Editor’s note: The following is a post put up recently on the Facebook page of Witness at the Border by Joshua Rubin, who is part of the leadership team of that group. It is reprinted here with permission. Rubin spent time with others outside the “Alligator Alcatraz” immigrant detention center in the Florida Everglades bearing witness to and challenging the existence of such a cruel detention and deportation system. It appears the government may be closing the facility down in the wake of a lawsuit challenging its existence on environmental grounds.
I am home, and anxiously following the news that seems to indicate that the clues we were following in front of Alligator Alcatraz were real: that the sadistic villains who conspired to turn the miraculous Everglades into an instrument of torture for people snatched off the streets of Florida have suffered a defeat, and it will close down. Even by their own measure, the place was a failure. By ours, it was a fascist abomination.
Their idea was that it would amuse their fellow sadists, while logistically it would work like this: they would stow people with final deportation orders in unlivable conditions and then, at their leisure, load them onto flights taking off for other countries using the largely unused airstrip, built in the 1970s in anticipation of supersonic flights that never materialized, and was abandoned. Back when the airstrip was half built , it became a point of contention that, believe it or not, led to the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency under Nixon.
The problem for them is, as it is all across the country, that just grabbing brown skinned people with the idea of deporting them isn’t as easy as they want it to be. Oh, they can grab them, and incarcerate them, and, dare I say, torture them. But deporting them takes a few judicial steps that they couldn’t quite manage. So the flights out of alligator land were destined for other domestic prisons where they have kangaroo courts nearby to finish the job of declaring them deportable. And no such courts operate in the heart of the Everglades.
But they drummed up a sensation that not only angered the people that love the Everglades, but also those of us to whom their gleeful grandstanding about the harsh conditions for our fellow human creatures was an abomination. With every sign they posted along the Tamiami Trail and their publicity barrage about their admitted cruelty, they raised the ire of good people.
And some of us went. And we withstood the brutal heat and humidity and thunder and lightning and torrential rain of south Florida summer, standing swarmed by mosquitos, and watching for the alligators that indeed occupied the roadside rivers. And the lawyers rallied. And the press reported. And now, all signs point to the closure of what was, clearly, a concentration camp.
One lawsuit in particular now challenges the right of any state to become an arm of the brutal deportation machine. Watching…hoping.
But not counting on it.
I will be recovering for a few days, at home, embraced by family. It’s good to be home.
Joshua Rubin is founder of Witness at the Border.
