Alligator Alcatraz – Paradise Lost

We live in paradise, or do we? Glorious sunsets and waving palm trees belie what is under Florida’s surface. Currently, contractors are working around the clock to prepare a gulag for deportees. This penal colony, dubbed Alligator Alcatraz, is located in the heart of the Big Cypress National Preserve in Collier County on land owned by Miami-Dade County. It will house 5,000 inmates in tents without air conditioning while awaiting deportation.

The press is noticing that water and food must be trucked in, and food scraps and human wastes trucked out daily. There is no infrastructure to process sewage or bring fresh water there. Why not? It’s built on the site of an abandoned airstrip, unfinished when the environmental impact was deemed too great. The harm to the surrounding swampland, indigenous villages, and Everglades wildlife mattered to people at the time. Construction stopped.

Today, budgetary impact is ignored. FEMA money to build it could assist Florida residents recovering from three 2024 hurricanes. No new environmental impact studies have been done. The threat to indigenous sacred lands is incalculable. Yet these pale compared to the human suffering incarceration among mosquito and alligator-infested swamps will wreak upon the immigrants sent there, who may have worked in our businesses and communities or worshipped alongside us for years.

So I ask, where is our humanity that we let this abomination continue in our home, in our name? I have always wondered what I would do if I lived in Germany in 1939. Now, the camps are here in our state of Florida, where we live, work, play, raise our children, and pray. Now, we must all answer what could be the most consequential question of our time. What will I do about it? What will we all do?

The decision is ours.

Kathleen Flora
Lakewood Ranch