On a sweltering July afternoon in the Florida Everglades, Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Kristi Noem stood before a newly constructed immigration detention center newly built with cages and tents in a remote Everglades location where the heat and mosquitos kill as much as the alligators. They smiled for the cameras, laughed among themselves, and made light of the facility’s location. The place had already acquired a macabre nickname: “Alligator Alcatraz.” Trump quipped that if detainees tried to escape, they would have to “run zigzag” to avoid becoming meals for the surrounding predators. For these politicians, it was a moment of levity. For the rest of us, it should be a moment of national reckoning.
This was not an isolated image, nor a stray joke. It is the culmination of a pattern—systematic, deliberate, and escalating—through which the U.S. government has recast immigration policy as spectacle and punishment. What was once a policy domain shaped by humanitarian principles and legal process has now been reduced to political theater and cruelty for the sake of optics.
The dehumanization of immigrants has been steadily normalized, first through language, then through enforcement, and now through pageantry. The White House recently released a stylized deportation video titled “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight,” where the forced removal of human beings was treated like a soothing bedtime ritual. Another video featured deportees boarding a plane set to the 1990s song “Closing Time,” replete with jokey captions, converting trauma into a punchline. These videos are not meant to inform. They are meant to entertain, to devalue, and to degrade.
On the ground, the cruelty is not just symbolic—it is literal. In Huntington Park, California, masked ICE agents raided homes and businesses using unmarked vans, dragging away residents in front of their neighbors. The city’s mayor described it as a campaign of domestic terror. In Los Angeles, detainees have been held without food, water, medicine, or access to legal counsel. One man was allegedly forced to drink from a toilet sink. Several others, including naturalized U.S. citizens, were detained in error and subjected to invasive searches and shackling before finally being released—without apology.
Even those with no criminal history, who had lived in the United States for decades, have been caught in the dragnet. Dozens of Venezuelans were deported en masse under the Alien Enemies Act, some selected based on tattoos or unsubstantiated rumors. They were sent not to their home country but to El Salvador’s CECOT prison—a mega-facility known for brutal conditions. The legal justification for these deportations was tenuous at best, the human toll undeniable.
Stephen Miller, the architect of much of this policy architecture, defended the Alligator Alcatraz facility in a televised interview, praising it as a “clean and efficient deterrent.” He dismissed critics as saboteurs and insisted that any concern for detainee welfare amounted to softness on border enforcement. Meanwhile, children have gone missing in the surrounding swampland, and one was later found injured by an alligator.
And now people are dying. In recent weeks, several detainees have lost their lives while in ICE custody. Johnny Noviello, a 49-year-old Canadian permanent resident, died in a Miami detention center on June 23. Just three days later, 75-year-old Isidro Pérez, a Cuban who had lived in the United States for nearly sixty years, died at Krome Detention Center while awaiting medical care. Earlier in the month, a Mexican man, Jesús Molina-Veya, was found dead in an Atlanta facility in what ICE described as a suicide. Another man, Abelardo Avellaneda Delgado, died while being transported in Georgia—wheelchair-bound and reportedly denied timely medical attention. Maksym Chernyak, a Ukrainian man detained at the same Florida facility where others have perished, died after complaining of freezing conditions and untreated medical issues. As of the end of June, thirteen detainees have died in ICE custody this fiscal year, making it one of the deadliest years on record.
We must ask ourselves what we are becoming when we allow this schadenfreude to continue. When we turn the removal of immigrants into TikTok reels, when we build camps in swamps and laugh about the threat of the wildlife, when we let the sick and elderly die in our custody without even granting them the dignity of proper care, we are no longer enforcing laws—we are abandoning our humanity.
What’s unfolding is not enforcement. It is banquet of the beasts. It is punishment as theater. It is cruelty not as a means, but as the message. The photograph of Trump and DeSantis smiling before the barbed wire is not a moment of irony or accident. It is a confession of inhumanity.
We can still choose another path. We can demand oversight, dignity, and a return to principles rooted in human rights and constitutional guarantees. But to do so, we must first acknowledge what this is. Not a border crisis. Not a bureaucratic misstep. But a moral collapse in plain sight. And we must decide, urgently, if this is the country we wish to be.
Amaury Cruz is a writer, retired lawyer, and activist whose work focuses on politics, law, and the moral dimensions of public policy.
