ship them off to “safe third countries” that are anything but.
The Trump administration argued—and the court’s on-the-take, Republican-appointed majority agreed—that migrants have no right to American judicial processes once they’re transferred elsewhere. In other words, we can dodge our legal obligations under both U.S. and international law simply by putting someone on a plane.
This is the same loophole thinking that allowed George W. Bush’s administration to kidnap terror suspects and ship them to places like Egypt and Syria, where they were tortured out of view. That policy was called “extraordinary rendition.” Today, we might call this new policy extraordinary rejection: a way to deny asylum without confronting its human cost.
And here’s the truly chilling part: Once someone has been deported to a third country, they are functionally outside the U.S. legal system. They can’t sue. They can’t appeal. They may not even survive. And, to Trump’s delight, it’ll all be outside the reach of American courts and U.S. media.
This obscene policy isn’t about safety, it’s about displacement as punishment and the creation of a pseudo-legal infrastructure of indifference to the humanity of the people we’re “processing.”
Whether it’s a camp outside Kraków or a deportation center in Guatemala, the strategy is the same: create a zone of moral invisibility. A legal no-man’s-land where acts that would outrage decent people become routine, because they happen far away, beyond the reach of media, law, and conscience.
That’s not how democracies behave: That’s how authoritarian regimes insulate themselves from dissent.
And like all authoritarian tools, once it exists, it will be used again.
You may think this only affects immigrants. But consider: The legal precedent now exists for the government to forcibly remove someone from U.S. soil and drop them in another country without due process. Today it’s asylum-seekers. Tomorrow, who knows?
A future president with dictatorial ambitions could cite this ruling to round up political dissidents, journalists, or whistleblowers and ship them off to “safe third countries” that are anything but.
You think that’s paranoid? So did people in 1932 Berlin.
The genius of the American system—at least in theory—is that it puts checks on state power. The executive cannot act like a king. The courts must protect the vulnerable. And the public must have visibility into the actions done in our name.
This week, though, the Supreme Court abdicated that role. And in doing so, the six Republicans on the bench handed a dangerous tool to a man most inclined to abuse it.
Let’s not kid ourselves. The decision wasn’t just about deportation. It was about moral laundering, washing the blood off our hands by putting it on someone else’s tarmac.
The Nazis did it. So did the Bush administration. Now Trump’s backers on the court have opened the door once more.
History doesn’t repeat, but, as Mark Twain said, it rhymes. And if we’re not careful, we may soon find that rhyme turning into a full verse we’ve heard before.
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Trump’s One Big Beautiful (Ugly) Bill Versus an Unsung Hero
An unlikely hero blocked a provision that amounted to an assault on the Constitution: the Senate parliamentarian. Will her ruling stick?
Jun 25, 2025
In the dead of night at 2:53 am on May 22, the House of Representatives began to consider President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”
Four hours later, Republicans passed it by a single vote—215 to 214. It included a provision that effectively forgave most of Trump’s unconstitutional actions and undermined the federal courts.
Republicans in the Senate made it worse.
Over the weekend, an unlikely hero blocked this assault on the Constitution: the Senate parliamentarian. Will her ruling stick? Or will Senate Republicans detonate the “nuclear option” to save the provision?
Negating Trump’s Courtroom Losses
Buried in the House bill’s 1,000-plus pages was Section 70302, which allowed Trump to disregard all existing injunctions and continue his unconstitutional policies with impunity. It provided—retroactively—that unless a court required a bond, it could not enforce a contempt charge for violating an injunction or temporary restraining order.
Rarely are bonds required in cases challenging the constitutionality of government policies. Dozens of judges—including Trump appointees—have issued such injunctions to halt his attacks on Big Law firms, closure of federal agencies, deportation of migrants without due process, and more. In case after case, the Trump administration violated those injunctions or stonewalled. Faced with such disobedience, a court’s only enforcement weapon is a contempt charge.
The House was letting Trump off the hook.
“We Can Look at the Language”
Protecting Trump is one thing. But in their myopic quest to make Trump king, House Republicans committed legislative malpractice: Section 70302 also rendered unenforceable hundreds of previous injunctions issued over decades in cases, ranging from antitrust to school desegregation to police reform.
The provision emerged from the House Judiciary Committee after Democrats tried to kill it. Then it went to the Rules Committee where the Judiciary Committee’s chairman, longtime Trump loyalist Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), seemed not to grasp its scope.
