Alligator Alcatraz and the Architecture of Dehumanization

A psychological and historical reckoning with the enduring systems that normalize cruelty and obscure responsibility

I. Introduction: A Warning I Will Never Forget

When I was 25, I visited the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, and I will never forget what I saw. The guide told us the barracks were built to hold 200. By the end, they stuffed 2,000 into each one. People slept stacked on top of each other in wooden bunks, shoulder-to-shoulder, body-on-body. If someone had to relieve themselves in the night, they did it there. The person on the bottom often suffocated or was crushed by the weight. If the person above you soiled themselves, you were forced to lie in whatever fell onto you. This was designed overcrowding, engineered dehumanization, a system of control through suffering.

Now in 2025, I find myself looking at the images and testimony emerging from the migrant detention facility known as “Alligator Alcatraz.” I feel that same visceral unease. In the Everglades of Florida, an airstrip has been rapidly converted into a sprawling tent encampment meant to detain thousands of migrants. It is isolated, surrounded by alligator-infested swampland, and intentionally built to be difficult to escape. Officials praise it as efficient. I see a warning.

II. The Facility and Its Justifications

Within days, the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport was transformed into what Governor Ron DeSantis lauded as a “force multiplier” in immigration enforcement. The site now detains over 3,000 individuals in FEMA trailers and soft-sided tents, with reports indicating the capacity may extend to 5,000. It was constructed without public input, on sacred tribal land, during hurricane season, and with questionable legal and environmental oversight.

Officials have claimed the site is secure, self-contained, and temporary. But from the accounts of those inside, a different reality emerges. Detainees report having no access to water for bathing, no ability to contact attorneys, and no medical or mental health support. Meals are described as “one per day” and “crawling with maggots.” Mosquitoes swarm the facility in such density that some have required hospitalization from reactions. Lights remain on 24 hours a day. Bibles have been confiscated.

As one man put it: “They took my Bible and said there is no right to religion. That Bible was the one thing keeping my faith. Now I’m losing it.”

III. Nature as Weapon, Not Refuge

Officials—including Florida’s Attorney General and White House press secretary—have made repeated references to alligators, pythons, and the impassable wilderness surrounding the site as a “natural deterrent.” The message is grotesque in its clarity: even if someone escapes, death awaits.

But the use of environmental danger as policy enforcement is not innovative—it’s colonial. The Everglades, long home to the Miccosukee Tribe and central to Florida’s aquifer system, is being weaponized as both border and prison. Betty Osceola, a Miccosukee elder and environmental activist, has protested the site’s proximity to sacred land, calling it “an affront to everything we are.”

IV. The Psychological Infrastructure of Control

To grasp the full danger of Alligator Alcatraz, we must understand it not only as a physical structure but as a psychological apparatus. Its design appears to produce helplessness, disorientation, and moral injury—not by accident, but by function.

• Trauma by Design: Sleep deprivation, sensory overstimulation, lack of hygiene, and isolation are not unfortunate side effects. They mirror torture techniques known to produce dissociation and psychological collapse. As one detainee said: “I’m on the edge of losing my mind. I haven’t taken my medicine in three days.”

• Identity Destruction: By removing religious texts, severing legal contact, and caging people in tents without names or timelines, the facility strips identity. What remains is not a person, but a case file.

• Language as a Weapon: Bureaucratic euphemisms like “processing center” and “deterrence mechanism” disguise what is effectively carceral internment. Bandura’s work on moral disengagement shows how this kind of sanitized language enables systemic cruelty.

• The Lucifer Effect in Action: Philip Zimbardo’s prison experiments showed how ordinary environments can transform people into agents of cruelty under the right structural conditions. Alligator Alcatraz seems designed to bring out that transformation—both in detainees and in those who guard them.

• Obedience to Authority: Stanley Milgram’s experiments showed that ordinary people, under direction from an authority figure, would inflict harm—even when morally distressed—because they believed the responsibility wasn’t theirs. Alligator Alcatraz exploits this mechanism: hierarchical roles dilute moral judgment, turning participation into procedure.

V. Not Just a Policy—A Performance of Power

This facility is not just about immigration enforcement. It is a theater of control. A $450 million production that signals toughness to a political base while dodging legal, ethical, and humanitarian standards. It was built on stolen land, during hurricane season, using emergency powers that bypassed democratic oversight.

That performance includes denying entry to lawmakers and journalists. It includes placing the facility in an isolated marsh, far from public scrutiny. It includes officials publicly joking about the lethality of local wildlife.

