The migrant detention middle referred to as Alligator Alcatraz is closed, however a lot about it stays unresolved. There are complaints over detainees’ remedy, environmental claims over injury to safe wetlands and uncertainty about the way forward for the airstrip it used to be constructed on.
One facet of the South Florida facility has drawn a ways much less consideration, regardless that: the identify itself, and the lengthy historical past of associating alligators with racist concepts about other people of colour.
I’m a historian of natural world, the surroundings and American tradition who has studied the cultural and environmental historical past of the American alligator. My analysis presentations that the species has carried quite a few meanings in the USA, starting from a prized supply of leather-based for luxurious type to a symbol of Florida id. Much less widely known is the reptile’s function within the country’s historical past of racial stereotyping. For generations, alligators featured prominently in imagery meant to demean Black American citizens.
Regardless of the intentions of those that named and promoted the ability, Alligator Alcatraz echoed a protracted custom of the use of alligators in ways in which have bolstered racist imagery and dehumanizing stereotypes.
President Donald Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and then-Place of origin Safety Secretary Kristi Noem excursion Alligator Alcatraz, a migrant detention facility in Florida, in July 2025.
AP Picture/Evan Vucci
Establishing Alligator Alcatraz
Situated on a faraway touchdown strip surrounded via Large Cypress Nationwide Maintain, about 6 miles north of Everglades Nationwide Park, Alligator Alcatraz sparked controversy from the start. Critics argued that the detention middle housed immigrants in unsafe and inhumane prerequisites, restricted get admission to for attorneys and members of the family, and imperiled delicate, federally safe wetlands. Seminole and Miccosukee other people denounced it as a risk to their sacred homelands. Some detractors even characterised it as a focus camp.
In a long exposé for The Atlantic, journalist Eric Schlosser decried the ability as “a uniquely cruel publicity stunt with an absurdly high price tag.” In accordance with figures from court docket filings and Florida’s grant software to the Federal Emergency Control Company, Schlosser estimated that it price about US$500,000 a 12 months to carry a unmarried immigrant at Alligator Alcatraz. In contrast, Florida spends simplest $30,000 a 12 months to restrict somebody in a state jail.
The contentious middle used to be the brainchild of Florida Legal professional Common James Uthmeier, who pitched the theory to federal officers in June 2025.
Uthmeier’s catchy identify used to be supposed to take hold of consideration, specifically from President Donald Trump, who had not too long ago proposed reopening the infamous, long-shuttered Alcatraz federal jail in San Francisco Bay. All over his first time period, Trump had additionally reportedly floated the theory of creating a moat stuffed with “snakes or alligators” to beef up his southern border wall. Keenly attuned to the facility of provocative branding, Trump embraced Uthmeier’s proposal.
As soon as given the fairway gentle, the management of Gov. Ron DeSantis unexpectedly constructed a makeshift detention middle designed to carry a number of thousand migrants. After traveling the ability in a while sooner than the primary detainees arrived, Trump declared, “We’re surrounded by miles of treacherous swampland, and the only way out is, really, deportation.”
He added, “You have a lot of bodyguards and a lot of cops that are in the form of alligators.”
Forward of Trump’s talk over with, the Division of Place of origin Safety posted an AI-generated symbol of menacing alligators dressed in Immigration and Customs Enforcement hats as they stood guard outdoor the detention middle. To money in at the concept, the Florida Republican Celebration additionally started peddling Alligator Alcatraz–themed products, like T-shirts, hats and beer koozies.
Protesters acquire outdoor Florida’s ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ immigration detention middle in Would possibly 2026.
AP Picture/Lynne Sladky
The parable of crocodilians yearning Black our bodies
Whether or not he learned it or no longer, Trump’s depiction of alligators as enforcers of migrant detention echoed a miles older custom.
My analysis unearths that, as early because the 18th century, French explorers and naturalists started claiming that alligators and crocodiles confirmed a marked choice for attacking and eating other people of African descent. Plantation house owners within the South eagerly repeated those tales as a result of they discouraged enslaved other people from escaping into marshes and swamps, the place pursuing them proved tricky.
The theory won a lot wider traction after the Civil Warfare. As previously enslaved other people secured freedom and elementary civil rights, pursued instructional and financial alternatives, and won political energy, many white American citizens sought to reassert white supremacy. They limited balloting rights, imposed Jim Crow segregation and inflicted racial violence.
Additionally they hired demeaning racial stereotypes designed to humiliate African American citizens whilst undermining their claims to freedom, dignity and citizenship. My paintings presentations how the rising affiliation between alligators and Black our bodies used to be a part of this higher marketing campaign to fortify notions of Black inferiority.
Many postwar accounts of alligator assaults focused on a dated racist slur that portrayed Black youngsters as not up to human. In most cases depicted with exaggerated options and ragged clothes – or no clothes in any respect – those youngsters have been continuously proven being chased via alligators or different wild animals. Such pictures rested at the dehumanizing assumption that Black youngsters have been incapable of experiencing ache or struggling in the similar approach as their white opposite numbers.
‘Alligator bait’ as a racial slur
Quickly, tales about hunters the use of Black youngsters as bait to trap alligators additionally started circulating. Some specifically unbelievable accounts claimed that African American moms rented out their young children to hunters in search of to draw the reptiles.
Those tales represented a gruesome inversion of the lived revel in of slavery. For enslaved girls, the compelled separation from their youngsters used to be a number of the establishment’s maximum devastating cruelties. Via suggesting that Black girls would willingly position their very own youngsters in mortal risk for benefit, such narratives equipped but some other approach of humiliating, degrading and dehumanizing African American citizens.
Such imagery remained common till the trendy Civil Rights Motion rendered it increasingly more unacceptable.
Perpetuating a racist custom
The architects of Alligator Alcatraz would possibly not have consciously sought to invoke the historical past of “alligator bait” stereotypes. But ancient symbols continuously outlive the contexts by which they have been created, and the American alligator bears the imprint of a protracted racial historical past.
Alligator Alcatraz drew upon an emblem formed via generations of racial exclusion and dehumanization. In remodeling migrant detention into political theater, the now-closed facility published a troubling overlook for symbolism and historical past. It additionally betrayed the cruelty and indignity that spectacle-based approaches to immigration enforcement inflict on human beings.
The tents is also long past, however the racist ancient echoes embedded within the identify “Alligator Alcatraz” stay.
