The Immigration Reality Show

Featuring masked men, merch, and memes

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When President Donald Trump toured Florida’s "Alligator Alcatraz" — a hastily constructed migrant detention camp surrounded by predators and marshland — last week, he wasn't just inspecting a government facility. He was starring in the most elaborate performance of government-sponsored cruelty in modern American history, complete with merchandise, social media campaigns, and carefully choreographed photo opportunities designed to maximize both fear and spectacle.

This is Trump's immigration crackdown: a $170 billion production in which the suffering is the message, military planes double as theater props, and Congress funds not just enforcement but entertainment. It's immigration policy as reality TV, with real human consequences that stretch far beyond what most Americans bargained for when they voted for border security.

The drama is the point

The measures read like a catalog of excess.

Military transport planes flew shackled migrants to CECOT, a notorious megaprison in El Salvador, where they were filmed for White House social media while being stripped and processed. Venezuelans ended up there, 1,600 miles from their home country, for having rose tattoos that immigration officials unconvincingly cited as evidence of a gang affiliation.

Much has been made of the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, but he’s not the only person the US has sent to CECOT. There’s also Andry Hernandez Romero, a gay make up artist who came to the US looking for asylum. His lawyer said he left Venezuela after being targeted for his sexual orientation and his political views.

Hernandez Romero just “disappeared… One day he was there, and the next day we're supposed to have court, and he wasn't brought to court,” his lawyer told 60 Minutes. His family said, just days ago, that they haven’t heard from him since he was sent to CECOT in March.

CECOT is notorious for its spartan conditions: cells built to hold 80 inmates, where men are held for 23.5 hours a day. "The only furniture is tiered metal bunks, with no sheets, pillows or mattresses,” plus “an open toilet, a cement basin and plastic bucket for washing, and a large jug for drinking water,” as CNN reported after a recent visit. But Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem thought it was a perfect spot to make social media content. She posed for selfies in front of the caged, shirtless inmates and talked tough in a video.

El Salvador isn’t the only country to which migrants are being sent despite having no connection to it. Eight migrants have been shipped to South Sudan — a place where they have never lived and have no ties, and a country the State Department warns Americans not to visit because of "crime, kidnapping, and armed conflict."

A federal judge in Massachusetts had temporarily blocked their removal while they argued that they had a “credible fear” of being tortured or killed in South Sudanese custody. But the Supreme Court ruled last week that their deportations could proceed, and they arrived in South Sudan last Friday.

Meanwhile, a detention facility once reserved for terrorism suspects — Guantanamo Bay — now houses migrants. While some immigrants were sent there several months ago, the Trump administration is ramping up the deportations to the prison in Cuba. According to new documents viewed by CBS, immigrants from Africa, Asia, Europe and the Caribbean have been relocated there in recent weeks. There are now just over 50 detainees at Gitmo, but thousands more could be headed there soon. Last month, Politico reported that the Trump administration is vetting at least 9,000 people to be transferred there.

And in the Florida Everglades, a tent city for 5,000 people sprung up in a matter of days, complete with 28,000 feet of barbed wire and the promise that escaped detainees will become alligator food. If you escape, Trump said, “don’t run in a straight line. Run like this.” The president demonstrated by making a side-to-side motion with his hand. “You know what, your chances go up by 1 percent.” He added that Alligator Alcatraz was “not a place I want to go hiking anytime soon.”

The comments were meant to be humorous, but White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt had already said earlier in the week that the dangerous location was part of the point: "When you have illegal murderers and rapists and heinous criminals in a detention facility surrounded by alligators, yes, I do think that's a deterrent for them to try to escape."

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This isn't just about deterring escapes, though — it's also about drama. President Trump has praised these theatrical displays of punishment as exactly what "people want to see." The Republican Party of Florida is selling “Alligator Alcatraz" beer koozies and t-shirts, monetizing human misery with the efficiency of a campaign rally.

The party sent an email message that captured the spirit perfectly: "The feds have green lit alligator Alcatraz Florida's Gator guarded Python patrol prison for illegal aliens who thought they could game the system, surrounded by miles of swamp and bloodthirsty wildlife. This ain't no vacation spot. It's a one way ticket to regret for criminals who wish they'd self deported."

There is even a DHS social media meme portraying alligators as the newest ICE agents.

