With Alligator Alcatraz, Empire’s Tyranny Has Come Home

And with them came the architects of war itself.

Behind the biometric gates of Alligator Alcatraz lie the fingerprints of America’s most powerful defense contractors. Raytheon, Palantir, and Lockheed Martin— firms once known for cruise missiles and drone strikes—now supply the surveillance, facial recognition software, and digital tracking tools used to police the immigrants.

These engines of containment operate with bipartisan blessing.

From Reagan to Clinton, Bush to Biden, the approach has remained largely the same: treat migration as a threat to contain, not a consequence to understand. Criminalization becomes the default. Enforcement becomes policy. And budgets balloon accordingly.

President Obama—despite his reformist rhetoric—deported more immigrants than any president in US history, earning the nickname “Deporter in Chief” from immigrant rights advocates. His administration expanded detention quotas, surveillance programs, and legal frameworks that future presidents would inherit and escalate. Though he later narrowed priorities to focus on serious offenders and recent arrivals, the shift came too late—and without dismantling the underlying machinery.

That fortified system was handed to Trump, who wasted no time weaponizing it—turning immigration into theater, threatening naturalized citizens, and staging mass raids for cable news consumption. But the logic of punishment over protection, of surveillance over sanctuary, didn’t start with Trump—and it didn’t end with him.

Now, under his second term, the infrastructure is metastasizing. In July, the administration offered $608 million to states willing to replicate Florida’s detention model—an incentive for governors to build their own Alligator Alcatrazes using fast-track emergency powers. Texas, Arizona, and Louisiana have all expressed interest. Florida’s prototype—built in just eight days with $245 million in federal contracts—is a deterrence model packaged for national rollout.

Today, over 56,000 people are held in ICE detention on any given night—a record high and a 40 percent increase over last year. Nearly 72 percent have no criminal history. With overcrowding mounting, reports of physical and emotional abuse proliferate: migrants forced to stand in the blazing sun for hours, held in disgusting and unsafe conditions, denied legal counsel, and separated from children without clear reunification plans. These are recurring features of a system optimized for disorientation. And still, the budgets swell. Hundreds of millions materialize for rapid construction and mass detention, while calls for livable wages, healthcare, or functioning schools are met with shrugs and spreadsheets.

The question is never how we afford care—only why we keep choosing cages.

Last month, Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a sweeping spending measure that slashes funding for Medicaid and SNAP while allocating nearly $170 billion to immigration enforcement—making ICE the largest federal law enforcement agency. A massive share of that funding will flow to private prison operators and defense contractors behind detention sites like Alligator Alcatraz. This is intentional. Caging the displaced is now a bipartisan budget priority.

This isn’t about security. It’s about investment—in fear, in punishment, in profit.

As historian Kelly Lytle Hernández reminds us, ICE’s ancestry traces back to slave patrols and colonial policing. What once pursued the enslaved now targets the displaced. The tools have evolved—drones instead of dogs, algorithms instead of chains—but the purpose remains the same: capture and control.

And increasingly, even dissent becomes a deportable offense. Legal observers have documented ICE raids at churches, schools, and hospitals. Families torn apart not by accident, but by strategy. The goal isn’t just removal. It’s fear.

I’ve spoken with migrant workers who say today’s fear mirrors the violence they once fled. The helicopters were American then, too—just flown by others. Now they hover over US cities with the same intent: detain, divide, disappear.

Yet, even under these conditions, resistance endures. Detainees stage hunger strikes. Legal advocates sue. Communities build rapid-response networks and mutual aid systems. But the machine grinds on.

Philosopher Aimé Césaire warned that colonial violence always boomerangs back home. Hannah Arendt cautioned that totalitarianism begins when imperial methods turn inward—when entire populations are cast as internal enemies.

We’ve reached that moment. A nation that once exported counterinsurgency now enacts it on domestic soil.

Alligator Alcatraz is not an outlier. It is a signal flare.

The surveillance state that once patrolled Fallujah now monitors Fresno. The defense contractors that once armed foreign insurgencies now manage migrant detention contracts. The legal architecture that once interned Japanese Americans now justifies raids on schools and mosques.

Immigration enforcement is not broken. It is working exactly as it was designed to—to discipline labor, suppress dissent, and reinforce a racial and economic order.

We must stop asking how to fix a system built to punish. We must ask why we keep paying for it—in Congress, in budgets, in silence, and in complicity.

Because when empire turns inward, it doesn’t just target migrants. It targets the nation’s soul.

“Empire abroad entails tyranny at home,” Arendt warned us. The tyranny has landed.