On a sweltering July afternoon in the Florida Everglades, Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Kristi Noem stood before a newly constructed immigration detention center newly built with cages and tents in a remote Everglades location where the heat and mosquitos kill as much as the alligators. They smiled for the cameras, laughed among themselves, and made light of the facility’s location. The place had already acquired a macabre nickname: “Alligator Alcatraz.” Trump quipped that if detainees tried to escape, they would have to “run zigzag” to avoid becoming meals for the surrounding predators. For these politicians, it was a moment of levity. For the rest of us, it should be a moment of national reckoning.
This was not an isolated image, nor a stray joke. It is the culmination of a pattern—systematic, deliberate, and escalating—through which the U.S. government has recast immigration policy as spectacle and punishment. What was once a policy domain shaped by humanitarian principles and legal process has now been reduced to political theater and cruelty for the sake of optics.
The dehumanization of immigrants has been steadily normalized, first through language, then through enforcement, and now through pageantry. The White House recently released a stylized deportation video titled “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight,” where the forced removal of human beings was treated like a soothing bedtime ritual. Another video featured deportees boarding a plane set to the 1990s song “Closing Time,” replete with jokey captions, converting trauma into a punchline. These videos are not meant to inform. They are meant to entertain, to devalue, and to degrade.
On the ground, the cruelty is not just symbolic—it is literal. In Huntington Park, California, masked ICE agents raided homes and businesses using unmarked vans, dragging away residents in front of their neighbors. The city’s mayor described it as a campaign of domestic terror. In Los Angeles, detainees have been held without food, water, medicine, or access to legal counsel. One man was allegedly forced to drink from a toilet sink. Several others, including naturalized U.S. citizens, were detained in error and subjected to invasive searches and shackling before finally being released—without apology.
Even those with no criminal history, who had lived in the United States for decades, have been caught in the dragnet. Dozens of Venezuelans were deported en masse under the Alien Enemies Act, some selected based on tattoos or unsubstantiated rumors. They were sent not to their home country but to El Salvador’s CECOT prison—a mega-facility known for brutal conditions. The legal justification for these deportations was tenuous at best, the human toll undeniable.
Stephen Miller, the architect of much of this policy architecture, defended the Alligator Alcatraz facility in a televised interview, praising it as a “clean and efficient deterrent.” He dismissed critics as saboteurs and insisted that any concern for detainee welfare amounted to softness on border enforcement. Meanwhile, children have gone missing in the surrounding swampland, and one was later found injured by an alligator.
And now people are dying. In recent weeks, several detainees have lost their lives while in ICE custody. Johnny Noviello, a 49-year-old Canadian permanent resident, died in a Miami detention center on June 23. Just three days later, 75-year-old Isidro Pérez, a Cuban who had lived in the United States for nearly sixty years, died at Krome Detention Center while awaiting medical care. Earlier in the month, a Mexican man, Jesús Molina-Veya, was found dead in an Atlanta facility in what ICE described as a suicide. Another man, Abelardo Avellaneda Delgado, died while being transported in Georgia—wheelchair-bound and reportedly denied timely medical attention. Maksym Chernyak, a Ukrainian man detained at the same Florida facility where others have perished, died after complaining of freezing conditions and untreated medical issues. As of the end of June, thirteen detainees have died in ICE custody this fiscal year, making it one of the deadliest years on record.
We must ask ourselves what we are becoming when we allow this schadenfreude to continue. When we turn the removal of immigrants into TikTok reels, when we build camps in swamps and laugh about the threat of the wildlife, when we let the sick and elderly die in our custody without even granting them the dignity of proper care, we are no longer enforcing laws—we are abandoning our humanity.
What’s unfolding is not enforcement. It is banquet of the beasts. It is punishment as theater. It is cruelty not as a means, but as the message. The photograph of Trump and DeSantis smiling before the barbed wire is not a moment of irony or accident. It is a confession of inhumanity.
We can still choose another path. We can demand oversight, dignity, and a return to principles rooted in human rights and constitutional guarantees. But to do so, we must first acknowledge what this is. Not a border crisis. Not a bureaucratic misstep. But a moral collapse in plain sight. And we must decide, urgently, if this is the country we wish to be.
Amaury Cruz is a writer, retired lawyer, and activist whose work focuses on politics, law, and the moral dimensions of public policy.