Unfortunately, Trump—who has urged elimination of the filibuster—doesn’t care about preserving the institutional value of anything. If he can neuter the courts in the process of bending the Senate to his will, so much the better.
In response to questions from Rules Committee member Rep. Joe Neguse (D-Colo.), Jordan asserted incorrectly that the law would apply only to nationwide injunctions in immigration cases. Rep. Neguse pointed out that the provision had no such limitations. It did not contain the words “immigration” or “nationwide.”
Obviously confused, Jordan—a lawyer—briefly consulted with attorneys before responding that Republicans can “look at the language.”
“It’s 6:00 am. You’re voting on this thing in like 10 hours. What are we talking about?” Rep. Neguse replied.
The language didn’t change, and the vote on the One Big Beautiful Bill proceeded.
“This Provision Was Unknown to Me”
Rep. Mike Flood (R-Neb.) has a law degree from the University of Nebraska. At a town hall meeting after voting for the bill, he told angry constituents that he didn’t know about Section 70302.
“I am not going to hide the truth,” he said. “This provision was unknown to me when I voted for that bill.”
“You voted for it!” came shouts from the audience.
Rep. Flood promised to seek its deletion.
The Senate Version is Worse
The Senate proposed a different way to protect Trump’s unconstitutional actions from judicial scrutiny: an enormous bond that would close the courts to the vast majority of potential litigants. It would require any plaintiff seeking a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction against the federal government to post a bond “in an amount proper to pay the costs and damages sustained by the Federal Government.”
That could be millions—sometimes billions—of dollars. Arizona Supreme Court Justice Clint Bolick outlined the tragic irony:
“The basic idea of a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction is to prevent the damage to the rights and well-being of citizens from the government carrying out an action or policy that is likely to be found illegal or unconstitutional.”
“The new Senate version turns that logic on its head, instead seeking to protect the government from any costs that might be incurred from citizens asserting their rights…” [emphasis in original]
The Senate version would also prohibit a court from considering “any factor other than” the costs and damages that the government will sustain if it gets the injunction reversed on appeal. In other words, a plaintiff’s inability to pay the bond and the hardship that a plaintiff will sustain if the court refuses to grant the injunction are irrelevant.
The provision would prevent most lawsuits against government action from being filed in the first place because few would have the means to pay upfront. As Justice Bolick observed, Trump’s victims would have no choice but to “accept violations of their rights rather than seek legal redress, severely undermining the Constitution.”
An Unsung Profile in Courage
The Senate is relying on the “reconciliation” process to pass Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill with a simple majority, rather than the 60 votes that would otherwise be required to overcome a Democratic filibuster. But the process is available only for legislation relating to government spending, taxes, and the deficit. “Extraneous” measures are not allowed.
The Senate parliamentarian determines what is “extraneous.” Elizabeth MacDonough, a former Justice Department trial attorney, has held the nonpartisan position since 2012. Several times under both Republicans and Democrats she has struck prohibited measures from reconciliation bills. The current attempt to limit federal court injunctions is among many provisions that she struck from the Senate version of the One Big Beautiful Bill.
That’s a problem because there are only 53 Senate Republicans, and they need 60 votes to overcome any objection to an extraneous provision, unless…
The “Nuclear Option”
Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) could accept the parliamentarian’s rulings and strip the Senate bill of its offending provisions.
Or he could overrule the parliamentarian with a simple majority (50 + Vice President JD Vance casting the tie-breaking vote)—a rare event. On January 6, 2025, Thune said he wouldn’t use that “nuclear option”:
“Yeah, and that’s totally akin to killing the filibuster. We can’t go there. People need to understand that.”
Sen. John Thune is about to get the test of his political career: loyalty to Trump or to the Constitution?
On May 21, Thune led Republicans in disregarding the parliamentarian’s opinion and repealing California’s electric vehicle mandate banning the sale of most new gas-powered cars by 2035. On the Senate floor, he assured Democrats that it was a one-off based on the Congressional Review Act:
“We are not talking about doing anything to erode the institutional character of the Senate.”
Unfortunately, Trump—who has urged elimination of the filibuster—doesn’t care about preserving the institutional value of anything. If he can neuter the courts in the process of bending the Senate to his will, so much the better.
Sen. John Thune is about to get the test of his political career: loyalty to Trump or to the Constitution? He swore an oath only to one of them.
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