Alligator Alcatraz: They Promised to Drain the Swamp, But Instead Built a Prison in It

How JAG officers, tent courts, and deportation pipelines reveal the authoritarian ambition behind Trump’s immigration policy.

Jul 02, 2025

On July 1, 2025, in the suffocating heat of the Florida Everglades, President Donald Trump arrived at a freshly built migrant detention camp nestled among sawgrass and snakes. Officially named the Southern Border Response Facility, but widely dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” the site had been constructed in just over a week. 3,000 beds inside wire-fenced tents, surrounded by barbed wire, alligators, and armed security.

Trump stood at a podium flanked by political allies, including Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who told reporters that detainees would face “a one-way flight” out. The heat index soared above 100 degrees, and bugs swarmed the air. Behind them, steel cots sat lined in rows like livestock pens.

The visit had the energy of a campaign stop. State Republican officials and supporters posed for pictures and handed out merchandise branded with the camp’s name—shirts, caps, and mugs reading “Alligator Alcatraz” in stylized lettering. The products were sold through the Florida Republican Party, which had not only adopted the site as a policy tool but also as a political symbol.

In front of this stage-managed scene, Trump announced his approval of Florida’s unprecedented request: to allow National Guard Judge Advocate General (JAG) officers to serve as immigration judges on-site, fast-tracking deportation decisions inside the camp itself. His reasoning was simple: “We don’t have time for the usual process.”

But the implications were anything but simple. What Trump was proposing wasn’t just a shortcut. It was a direct circumvention of federal law, a potential constitutional violation, and a carefully staged performance of power.

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The JAG Plan Is a Legal Fiction and a Constitutional Threat

What Florida is proposing, and what Trump has now endorsed, is as legally flimsy as it is politically explosive: to allow state-controlled military lawyers, specifically National Guard JAG officers, to serve as immigration judges in a civilian, federal legal process. On its face, the plan appears efficient. In practice, it is a violation of constitutional norms and statutory authority so blatant, it reads like provocation.

Immigration judges are not generic legal actors. They are federal civil service employees, appointed by the U.S. Department of Justice through the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR). Their authority stems from federal law and is tightly bound to DOJ oversight. States have no power to appoint their own immigration judges, just as they have no power to set immigration policy or enforce deportation independently.

And JAG officers, though lawyers by training, are fundamentally military personnel, governed by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, not the civil immigration code. Their expertise is in military discipline, not asylum law, refugee rights, or the intricate web of legal protections surrounding removal proceedings. Worse still, by placing military officers in quasi-judicial roles within a domestic, civilian legal framework, Florida and Trump are dangerously eroding the principle of civil-military separation. This isn’t just a procedural violation. It’s a constitutional fault line.

Even the use of emergency powers cannot justify what is effectively a military tribunal system masquerading as immigration reform. The Posse Comitatus Act, a long-standing guardrail against authoritarian overreach, prohibits the use of military forces in domestic law enforcement. While Florida claims these Guard members remain under state control, thereby technically evading federal prohibitions, the result is the same: armed, uniformed military officers making binding legal decisions over civilians, without proper legal authority, training, or oversight.

Most chilling of all, this plan has no clear appeals process, no federal review, and no guarantee that those judged in tents by soldiers will ever see a real courtroom.

We’ve reported extensively on the Trump regime’s immigration policies and cruelties. See some of that reporting here:
Remigration Orders: Trump’s Mass Deportation Plan Is a Direct Threat to American Democracy
General Azmundus
·
Jun 17
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Note: This article is more than 45 days old and now lives in the archive. Consider becoming a paid subscriber to access the full 700+ article archive and exclusive perks.
Immigration Enforcement Expands as Legal Safeguards Fall Away
Team Coffman Chronicle
·
May 1
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Alligator Alcatraz Isn’t a Facility. It’s a Stage Set for Suffering

If the JAG plan is the legal sleight of hand, then Alligator Alcatraz is the stage, the literal and symbolic centerpiece of Trump’s immigration theater. Nestled in the Florida Everglades, the facility was erected on a former airstrip in just over a week, without public review, environmental vetting, or meaningful oversight. It holds between 3,000 and 5,000 detainees in tent-style enclosures, guarded by Florida National Guard troops, ringed with barbed wire and wild terrain, and miles from the nearest hospital or court.

Temperatures on the day of Trump’s visit soared past 100 degrees, and the swamp buzzed with mosquitoes, snakes, and alligators. No one could say for sure whether there was working air conditioning, clean drinking water, or sufficient medical infrastructure. There was certainly no visible legal aid tent, and there were no translators, a critical omission in a system where most detainees speak little to no English and face life-or-death decisions with no way to understand their rights.

