PROFES SOR MARVIN DUNN: “The term ‘gator bait’ never left the lexicon, par ticularly in the South." PHOTO COURTESY OF X.COM

At the recent opening of the “Alligator Alcatraz” migrant holding pen in the Florida Everglades, a supporter held up a sign stating, according to The Miami Herald, “Welcome to Paradise. Don’t feed the animals.”

HuffPost disclosed that the National Republican Congressional Committee launched a fundraising campaign selling T-shirts based on the center’s name. One side displays an enlarged head of an alligator wearing a baseball cap with the letters “ICE” and part of the barbed wire fence in the background. A caption below it reads: “That’s right! Alligator Alcatraz is officially open, and we are excited about it!!! So excited that we have decided to release a T-SHIRT!.” The other side of the T-shirt has the words “ALLIGATOR ALCATRAZ” above an image of an alligator decked out in sunglasses and a baseball cap, below which are the words “ICE WITH A BITE.”

The T-shirts were marketed, HuffPost reported, via an email that read, “Do you support keeping our nation safe from ILLEGAL CRIMINALS? Well, this is your chance to show support for ICE in their mission! Let us keep our cities SAFE from criminal illegal aliens.”

And President Donald Trump stated that “the most menacing migrants, some of the most vicious people on the planet,” would be held at “Alligator Alcatraz.” He “also played up the fact that the facility is surrounded by predators, an added layer of security” aimed “at stopping people from trying to escape,” HuffPost reported. “We’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator, right?”

However, the majority of migrants being held at the holding facility are not “criminal illegal aliens.” They include mostly people who came to the one country where they believed they have the chance of a better life. That desire led some of them to risk their lives journeying through the Darien Gap which the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) described as a “thick, dense, and notoriously dangerous jungle separating Colombia to Panama … one of the most dangerous migration routes in the world.”

The IFRC estimated in 2023 that more than 400,000 migrants, including nationals of 50 countries, mostly from Venezuela, Haiti and Ecuador, but also India and African nations such as Somalia and Sierra Leone, were estimated to have crossed the Darien Gap that year. “Sadly, it is not uncommon for people to die on the route due to the treacherous environmental conditions. There is also a high risk of violence, sexual abuse, human trafficking and extortion by criminal gangs,” the IFRC stated.

As to how the detention facility came into being, The Guardian’s Moira Donegan reported that it was first pitched in a video that Florida’s Attorney General James Uthmeier posted on social media. He “coined a name for his proposed camp that seemed especially designed to appeal to Trump’s fantasies of high drama, cinematic domination of his enemies,” Donegan wrote. “Trump had reportedly mused both about creating a moat filled with alligators along the Mexico border and about reviving Alcatraz,” a reference to the former federal prison in San Francisco, although the Florida facility was not expected to be a prison.

In the video, Donegan reported, “Uthmeier walks along a rural airstrip, presumably the one he had earmarked as the camp site, flanked by uniformed law enforcement officers. He can be heard in a voice-over saying that immigrants – whose illegal entry into the United States is a civil violation and who often have not been convicted of a crime – will not be able to escape the facility without encountering alligators and pythons in the Florida wilderness. In another shot, a helicopter sits on the asphalt as rock music plays.”

Using emergency powers, the state of Florida seized the land, site of a former airstrip, owned by Miami-Dade County, with no consultation, and spent an estimated $400 million in tax dollars to erect it in about a week.

“Branded like a low-budget movie, the Everglades site combines the extraordinary racism and contempt for human rights of the Trump anti-immigration effort with the sleazy camp of his movement’s masculinity,” Donegan wrote.

The Trump administration has denied having anything to do with the construction of the facility – which, judging from Uthmeier’s video, is true – but it is doubtful that it could have been even thought of if not for the dehumanization with which, critics are saying, the administration’s anti-immigration policy is being implemented. Also, the president and Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis visited the site together for the opening.

All this has taken place in a state which refused to accept federal funds to provide Medicaid for its low-income residents and one in 10 is without health care; where an increasing number of out-of-state billionaires are buying mansions while residents cannot afford increasingly expensive houses, homeowners insurance costs the most nationwide and homelessness is on the rise.

It is a state where public schools face an uncertain future because of a policy of making tax dollars available to all who wish to send their children to charter schools, regardless of family income; where public funds were used to pay for aircraft to pick up refugees from the Southern border and dump them into Democratic cities; where 27.4 percent of the population – some six million people – are Latinos, the group which the deportation policy hurts most.

Critics have raised other major concerns, as well, such as lack of transparency in the planning and building of the holding facility; the threat posed to the environment because of the fragility of the Florida Everglades ecosystem; the disrespect shown to the Miccosukee tribe of Indigenous Peoples whose members have lived nearby since perhaps the 18th century; political patronage involved in building and running the facility; and the conditions in which the inmates are being held in chain-link cages behind barbed wire, including lack of access to lawyers. And, Politico reported that Uthmeier is hoping to win Trump’s endorsement for an upcoming bid for election to the post to which DeSantis appointed him after it became vacant.

And then there is the matter of the name. It harkens back to the “worst parts pf our history; when similar jokes and tropes, such as ‘gator bait’ were used to dehumanize Black people and desensitize people to the harm and violence inflicted upon them,” The Herald reported, citing ACLU Florida’s Executive Director Bacardi Jackson.

“The ‘gator bait’ trope, which has been well-documented by the Jim Crow Museum in Big Rapids, Michigan, implied that Black people don’t deserve protection against the hazards of nature,” The Herald reported. “In the museum’s archives are articles detailing how Black babies, referred to by the slur pickaninnies, were used as bait to lure and kill Florida alligators. The National Museum of African American History and Culture’s archive features postcards depicting Black children sitting near swamps to lure alligators.”

Historian and retired college professor Marvin Dunn made the point that, as The Herald put it, “the same disregard for humanity is now being applied to detainees who will be housed in the detention center.” As Dunn put it, “Basically, the same kind of anger, the same kind of resentment is now being transferred to immigrants.” Dunn told The Herald that, in its words, “the term ‘gator bait’ never left the lexicon, particularly in the South. White nationalists use the term all the time and it is an ‘inside’ joke among certain groups.”

The ACLU’s Jackson, agreed, telling The Herald, “These kinds of tropes and jokes were made as a way to keep people from thinking of Black people as human. And, now, when we are in this situation where what is happening to immigrant people, who are largely Black and brown people, it’s the same exact thing. It’s the dehumanization. It’s the desensitizing [of] folks in the hopes of not having people rise up against such cruelty and treatment of others.”

Dehumanizing one group, Jackson cautioned, opens the door for it to happen to others. “Silence is consent.”

If the facility survives the various lawsuits which have been filed, at least consideration should be given to changing its name.