Hundreds of people who were once detained at the troubled immigration jail in the Florida Everglades, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz,” have disappeared. Democracy Now! speaks with Shirsho Dasgupta, a Miami Herald reporter who found that, as of late August, about two-thirds of the 1,800 immigrants who were held there in July have gone missing from ICE’s online database, with their families and attorneys unable to locate them. Earlier this month, a federal appeals court ruled the jail could continue to operate despite reports of abuse.
“What we’re seeing at Alligator Alcatraz is basically a new model of immigration detention, where a state-run facility is operating as an extrajudicial black site, completely outside of the previous models of immigration detention in this country. And it’s making what was already a terrible system somehow even worse,” says Thomas Kennedy, policy analyst at the Florida Immigrant Coalition.
Well, I dunno about always, but things certainly have gone down hill after WWII. But, I feel the Native Americans would disagree with me.
We have sometimes been a force for good but we have never, and can never, atone for the genocide and slavery this nation is built on. That specter of cruelty haunts us and manifests in many ways. The loss of indigenous peoples. The failure of Reconstruction. Constant meddling in foreign governments. Every fight for equal rights and fair treatment is an echo of the foundation of an inherently unjust country.
not just “slavery.” There was also genocide.