In immigration court, language is everything. Without trained, certified interpreters, people cannot respond to accusations, cannot seek asylum, cannot navigate the process that determines whether they will be deported or detained indefinitely. It’s not just an inconvenience. It’s a denial of the most basic constitutional guarantee of due process. And in these tent courts, where even the judges are military officers with crash-course training, the absence of interpreters isn't an oversight. It’s a feature of the system, not a flaw.

And in the face of this, Trump cracked jokes.

“If someone escapes, they’ll have to zigzag past the gators. And if they make it out—well, maybe they deserve to stay,” he quipped during his televised tour.

The line got laughs, as it was meant to. But there was nothing funny about the images that emerged afterward: politicians and influencers posing and laughing beside the camp’s caged beds, treating a detention center like a campaign backdrop. There were no signs of dignity, just rows of steel bunks and a branded hat reading “Alligator Alcatraz.”

More than anything, the camp is not designed to process immigration cases. It is designed to make a statement: to migrants, to Trump’s base, and to anyone watching. That statement is clear: we will hurt you, quickly, without trial, without translation, and in public.

It’s not just unconstitutional. It’s deliberately cruel.

See our recent reporting on Alligator Alcatraz here:
A Man Just Died in Miami ICE Custody. 45 Miles Away, They’re Building a Tent City.
Marie Riverton
·
Jun 30
Read full story

A System Already Taking Lives

By July 1, 2025, at least 12 people had died in ICE custody, equaling the total number of deaths in all of 2024. Advocates warn that the actual number may be even higher. With the construction of ad hoc detention sites like Alligator Alcatraz and the lack of medical infrastructure, legal oversight, and environmental safety, the number of deaths is almost certain to climb.

These aren’t isolated incidents. They are the direct result of a system that detains people rapidly, without proper review, and then removes them from public and legal visibility. Many are:

Denied access to necessary medication
Held in extreme temperatures
Deported to unstable countries with no accountability trail
Or “disappeared” into foreign prisons under third-country agreements, where conditions are often far worse and reporting is virtually nonexistent.

ICE itself has faced repeated criticism for underreporting deaths, failing to notify families, and neglecting detainees with known health conditions. With expedited removals now paired with military judges and remote camps, transparency is not only eroding. It is vanishing.

When due process is denied and detention becomes a black box, people don’t just lose their rights. Some lose their lives, and the system is designed so we may never even know their names.

Trump Killed the Real Fix, Then Manufactured the Crisis

What makes this entire charade more damning is that the solution to the immigration backlog already existed. In early 2024, a bipartisan group of senators working with the Biden administration crafted a comprehensive immigration package aimed at addressing the very problems Trump now claims to be solving with swamps and soldiers.

The legislation would have dramatically increased the number of immigration judges, hired thousands of asylum officers, and funded translation services and legal support nationwide, all of the provisions that experts have argued are necessary to address years of backlog. It also included conservative wins, such as border security enhancements, faster processing tools, and discretionary authority during high-volume periods. It wasn’t perfect, but it was practical, constitutional, and ready to go.

And then Trump killed it.

Not because it was flawed, but because it worked. Not because he had a better plan, but because it wasn’t his plan.

He lobbied GOP leaders to block the bill. He called in allies, then took public credit for its failure, saying the crisis at the border was too valuable a political weapon to fix. If Biden had solved immigration, Trump would lose the visual chaos, the talking points, the rage bait.

So he ensured the system stayed broken. And now, instead of improving it, he’s building a new one—outside the law, inside a swamp, and entirely under his control.

This was never about addressing backlogs. It was never about restoring order. It was about creating a crisis big enough, brutal enough, and visible enough to justify authoritarian policy and campaign on it.

Five Months of Power And No Effort to Uphold the Law

Since his inauguration on January 20, 2025, Donald Trump has had complete executive control, a compliant Cabinet, and a federal bureaucracy more willing than ever to implement his agenda. He’s had time. He’s had power. What he hasn’t had is any interest in addressing the immigration system with integrity.

In the five months since taking office, Trump could have:

Requested federal funding for more immigration judges, court staff, and trained interpreters
Partnered with Congress to expand legal processing centers and asylum officer training
Strengthened legal standards within ICE to prevent wrongful detentions of citizens, visa holders, and green card holders
Created transparent review systems to ensure due process wasn’t lost in enforcement
Launched public initiatives to restore public trust in immigration institutions

He did none of it.

Instead, he prioritized executive orders, military deployment, unmarked ICE vans, and off-the-books third-country deportations to places like CECOT in El Salvador, a facility already condemned by human rights groups for its inhumane conditions.

Instead of addressing known choke points like the severe shortage of trained immigration judges and legal translators, Trump has bypassed the system entirely and called it reform.

That’s not triage. It’s sabotage.

What we’re witnessing isn’t a government struggling to manage a crisis. It’s a government manufacturing one, and then using it to justify a sweeping, extralegal crackdown.

