Alligator Auschwitz, Alligator Alcatraz — it's all over the headlines, but it's not really anything new. That is the sad truth of the matter. This is not new.
Does anyone remember reports of his directives ordering forced sterilizations happening to women in ICE detention centers, as they're called? Surgeons removing body parts and organs from women to prevent them from having children. This has been confirmed to have happened. When it happened, do you think it stopped? When it happened, do you think there was an investigation? No. Of course not.
The Alligator Alcatraz story is mostly spectacle manifesting itself. This is continuous. It has not stopped. This policy has been in place for over a decade. These internment sites are ramping up. It has been happening. It will continue to happen.
When we see drones used to survey and mark people as kill targets in Gaza, when we see aid distribution centers used as kill boxes, and when members of our police departments and immigrant enforcement agencies travel to Israel to train with those who are conducting mass killings in Gaza — using weapons created and sent by America — we must ask: how long until that violence comes home? How long until the fact that it has already arrived is noticed?
Because it has already arrived. How many people will die in the swamps of Florida in this concentration camp? People will die. They are building a concentration camp with funds relocated from emergency hurricane support funds. Your rural hospital is shutting down while they're laying concrete for internment sites. That's the tradeoff. That's imperialism.
We are already living in occupied territory. They are preparing for repression, accelerating even, preparing to detain tens of thousands, potentially hundreds of thousands, and send them to these camps and black sites outside the country.
We must ask ourselves in our communities: are we prepared for that level of repression? Because it will start with immigrants, then move up the chain — political dissenters, queer people, homeless people, the poor, the needy. Anyone who can be labeled a problem will be "solved" with their own final solution.
These are the hard questions we must ask. We are living in unprecedented times. We have been living in unprecedented times. We are only just now starting to see the shape of the noose.
This is why gatherings like the July 4th event HOUDINI Magazine helped organize is so important. All profits from the event will go to two organizations: a local Florida group fighting for immigrant rights, and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. The struggles in Palestine are the struggles in our own communities against ICE. When politicians talk about stripping healthcare from the poorest among us while gorging themselves at the trough like greedy pigs, feasting on the bones and bile of the colonized abroad, understand — that's by design. That's imperialism at work.
They've already priced out the value of killing in Gaza. The value of denying healthcare. The value of abducting immigrants. The value of closing hospitals. The value of social murder. It's all on the ledger. And the profits from this event will go to those who resist that — to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, real medics who've been mercilessly targeted by the imperialist regime.
HOUDINI Magazine reached across every available line to get the word out. Tampa DSA. Lakeland Mutual Aid. Miami PSL. We extended our hand to every socialist-adjacent organization in the region. Because common ground must be built. Space for cooperation must be carved out.
A United Front must be formed. We must work to strengthen our communities. We must work to rebuke imperialism. We must defeat the anti-life regime.