The gap between rhetoric and reality

President Trump said his immigration crackdown would focus on violent criminals, and his spokespeople, like Leavitt, regularly insist that the worst criminals are the ones being deported. But according to NPR's review of ICE data, the number of people without criminal convictions in detention has nearly doubled since May — a greater increase than that of any other detainee category. The Cato Institute found that 65% of those detained by ICE had no convictions at all, while fewer than 7% of ICE detentions were of violent offenders like murderers, rapists, or child molesters.

The majority of Americans (80%) support deporting violent offenders, but as Trump himself acknowledged during his tour of Alligator Alcatraz, "if somebody's a real killer we don't send them anywhere, we put them in a maximum security" facility.

The people who end up detained and deported are more likely to be construction workers, landscapers, and families taken into custody after they show up at their legally mandated immigration hearings, something most Americans do not approve of. According to a recent Marist poll, 54% of Americans think ICE has gone too far in enforcing the rules — the masked men in black appearing to seize people walking to class or outside their place of employment, videos showing detainees being wrenched away from their tiny, screaming children.

Some Trump supporters are speaking out — people like Greg Johns, who lives across the street from Pastor Maurilio Ambrocio. Ambrocio is from Guatemala, and has been in the US for 30 years, working as a minister and running a landscaping company. He had no criminal record and had been checking in with immigration officials for 13 years without incident. But a few months ago, at a regular check-in, he was arrested and placed in detention. He was then deported back to Guatemala.

Johns said he suspects ICE is driven by demands to achieve Trump’s promise of mass deportations more than by consideration of each case. "You're going to take a community leader, a pastor, a hard working man,” he said. “What, did you need a number that day?"

Podcaster Joe Rogan, who enthusiastically endorsed Trump last year, has repeatedly criticized the administration's approach as "insane." He’s specifically called out "the targeting of migrant workers. Not cartel members, not gang members, not drug dealers. Just construction workers. Showing up in construction sites, raiding them. Gardeners. Like, really?"

Republican legislators that represent red districts in California have written to the Trump administration asking them to focus on deporting criminals, not conducting workplace raids. Jeffrey Ball, the head of the Orange County, CA, business council, highlighted that when people don’t feel safe working, it’s not good for business. “This immigrant population is an important part of our workforce,” he said. “We are still in a labor shortage in this region and… you have people leaving the region out of fear or not feeling comfortable going to work it further exacerbates some of the problems we have related to the efficiency and reliability of the workforce.” Orange County has more than 230,000 undocumented immigrants.

Meanwhile, Congress has continued to fund the immigration crackdown enthusiastically. The "One Big, Beautiful Bill Act," which Trump signed into law last Friday, allocates another $45 billion over the next four years for detaining undocumented immigrants, more than the federal government spent on immigration detention during the previous three presidential administrations combined.

The legislation makes ICE larger than the FBI, the DEA, and the US Bureau of Prisons together. As Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council noted, the spending package turns ICE into "the single largest federal law enforcement agency in the history of the nation."

“Something entirely different”

Americans want border security, but they don't want their tax dollars funding sadistic theater. They certainly didn't vote to turn immigration enforcement into a multimedia entertainment complex complete with merchandise and social media campaigns celebrating human suffering.

The United States has always prided itself on being different — a nation that, whatever its flaws, aspired to treat even those who broke its laws with basic human dignity. As longtime immigration reporter Robert Tait argued, "This is not a question about immigration or immigration policy or immigration enforcement. This, this seems to have moved and morphed into something entirely different, the glee, the joy in the fact that some arrested migrants might just die and get eaten by alligators."

When a sitting president poses in front of detention camps and jokes about migrants being eaten by alligators, when federal agencies produce promotional videos celebrating suffering, when Congress funds cruelty as entertainment, we've crossed a line that should concern Americans regardless of their views on immigration. What many people believed they were voting for was the removal of violent criminals. They didn’t think their own friends and neighbors — hardworking, often religious members of the community — would be targeted.

Santa Ana, CA city councilmember Thai Viet Phan, said that even people who like President Trump are finding it hard to support workplace raids and ICE agents seizing people outside of car washes. “People have a lot of sympathy,” Phan said. “People voted for Trump based on a variety of things, principally the economy. But I don’t think they anticipated it would be like this.”