Everglades Detention Facility, Florida — [Editor’s note: This is a statement issued by Witness at the Border.] Grassroots human rights observers and activists from throughout the country affiliated with the network coordinated by Witness at the Border, stood at the entrance to the Everglades Detention Facility [also known as “Alligator Alcatraz”] last week.
A judge ordered the facility closed. But a higher court put the closure on hold, and the case is still pending. There are about 1,400 migrants imprisoned there right now. New ones are brought in daily, and others are taken out. The windows on the buses they are transported in are darkened, so we can’t tell how many prisoners are on the buses. Some prisoners are flown directly into and out of the camp. It is built on an old airfield in the Everglades. We have seen the planes come and go.
Getting information about the camp requires patience. A guard who was leaving stopped to talk with us. Normally they don’t, but this guy had just been fired, so he wasn’t very motivated to keep the camp’s secrets. He told us about the camp’s Special Housing Unit (SHU), which is where prisoners who are considered troublesome are confined in what is commonly called isolation or solitary confinement. We didn’t get many details, because he only talked with us briefly. But he did tear the patch off the arm of his uniform and give it to us.
The guard’s patch had images of the grim reaper riding on an alligator skeleton. Below the skeleton are two human skulls, similar to the Totenkopf or death’s head that the Nazis who ran and guarded German WWII concentration camps had on their SS uniforms. The death’s head imagery is still used by Neo-Nazis and white supremacists. The guard we spoke to said a number of the guards wore the patches on their uniforms while on duty.
It is understandable that one ill-informed guard might be insensitive enough to wear a Nazi-inspired patch. It is, however, incomprehensible that the administration would permit multiple guards to regularly display such frightening imagery inside the camp….The death’s head conjures up memories of mass-murder, sadistic medical experimentation, sexual exploitation, and other atrocities that were committed on an industrial scale inside Nazi camps….It reminds prisoners that Trump has already sent migrants to the notoriously violent CECOT camp in El Salvador. It tells the migrants that they might suffer the same kind of abuse here in the U.S. that some of them fled in their home countries.
In addition to terrorizing the prisoners, the death’s head patch also affects the guards who wear it. It encourages them to think of themselves as being brethren in a group that has the impunity to abuse the life-or-death power they have over those in their charge. It signals to them that the people who run the camp are not concerned about whether they mistreat those in their custody. It tells them that they are aligned with Proud Boys, insurrectionists, the KKK, and others who believe their race gives them license to act violently in furtherance of some imagined divinely-inspired vision. It suggests that they are free to brutalize people who are helpless to defend themselves.
The administration and its supporters and apologists have strongly objected to people calling the camps concentration camps. It would seem obvious that if the administration doesn’t want people to think it is running Nazi-style concentration camps, it shouldn’t let the guards dress up in uniforms that are patterned after Nazi SS uniforms….
If we hadn’t been outside the camp at the moment the fired guard left, we wouldn’t have discovered that the guards are imitating and identifying with Nazi concentration camp guards. We don’t know what other horrors are being concealed within the camps. What we do know is that we need to shut down the camps at once, before this Nazi-inspired abomination goes any further.
Witness at the Border is a migrant advocacy group that was instrumental in bringing public pressure to close migrant child detention camps during President Trump’s first term and has continued to stand witness to the situation on the U.S./Mexico border and the expanding detention of migrants.
Brooklyn, NY – Witness at the Border has joined with over 30 immigration advocacy and support organizations to launch the Blue Triangle Solidarity campaign. The effort unites around the message, “I Stand With Immigrants.” It will include an in-person presence with symbols of inverted blue triangles at marches and rallies across the country and a social media campaign.
Joshua Rubin, founder of Witness at the Border, explains it this way: “The Nazis forced immigrants to wear blue triangles to identify themselves. Immigrants are under attack, and, right now, we all have to be immigrants, don’t we?”
