Alligator Auschwitz: Supply Side Despotism in America

Alligator Auschwitz: Supply Side Despotism in America
In my first essay about World War II films, I highlighted Conspiracy, HBO’s chilling re-creation of the 1942 Wannsee Conference, where Nazi officials methodically plotted the Holocaust. Framed like a corporate board meeting, the film depicts bureaucrats calmly discussing how to solve a "storage problem"—what to do with millions of Jews stripped of homes, jobs, and citizenship. Options like relocation to Madagascar or Africa are quickly dismissed. What remains is the “Final Solution”: systematic mass murder. No one at the table mentions how these people became stateless—through Hitler’s invasion of countries like Poland, the violent rounding up of Jews, and their forced relocation to ghettos and camps.

Nearly 85 years later, an unsettlingly similar logic resurfaces. The Trump administration faces what officials like Tom Homan and Stephen Miller describe as a “capacity” rather than a “storage” issue—how to handle the millions of undocumented immigrants and others rounded up within the United States. This approach perversely plans for mass detention by building extensive infrastructure first, then filling it—a kind of supply-side authoritarianism. Disturbingly, administration officials stand to profit financially from these policies, entwining personal gain with the machinery of state repression.

Trump originally claimed he would focus on deporting violent offenders, but that promise quickly unraveled. Instead, his administration expanded enforcement targets by stripping individuals with lawful or protected status—such as individuals with temporary protected status, humanitarian parolees from countries like Haiti, Venezuela, and Afghanistan, and even lawful permanent residents. Through denaturalization campaigns and legal maneuvers, they are creating a new class of quasi-citizens: people present in the country, but with rights that are tenuous or revoked. In effect, this is a modern version of rendering people stateless—strikingly reminiscent of 1930s Germany, when the Nuremberg Laws and similar measures relegated Jews to something less than full citizens.

What happens to these people is mass detention on a scale the U.S. has never seen. The Trump administration has moved aggressively to expand contracts with private prison corporations like GEO Group and CoreCivic, with the goal of detaining up to 100,000 individuals at a time. Today, nearly 90% of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detainees are already confined in privately run facilities, despite a long record of substandard conditions, limited accountability, and profit-driven abuses.

Decommissioned detention centers are being rapidly reopened in at least eight states, including New Jersey and Texas. Some detainees are even being sent to offshore or foreign facilities, such as Guantánamo Bay, El Salvador’s CECOT mega-prison, and proposed sites in Africa, raising serious legal and humanitarian concerns. This detention surge comes with a staggering price tag of $45 billion plus in the so-called “Big and Beautiful Bill”—more than the entire U.S. federal prison budget. What began as immigration enforcement has metastasized into a sprawling, semi-permanent infrastructure of mass incarceration, family separation, and community raids. It is not a temporary emergency measure—it is an institutionalized arm of domestic security.

One particularly grotesque manifestation is a facility known informally as “Alligator Alcatraz,” a detention camp rapidly erected on sacred Indigenous land in the Florida Everglades. Built in just eight days—without congressional approval, public notice, or environmental review—according to press reports, the site has already flooded once, violates hurricane safety codes, and faces lawsuits from environmentalists and tribal nations. It threatens both a fragile ecosystem and a $25 billion Everglades restoration plan. Worse still, it symbolizes something broader: the collision of authoritarian ambition, racial cruelty, environmental disregard, and the erosion of democratic norms.

Access to the site has been limited for members of Congress. Journalists and human rights groups have been stonewalled. Conditions reportedly will fail to meet basic health and safety standards, with exposure to mosquito-borne illnesses and hurricane threats. And yet, the project continues—propped up by dark money, secrecy, and an expanding surveillance state.

Donald Trump and Kristi Noem have transformed the creation of "Alligator Alcatraz" into a political spectacle, complete with branded merchandise that trivializes the gravity of mass incarceration. Instead of addressing the serious human rights concerns or the ethical and legal ramifications of such a facility, they have chosen to market it as a display of hardline immigration enforcement—turning shirts, mugs, and social media posts into tools of political theater. This approach not only glorifies cruelty but reduces a system built to detain families and disrupt communities to a punchline. By treating these repressive measures as opportunities for self-promotion, they are normalizing contempt for human dignity and undermining the moral standards that should guide national policy.

At the center of that state is Stephen Miller, the administration’s ideological engine. He’s not just designing the architecture of detention—he may be profiting from it. Financial disclosures reveal Miller holds as much as $250,000 in stock in Palantir Technologies, a data analytics and surveillance firm co-founded by billionaire Peter Thiel. Palantir has a $30 million contract with ICE to track immigrant populations, including those in detention, and is helping build a centralized federal “master database” integrating immigration records, tax filings, Social Security data, and voter rolls.

It doesn’t stop there. Geo Group donated $1 million to the pro-Trump Make America Great Again PAC during the 2024 campaign. After Trump’s election, the company’s CEO projected up to $400 million in additional annual revenue from Trump’s aggressive deportation plans. Company leaders have praised the unprecedented speed at which Trump’s administration pursued contracts with them. The sequence is troubling: former officials Homan and Pam Bondi lobbied for Geo Group, the company backed Trump’s campaign, and once he took office, Homan and Bondi joined his administration—raising serious concerns about conflicts of interest and profit-driven immigration enforcement.

Whether it is described as a “capacity issue” or a “storage problem,” the outcome is the same: the establishment of mass detention camps in the United States. This development reflects a troubling intersection of cruelty, corruption, surveillance, and xenophobia. While there are no mass killings planned, and we must hope such atrocities never occur, but we need to set a higher bar for acceptable standards in what has been the world’s greatest bastion of freedom and democracy. Accepting the Trump measures as normal is to acquiesce to a darker, more dangerous future for the country.