Marc Ribas holds a flag and wears independently produced merchandise advertising “Alligator Alcatraz,” the new state-managed immigrant detention facility in Ochopee, Florida, on July 12. Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Deputy Opinion Editor
Nora Berman
July 14, 2025
A prison looms over a murky swamp. The building is framed by an alligator with its jaws open, teeth bared in a threatening smile, and a writhing python. Below that image, blood drips down from the words “Florida GOP.”
Welcome to Alligator Alcatraz, and the commodification of brutality in the United States. President Donald Trump’s administration and its supporters are taking troll tactics and turning them into merchandise — and memes — to commodify their atrocious immigration policies, and make it more difficult for critics to effectively protest them.
“Surrounded by miles of swamp and bloodthirsty wildlife, this ain’t no vacation spot,” wrote the Florida Republican Party, which is responsible for the above design — which now festoons T-shirts, beer koozies and baseball caps — in an email advertising the merch for the new detention facility, which currently holds more than 700 detainees.
Scrolling through the Alligator Alcatraz-themed items in the Florida GOP’s online store reminded me of how it felt to watch live footage of the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the Capitol, and see the image of the now-infamous rioter wearing a “Camp Auschwitz” hoodie. It was impossible to understand at the time how someone could find that brutal concentration camp entertaining enough to advertise it on an article of clothing. I couldn’t see how Jewish death could be — as the sweatshirt implied it was — a joke.
I still don’t understand. But now, I can see how when you make merch out of suffering, it makes that suffering seem less real. Even funny. In the U.S., this wave of branding misery is making it easier for the government to get away with transparently inhumane policies.
“I never thought I’d see the day in America where people are profiteering off of effectively what could be a concentration camp,” Florida House Minority Leader Fentrice Driskell told Fox13 in Tampa.
The kind of “edgelord” behavior that’s led to that development has been a defining tool to assert power by the Trump administration. It was on view, for example, the day after pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in March, when the White House posted on X “Shalom Mahmoud,” appropriating a Hebrew word for “peace” to celebrate Khalil’s detention.
The idea behind the tactic is simple: Making fun of something damages the integrity of the butt of the joke. Earnest pleas for civility can be met with a cool, assured “I was just joking.”
“That’s a common defense you see from the far right,” Jon Lewis, an extremism researcher at The George Washington University, told my colleague Mira Fox, a Forward culture reporter, about the recent trend of right wing figures like Steve Bannon and Elon Musk giving a Nazi salute.
The truth is that concerns about the conditions at the new detention center in the Everglades, which some critics have taken to calling “Alligator Auschwitz,” are very, very serious. Officials allege that the makeshift facilities, which were constructed in 8 days and are already flooding, can withstand a Category 2 hurricane. But recent hurricanes in the region have regularly exceeded this strength, and it’s unclear if the facility has any ability to protect those inside from them.
Detainees are reporting “mosquitoes the size of elephants”; that their one meal a day is filled with maggots; that they have no water to shower with; that bright lights remain on 24 hours a day. A draft operational plan obtained by the Miami Herald includes references to minors and pregnant women eventually being held at the site. Historian Andrea Pitzer, who has written a book about concentration camps, wrote a recent op-ed titled “Don’t call it ‘Alligator Alcatraz’. Call it a concentration camp.”
But for their intended audience, the memes — and the merch — are meant to easily deflect all those concerns. They invite their supporters to ask: Can Alligator Alcatraz really be a concentration camp if it has an official beer koozie?
The now-defunct online store where Robert Keith Packer — who was officially pardoned by Trump, along with 1,600 other Jan. 6 defendants, earlier this year — purchased his “Camp Auschwitz” hoodie was deluged with negative reviews in the wake of Jan. 6.
But others defended it. “Notice all the crybaby snowflakes calling shirts racist and the company racist because they supply an item because people demand it,” one user commented a month after the insurrection. “…note to snowflakes just because you don’t like it and you let cnn tell you what to think doesn’t make it racist.”
We’re seeing natural evolutions from that logic today. On a visit to the Everglades facility, Trump joked that detainees “shouldn’t run in a straight line” to avoid the alligators. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who is also selling Alligator Alcatraz merchandise, said that the facility didn’t need to invest in a lot of perimeter security: “If people get out, there’s not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons.”
Laura Loomer, a Jewish far-right activist and close advisor to Trump, had the most disturbing response: “Alligator lives matter. The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we start now.” (The estimated population of Latinos living in the United States is 65 million.)
Even the name Alligator Alcatraz, a goofy moniker Uthmeier came up with, waters down the stark reality of the horrors taking place at the detention center. Videos are circulating online of tourists driving into the remote Everglades to take a picture standing below a newly installed sign for “Alligator Alcatraz” — as if it were just another theme park in the sunshine state.
Memes, silly names, jokes and cartoonish merch — all of this commodification does the same thing: It turns the Trump administration’s devastating crackdown on immigrants into a joke for his supporters to laugh at, rather than a set of real-world policies affecting very real people for whom they could conceivably have compassion. The merchandizing of the ICE detention center in Florida takes this noxious trend to the penultimate step: Capitalizing off of human suffering.
“The goal is to raise awareness to what the policy is.” Evan Power, the chairman of the Florida Republican Party, told Fox 13 about the line of merchandise. “But second of all, when you sell merch, you get names, you get emails, and then you make some money off of all of it.”
