Ochopee, Florida – It was a hot, oppressive day in the Everglades as hundreds of people gathered along the Tamiami Trail – a highway that cuts through the heart of one of North America’s most fragile ecosystems. What united them was more than concern for the environment. It was anger. It was shame. And it was a deep sense of helplessness in the face of a project that feels like a political fever dream: a deportation camp in the middle of the swamp, surrounded by alligators, on sacred land. “Alligator Alcatraz” – that’s what locals now call the detention center being built on the grounds of the Dade-Collier training airfield. Sidestepping procurement rules and environmental standards, Governor Ron DeSantis is pushing the construction forward by emergency decrees. 5,000 beds are to be installed – in tents and mobile containers, cut off from the rest of the world by swamps, snakes, crocodiles – and ignorance.
The images are disturbing. Trucks loaded with construction materials roll through the sensitive landscape while children hold signs reading: “This is our home. Not your prison.” Members of the Miccosukee and Seminole Nation speak of desecration – the airfield sits in the middle of 15 traditional villages, surrounded by ceremonial sites and burial grounds. Gary Wilcox of the American Indian Movement blessed the protesters with smoke and prayers. What the government is building, he said, is not a prison but a sacrilege. DeSantis, however, remains unimpressed. “If someone escapes – there are plenty of alligators,” he said cynically at a press conference. It wasn’t a joke. It was the new rhetoric: deterrence through wilderness, prison camps under a tropical sky, migration as a security threat – and the rule of law as an obstacle.
Environmental groups are also sounding the alarm. The construction, they say, threatens not only endangered species like the Florida panther but undermines the hydrological balance of the Everglades – a finely tuned system where every disruption has far-reaching consequences. “We see oil slicks on the road, exhaust in the air, light pollution in an international dark-sky sanctuary,” said Jessica Namath, founder of Floridians for Public Lands. “What’s happening here is the total wreckage of political delusion.” The government calls the camp a “logistical staging site for mass deportations.” But what is being built here is a symbol. A place where despair is institutionalized. Where migration is no longer treated as a human right but as a crime. And where a state begins to sink its core values into the swamp.
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