And it brings us to the real question: if Trump has all this power, and five months to act, why has he only built tents, not courts?

Recognizing the Pattern: From Spectacle to Authoritarianism

What we’re seeing now isn’t chaos. It’s choreography. From the National Guard deployments in California to JAG officers in judge’s chairs to tent courts without interpreters, each piece of Trump’s immigration crackdown follows a deliberate pattern. It’s not about enforcement. It’s about authoritarian expansion, disguised as emergency response.

This isn’t a policy. It’s a test, a test of how far a president can go by invoking national security, a test of whether courts will intervene quickly enough or at all. It is a test of how much suffering the public will tolerate when the victims don’t look or speak like them. Most of all, it is a test of whether executive power can completely override the Constitution, and still be sold as patriotism.

We’ve seen this pattern before, in Japanese American internment, where over 120,000 people—two-thirds of them U.S. citizens—were locked in camps during World War II, without trial, based solely on race. We claimed we were fighting authoritarianism overseas while replicating it at home. Emergency powers justified the detentions. Courts initially upheld them. Only decades later did the nation begin to reckon with the shame.

Today, the parallels are undeniable.

Detention without trial.
Military personnel enforcing civilian law.
Deportations without legal review.
State propaganda masquerading as justice.
Racial and ethnic profiling rebranded as “national security.”

In World War II, we said we were fighting governments that detained people without trial, while we did the same to Japanese Americans. Today, we invoke that same enemy while replicating their methods.

We didn’t win the war against fascism. We pocketed its tools. And now we’re testing them on migrants, on protesters, on cities, on anyone who refuses to fall in line.

If this is how the U.S. government treats people on the margins—caged, silenced, deported without trial—then it’s only a matter of time before those tactics are turned inward.

What starts in the swamp does not stay there.

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We’re Not Just Watching a Policy. We’re Witnessing a Test

What’s unfolding in Florida is not just an immigration policy. It’s a stress test for the American legal system, a controlled experiment in authoritarian tactics, dressed up in executive orders and patriotic merch.

Every element of this system is deliberate: the camps in remote locations, the untrained military judges, the absence of interpreters, the smiling politicians in front of cages, the merch that turns pain into a punchline.

This isn’t enforcement. This is a message: that law will be bent, blurred, or abandoned in service of executive power. That cruelty isn’t a side effect. It’s the point.

We’ve seen these tactics before, and not just in foreign regimes. We saw them in our own history, when Japanese Americans were detained without trial, under emergency powers, while the government claimed to be fighting fascism abroad. We said, “Never again,” and now, with chilling symmetry, we are doing it again, this time not as overreach, but as policy. Everything we said we were fighting during World War II, including detention, racism, authoritarianism, propaganda, surveillance, and erosion of democratic norms, we are actively seeing in real time.

Trump has had five months to act. He’s made his choices. He could’ve strengthened the courts. He could’ve hired translators. He could’ve followed the law. Instead, he built a detention camp in a swamp and filled it with legal theater.

And if we let this continue, it won’t stop with migrants. The tactics being normalized here—military tribunals, extrajudicial detentions, executive-only governance—don’t stay confined to one group. They’re tools of power, and once accepted, they get used again and again.

We are not watching chaos. We are watching control.

Trump promised to drain the swamp. Instead, he built detention camps in it and filled them with a legal system designed not to deliver justice, but to dismantle it one stripped right at a time.

What You Can Do—And Why It Matters

This is not the time to wait. You can make a difference now—before irreversible power grabs become law.

1. Call Congress Today and Every Day

Dial the Congressional Switchboard at (202) 224‑3121 and say:

“Hello, I’m [Name] from [City, State]. I’m deeply alarmed by the plan to use military JAG officers as immigration judges and build Alligator Alcatraz. This undermines due process and threatens constitutional safeguards. Please oppose any bills or funding that enable this, and support expansions for federal immigration courts, interpreter services, and oversight. Thank you.”

2. Support Legal and Watchdog Groups

Your contributions fuel lawsuits, investigations, and oversight. Consider supporting:

Even small monthly donations help. Spread the word to boost funding and visibility.

3. Join the July 4 "Free America Weekend" Protests

Stand up in solidarity on Independence Day:

Organized by 50501 and Women’s March, these protests happen across the country during Free America Weekend
Learn more or find an event near you: 50501 Events and Women’s March Free America Weekend action.womensmarch.com

4. Amplify the Message

Share this article and key excerpts online
Use tags: #NoSwampJustice, #ProtectDueProcess, #FreeAmericaWeekend
Encourage your network to call Congress and join local protests

Why This Matters Now

Slow rollouts give Presidents room to erode rights before judges catch up. Today’s detentions and camps are more than policy; they’re precedent. If we allow them now, we loosen protections not just for migrants, but for all of us.

We must act now, because if this stands, tomorrow’s victims might be closer to home.