And it reflects a broader pattern of authoritarian posturing: through cruelty, the state signals that belonging is conditional, rights are revocable, and suffering can be staged as deterrence.

VI. Historical Memory and the Dangers of Compliance

Visiting Dachau was one of the most horrifying experiences of my life. I cried nearly the entire time, especially as I came to grips with how little our education system in the United States had taught us about the realities of what happened there. What devastated me most wasn’t just what had occurred, but how it had been allowed to happen—through bureaucracy, silence, and collective denial. People chose not to see. People convinced themselves it wasn’t their responsibility. They trusted the state.

Alligator Alcatraz may not match the industrialized murder of Auschwitz. But if extermination becomes our only threshold for the term “concentration camp,” we have rendered it retroactive and meaningless. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, what distinguishes a concentration camp from a prison is that it operates outside judicial process, created by executive order to detain political or marginalized groups without trial. That is exactly what this facility represents. Its rapid construction, lack of transparency, and reported inhumane conditions function entirely outside democratic oversight.

On July 1, 2025, President Donald Trump toured the facility and praised it as a model for future expansion, suggesting similar camps be built “in many states.” He joked about detainees needing to learn how to “run from alligators” if they tried to escape, underscoring the weaponization of nature as a deterrent. Days later, on July 3, he proposed allowing migrant laborers to remain in the country only if employers vouch for them. On the surface, this may sound like compromise. But structurally, it resembles indentured servitude. Migrants would be tethered not to citizenship, but to corporate utility—subject to the whims of employers, without labor protections, due process, or a path to political personhood.

There is precedent for this. The Nazi regime used camps like Dachau and Mauthausen not only for political imprisonment, but for forced labor—channeling human bodies into extraction and infrastructure, without rights or recourse. Today, the same logics of disposability echo through our systems: who is “productive,” who is “dangerous,” and who is allowed to be visible. Trump’s “employer vouching” model doesn’t offer inclusion; it offers ownership.

We often ask: how did it happen? The better question is: when does it start?

When identity becomes threat. When nature becomes a weapon. When labor replaces citizenship. When law becomes performance. When no one is allowed to look.

It starts like this.

VII. Why This Matters

Alligator Alcatraz is not a rogue exception—it is a blueprint. It reveals how quickly a society can justify cruelty when it is wrapped in the language of policy, and how easily dehumanization becomes infrastructure when there is no public reckoning.

This facility did not appear out of nowhere. It is the logical product of years of rhetoric that paints migrants as threats, legal loopholes that sidestep constitutional protections, and public indifference that mistakes suffering for order.

It matters because the architecture of this camp—physical, legal, psychological—is not confined to the Everglades. Once built, it can be replicated. Once accepted, it can be expanded. What is done to the most vulnerable today becomes precedent for what can be done to anyone tomorrow.

We do not need gas chambers to recognize a concentration camp. We need only look at a place where people are held without trial, stripped of identity, denied basic rights, and used as political symbols. That threshold has already been crossed.

This is not just about migrants. It is about the kind of country we are becoming—and the kind of future we are building. Alligator Alcatraz forces us to decide whether we will confront that truth or look away.

VIII. This Is the Moment to See Clearly

History doesn’t always repeat, but it often rehearses. What’s unfolding in the Everglades is not a deviation from democratic values—it’s what happens when those values are hollowed out and used as stage props. What looks like policy is sometimes performance. What sounds like safety can be spectacle. The danger is not just in what’s being done, but in how easily it is being normalized.

This is the moment to see clearly because it is still unsettled. The infrastructure has been built—but the meaning of it, the public understanding of what it represents, is still being formed. Whether this becomes another footnote in a long line of state violence or a turning point in public reckoning depends on what we choose to name, to challenge, and to remember—right now.

No one will come back later and fix the record if we get it wrong. The conditions are already here. The question is whether we are brave enough to say so.

Sofia Djotni Doctoral Student in Clinical Psychology

Sources:

– AP News: First Immigration Detainees Arrive
– AP News: Republican Donors and Florida’s Hurricane Know-how
– Britannica: Concentration Camp
– CBS News Miami: Detainees describe inhumane treatment
– CNN: ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ facility overview
– PBS: Trump speaks after visit
– Reuters: Trump tours 'Alligator Alcatraz'
– Reuters: Trump say’s he’s open to migrant farm workers staying
– United States Holocaust Memorial Museum