Editorial written by Orlando Sentinel Editorial Board.
Unable to resist the political clickbait, President Donald Trump muscled Gov. Ron DeSantis and Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier out of the limelight June 30, to celebrate the opening of a Florida first.
It is an armed camp where thousands of immigrants targeted as undesirables will be confined, possibly without hearings, under the brutal conditions of a swamp in the Everglades in a place most Floridians have never heard of, called Ochopee.
It wasn’t the construction of “Alligator Alcatraz” that brought the president to the camp.
It’s not Florida’s fast-tracking of construction that’s entrancing right-wing media, breathing new life into DeSantis’s national political dreams, and boosting Uthmeier’s reelection profile.
It is the savagery.
The headline-grabbing power of “Alligator Alcatraz” lies entirely in the imagery of brown people getting out of line and being ripped bloody by alligators or suffocated by snakes.
Strip out the celebration of suffering and grotesque inhumanity and it’s just a row of tents in the middle of nowhere.
This is one more scar on land that environmentalists are waging a decades-long battle to save.
It’s just one more insult to the Miccosukee Tribe, which called it home long before Uthmeier embraced it as a stepping-stone to his election campaign.
The imagined torment of immigrants at this camp is not a glitch. It’s the main selling point.
This distinguishes it from World War II’s horrific internment of families and orphans of Japanese descent in tar-paper shacks, because they were of the wrong ethnicity at the wrong time. Even President Franklin D. Roosevelt called them concentration camps.
But FDR didn’t hawk T-shirts emblazoned with images suggesting gruesome deaths or show AI-generated images of alligators in ICE hats. The Republican Party of Florida did. So did the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
The World War II White House did not mark the opening of an internment camp by breathlessly reporting a ravenous cannibal detainee said to be eating himself while in federal custody on a deportation flight. DHS did.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and internment cheerleaders want you to believe that comparisons to other inhumane camps is hysterical hyperbole, as if the cynical marketing of Alligator Alcatraz is not.
In a particularly vivid example of his trademark cluelessness, DeSantis rebuffed criticism of inhumane conditions by pointing out the new camp’s showers.
Of course it is inhumane. Of course Trump, DeSantis, Noem and Uthmeier will deny bathing in the specter of savagery, even as Trump’s GOP raised money off it, while sidestepping their role in likely deaths that will have much less soundbite potential.
As Floridians know so well, heat is among the deadliest of weather events. High humidity prevents the body from cooling. Combined, the two are lethal.
The detention camp will place thousands of immigrants in wire cages in a humidity-intense swamp that is all but inaccessible to hospital ambulances, and where the summertime heat index can soar above 100 degrees.
Evacuating in advance of severe storms presents its own dangers, especially as it does not take a hurricane to flood a swamp or the two-lane road running next to it.
Last week, when a typical summer shower dumped less than two inches of rain during the opening tour, water seeped through the edges of buildings, walls shook and water spread across electrical cables, Spectrum News video showed.
