Republic of Fear

Alligator Alcatraz 

Not content to impugn the worth of 10 million undocumented workers, the Trump administration must calumniate the reputation of a genus of semi-aquatic reptiles as well. I’m no herpetologist, but having lived in rural Florida for six years, I can tell you that Alligator Alcatraz — the new stalag in the Big Cypress National Preserve, north of the Everglades – isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  Immigrants (undocumented and legal alike) take note:  Notwithstanding the barbed wire, guard towers, armed ICE agents and 200+ security cameras, escape from AA is no harder than from any other federal detention facility. Unless you are hand feeding alligators or walking a dog (a prey animal) — both improbable activities following an escape – your chance of being attacked by an alligator is less than being struck by lightning. So don’t be afraid of the gators. 

You may never even see one. Big Cypress is not only swampland. It’s also trees, grasses, roads, cabins, trails, boats, cars and bicycles – all valuable for hiding out and making a fast getaway. A good escape kit should include a broad brimmed hat, sunscreen and insect repellent. The Florida sun can be withering, especially in summer, and mosquitos, chiggers and ticks are a problem throughout the year.  Adhesive bandages and topical disinfectant would also be useful provisions – there are many plants with thorns or spikey leaves such as spiney amaranth (Amaranthus spinosus) and the ubiquitous sawgrass (Cladium jamaicense).  

A pocketbook with descriptions of the many available food-plants would come in handy. Common edibles include Florida betony (Stachys floridana), also known as “wild artichoke; bracken fern (Pteridium aquilinum), which is delicious when young; purslane (Portulaca oleracea), rich in omega-3 fatty acids; and Florida blueberry (Vaccinium darrowii), a sweet and nutritious desert. There are of course, many fish and animals to hunt, but being themselves stalked, immigrant and other escapees will likely feel a kinship with non-human animals, and follow a healthy, vegan diet during and after their flight to freedom. 

The new Florida concentration camp, likely the first of dozens that will be funded by Trump and congressional Republicans’ Budget Reconciliation Bill, is already notorious for overcrowding, unsanitary conditions, and human rights abuses. Its name was coined by a Florida official who heard Trump muse about returning Alcatraz to the federal prison system, and about digging an alligator filled moat on the border between Mexico and the U.S.  (Alligators could never survive the aridity and heat of the border.)  The president eagerly embraced the insulting appellation and made it the Florida camp’s official name. He hopes thereby to deter immigration and frighten other potential internees: pro-Palestinian Jews, Muslims, environmentalists, queers, feminists, socialists, liberals, anti-war activists and even feckless Democrats.

But alligators will have the last word. Alligator mississippiensis and Alligator sinensis (the two species of American alligator in Florida) first appeared in the fossil record some 37 million years ago; that’s about 35 million years before the genus Homo. And given their resourcefulness and adaptability, the species is likely to outlast humans by at least that long. (Heat, flooding, and sea level rise will be a boon to their numbers.) Also, because individual alligators in the wild can reach 60 years of age, almost any you see in Florida today are likely to outlive Trump who, at 79 years old, can only be expected to survive another 8+ years. 

Abu Ghraib

At Alligator Alcatraz in Florida, Ursula Detention Center in McAllen, Texas, and many smaller sites across the country, immigrants and others caught in ICE raids are held in cages or small prison cells, even though they have committed no crimes. (Undocumented status is a civil, not a criminal offense.) Press and politicians are mostly excluded from these locations, and even lawyers are kept at a distance. Most internment camps are purposely sited in remote locations where lawyers are few.  Even when they are available, prison officials make confidential communication between client and attorney difficult. Immigrants have no constitutionally affirmed right to an attorney so must either pay for one or find one that is pro bono. In these lawless circumstances, detainee abuse is a near certainty. 

