Donald Trump’s tour of the bloodcurdlingly monikered – and hastily constructed – “Alligator Alcatraz” migrants detention center in Florida’s Everglades had the hallmarks of a calculatedly provocative celebration of the dystopian.
Accompanied by Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis and a phalanx of journalists, the US president saw only virtue in the vista of mesh fencing, barbed wire and forbidding steel bunk beds.
“Between Kristi and Ron, it’s really government working together,” he said. “They have done an amazing job. I’m proud of them.”
Not that Trump was blind to the intimidating nature of the facility his long crusade against undocumented people had willed into existence in this hot, steamy part of southern Florida, prized by environmentalists as a crucial nature preserve but now redesigned to be a location of dread to those lacking documentary proof of their right to be in the US.
“Biden wanted me in here,” he said, snidely referring to his predecessor in the White House, who he accuses – without evidence – of orchestrating criminal prosecutions against him. “It didn’t work out that way, but he wanted me in here, the son of a bitch.”
Tuesday’s visit seemed to represent a new landmark in the administration’s embrace of unabashedly authoritarian solutions to meet what has been Trump’s defining issue since even before his first term: migration.
Recent weeks have seen several escalations as the White House and law enforcement agencies have sought to project an ever more draconian approach.
Deaths have been recorded of several detainees who had been taken into custody by Immigration, Customs and Enforcement (Ice) officials.
Footage of masked officers without insignia arresting people in the streets has sent shock waves through immigrant communities nationwide.
National guards troops and marines have been deployed against demonstrators protesting against migrant roundups on the streets of Los Angeles, even as local authorities and California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, insisted they were not needed.
In what has seemed like performative acts of political intimidation, several Democrats have been arrested and handcuffed by Ice and FBI agents near detention facilities or immigration courts. Senator Alex Padilla of California was pinned to the ground and handcuffed after trying to ask a question of Noem at a press conference, even after identifying himself.
The administration’s shtick was clear when Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador and self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator”, was feted in the White House in April days after more than 200 Venezuelan alleged gang members were summarily deported from the US to the sprawling Cecot facility in El Salvador.
Shortly afterwards, Noem compounded the message by traveling to the center – said to have capacity for 40,000 prisoners – where she posed outside a cell into which large numbers of shaven-headed detainees were herded.
All of this has drawn howls of condemnation from critics as signaling red flags for the state of US democracy and constitutional guarantees.
Tuesday’s event indicated the strength of the administration’s contempt for such concerns. It was case of all-in on the Bukele approach, at least in imagery if not in scale.
Enough beds have been installed in two separate areas of the facility to house 5,000 prisoners.
Seized from its owners, Miami Dade county, by DeSantis using emergency powers as governor, the setting has drawn accusations of cruelty from immigrants rights organizations who point to the area’s extreme heat and humidity and surrounding marshlands, which contains alligators, Burmese pythons and swarms of mosquitoes.
Trump seemed to revel in the potential for detainees’ misery at what was termed a roundtable discussion but which devolved into fawning praise of his leadership from administration and state officials and obsequious questions from journalists representing friendly rightwing news outlets.
“It might be as good as the real Alcatraz site,” he said. “That’s a spooky one too, isn’t it? That’s a tough site.”
As if in confirmation that this was an event designed to showcase ruthlessness, Trump handed the floor to Stephen Miller, the powerful White House deputy chief of staff and widely acknowledged mastermind of the anti-immigrant offensive, calling him “our superstar”.
Miller responded with a pithy summation of the policy’s raison d’etre.
“What you’ve done over the last five months [is] to deliver on a 50-year hope and dream of the American people to secure the border,” he said. “There’s a 2,000-mile border with one of the poorest countries in the world, and you have open travel from 150 countries into Central America and South America.
“There are 2 billion people in the world that would economically benefit from illegally coming to the United States. Through the deployment of the military, through … novel legal and diplomatic tools, through the building of physical infrastructure, through the empowering of Ice and border patrol and the entire federal law enforcement apparatus, President Trump achieved absolute border security.”
And there would be more to come – courtesy of funds secured for deportations in Trump’s sweeping spending bill, which secured narrow Senate passage during Trump’s visit to the facility.
“Once this legislation is passed, he will be able to make that, with those resources, permanent,” Miller said.
PBS reported that the bill envisions roughly $150bn being spent on the administration’s deportation agenda over the next four years.
Taking the soft cop line, Noem on Tuesday told undocumented people that it didn’t have to be this way; they could still, to use the administration’s terminology, take the “self-deport” option by returning voluntarily to their home countries – where she said the governments were waiting with open arms.
“Anybody who sees these news clips should know you could still go home on your own, you can self-deport,” she said, adding that they could apply to return to the United States “the right way”.
A more telling attitude to accountability was displayed by Trump himself at the end of the media question-and-answer session when a Fox News reporter asked how long detainees could expect to spend at the Florida facility – days, weeks or months.
After clarifying the question, Trump seemed – or perhaps decided – to misunderstand it.
“This is my home state,” he said. “I love it … I’ll spend a lot of time here. I’ll be here as much as I can. Very nice question.”
