Field Report from the Frontline of American Collapse

Alligator Auschwitz, Statelessness, Surveillance, and the Infrastructure of American Fascism

I’m a chronically ill, disabled, former academic—now a writer—working on healing my body from the long reach of generational and religious trauma. My work is deeply rooted in illness narratives and the spiritual lineage of my foremothers. I was trained to analyze the social world, to track patterns of power and erasure, but this kind of analysis is contraindicated to the kind of healing my nervous system requires. And still—some days demand it. Some days, you put the healing down and pick up the pen. Today is one of those days.

The following is an analysis of this week’s news through the lens of social theory and historical context. It is impossible to hit on all the points that deserve mention when discussing topics like these, so please bring what I may have overlooked or not covered with enough attention to the comments.

-JC

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“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”

—Hannah Arendt

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Photo by Marco Bianchetti on Unsplash

Alligator Auschwitz

I. Introduction: Naming the Moment

There are moments in history when language must be wrested back from the state. When euphemism becomes complicity, and silence is not neutrality but violence. This is one of those moments. In the swamps of southern Florida, the United States government has built a detention center capable of holding thousands of people in makeshift tent cities, surrounded by barbed wire and the ecological menace of gator-infested waters. They call it Alligator Alcatraz. But we must call it what it is: Alligator Auschwitz.

To many, the name will sound like an overreach, an attempt at provocation. But this is not rhetorical inflation; it’s moral precision. The camp does not exist to rehabilitate, nor to process immigration. It exists to detain, dehumanize, and disappear. It is not simply the creation of a prison; it is the materialization of a worldview that seeks to erase legal personhood altogether. It is the manifestation of fascism—not in its imagined future form, but as it exists here, today. In America 2025.

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II. The Infrastructure of Disappearance

Alligator Auschwitz was constructed with alarming speed and silence. No environmental review. No tribal consultation. No media access. It emerged like a specter from the American subconscious: a detention camp built not merely in a remote area, but in a geography associated with waste, abandonment, and the pretense of wilderness. The Everglades are the perfect symbolic landscape for this experiment in unpersonhood: a place where the state can vanish bodies and deny accountability.

Historically, the U.S. has excelled at creating the architecture of erasure. From Native reservations to Japanese internment camps, from segregated schools to the prison-industrial complex, American soil has long hosted facilities designed to sort, contain, and erase populations deemed inconvenient. What distinguishes Alligator Auschwitz is not its intent, but its technological and psychological sophistication. Here, biometric surveillance meets ecological isolation. Drones replace dogs. Kidnapping replaces due process. The disappeared are not merely detained—they are unacknowledged.

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III. Manufacturing Statelessness

Parallel to the construction of physical camps is the political project of manufacturing statelessness. The Trump administration’s open threats to eliminate birthright citizenship are not simply a legal overstep—they are a strategy of preemptive unpersoning. In this framework, citizenship becomes conditional, revocable, or retroactively invalidated.

Hannah Arendt argued that statelessness is not just the loss of legal identity, but the loss of the “right to have rights.” Once a person is excluded from the political community, the state bears no obligation to protect them. They become vulnerable to detention, deportation, and death without consequence. In recent months, there have been verified accounts of some U.S. citizens being detained without trial, flown to undisclosed locations, and reappearing only as bodies on foreign shores. Shackled, nameless, denied due process, they are proof that statelessness is no longer theoretical.

The machinery is already in motion: ICE raids executed in schools and hospitals, DMV document revocations targeting specific surnames, passport denials for those born near the southern border, biometric scanning used to preemptively flag individuals for detainment, the quiet annulment of birth certificates in the border counties, and the sealing of naturalization records under the guise of ‘data integrity.’ Homeland Security pilots AI-driven surveillance tools in immigrant-heavy neighborhoods. Banks freeze accounts pending “citizenship verification.” Hospitals receive new reporting protocols tied to immigration status. These are not missteps. They are not glitches. They are the deliberate, networked operations of a system evolving toward total exclusion.

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IV. Polite Civil War and the Bureaucracy of Violence

We are not facing the threat of a second civil war. We are living through it. It is not loud, theatrical, or declared. It is a polite civil war—a war waged through policy memos, administrative courts, federal registers, and polite press conferences. It’s Congress meeting in the middle of the night to pass a “Big, Ugly, Bill” that strips millions from healthcare and social safety nets. Its weapons of legal briefs, its uniforms are khakis, masks, and American flag pins. Its primary target is not just the migrant, but the very concept of guaranteed personhood.

Violence is here. It’s procedural.

A student disappears from campus. A father taken at a traffic stop. A family told their documents are no longer valid. These acts are not isolated; they are networked. This is how fascism functions in the 21st century: distributed, data-driven, and always deniable.

Public complicity is secured not by fear but through saturation and normalization. The population is not terrorized into silence; it’s numbed by bureaucracy. By the time the average citizen realizes the war is happening, they are already living in the aftermath of its crimes.

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V. Naming the Camps, Naming the Crimes

Language is the final battleground. The term “Alligator Alcatraz” is a narrative weapon—it cloaks the camp in familiarity and criminal implication. Alcatraz was a prison; it suggests the people held there have done something wrong. But this is not punishment. It is not rehabilitation. It is not law enforcement. It is containment of people who only crime is existence in the wrong category.

Calling it Alligator Auschwitz is not sensationalism. It is resistance to narrative laundering. We use the word because it reasserts moral clarity. Because euphemism is the first collaborator in every genocide. Because if we do not name it now, we risk its permanence.

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VI. Conclusion: The Responsibility of the Witness

There is no neutral language left. The state has built camps. It has disappeared people. It is openly dismantling citizenship as a fixed category. It is not preparing for fascism; it is administering it. And if we refuse to name it, we become archivists of our own erasure.

We must name the crime. We must document the vanished. We must understand that writing, speaking, and testifying are not acts of commentary, but acts of resistance. If we fail to act, we are not bearing witness to the rise of something unthinkable—we are chronicling our descent into its normalization.

This is not a warning. This is a record.

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Note to readers: This piece is part of a broader body of work that examine how illness, identity, and history intersect. I invite you to continue the conversation in the comments. Sharing your insights, complicate the analysis, or bring forward what was missing. We are each other’s witnesses. And right now, witnessing matters more than ever.