There is already a vast catalogue of documented abuses, especially forced labor at privately owned and operated detention facilities, such as those belonging to CoreCivic and Geo Group. As these facilities expand in number, we can expect the amount of slave labor to increase. The plan may be to force this large and potentially mobile work force to do for free what they previously did for pay in the now labor-depleted cotton fields of the Texas High Plains, meat processing plants of Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas, and fruit and vegetable farms in the Central Valley of California. 

Detainee and prisoner abuse in the U.S. is hardly new. It dates to the Indigenous removal campaigns of the Federal period and the Union Army prison camps of the Civil War, such as Andersonville.  Innumerable U.S. prisons encourage or enable violence against inmates. But the most notorious recent instance is associated with the decade long “War on Terror,” following 9/11. In 2003, Iraqi men and a few women held at Abu Ghraib prison, 20 miles west of Baghdad, were subjected to torture and other forms of abuse by U.S. military police under the command of Brigadier General Janice Karpinski. Many private contractors tasked with interrogation and translation, also worked at the prison; they too abused and tortured prisoners. The violence consisted of beatings (sometimes resulting in death), mandated nakedness, extreme heat, forced public urination and defecation, sleep deprivation, bright lights, loud music, and coercing prisoners to enact sexual charades or assume stress positions. 

The abuse was exposed the year it occurred by Amnesty International and the Associated Press but became more widely known the following year after reports by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker and by reporters on the popular, TV news magazine, 60 Minutes. After internal investigations, congressional hearings and a series of criminal trials, a dozen soldiers were convicted of various offenses, mostly dereliction of duty. Half of them served light prison sentences. None of their military or civilian supervisors were criminally charged. A few received minor chastisement of one form or another, including demotion. Some – including Michael Chertoff and Gina Haspel (she was implicated in the torture of prisoners elsewhere) were promoted.  President George Bush – ultimately responsible for all of it — was re-elected in 2004. 

The abuse and torture at Abu Ghraib, and its photographic documentation, as I have written elsewhere, was designed for several purposes: 1) sadistic gratification of torturers and their enablers; 2) obtaining actionable intelligence (rarely if ever successful); 3) instilling camaraderie among participating U.S. troops – shared criminality cements emotional bonds; 4) the inscription of racial inferiority and instilling of fear upon the bodies and minds of torture victims; 5) expressing a vision of U.S. military omnipotence. The soldiers who took the pictures shared them widely, without shame.  Later, a small number expressed remorse or experienced depression.  At least one took his own life.

For perpetrators, the photographic evidence of humiliation justifies domination and violence.  “Look at them,” the abuser says, “they were asking for it!”  The same cruel logic underlies the activities of ICE agents and their overseers today.  Masked, government kidnappers sometimes record and broadcast their raids, advertising their impunity and their detainees’ fear and abjection. High ranking government officials pose proudly in front of concentration camps and prisons in the U.S. and abroad. Homeland Security Director Kristie Noem stood — tight sweatered, MAGA capped and gold Rolex adorned — in front of CECOT in El Salvador. “[This prison] is one of the tools in our toolbox” she intoned. “If you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face”. For Trump, Noem, Stephen Miller and many others supporting the immigration crackdown, detainee abuse isn’t an unfortunate byproduct of zealous enforcement of the law; it’s the point. Their political motto might be: “It’s the fear, stupid.”

Self-deportation

For personal and political reasons, my wife Harriet and I – both U.S. citizens — chose self-deportation; I almost added “before it was foisted upon us.”  When we left our home in Micanopy, Florida, more than a year ago, that addendum would have sounded melodramatic if not ridiculous: A retired American art history professor writing for a niche, lefty magazine, and his British-American, environmentalist wife are unlikely to attract the scrutiny of Homeland Security or the State Department. And even if we did, there are laws to protect us – clear ones, cast in stone — that would prevent our arrest, de-naturalization or deportation. Now, I’m less sure. With ICE’s budget set to expand 10-fold, and open discussion among White House and Justice Department officials about increasing de-naturalization proceedings, the government seems set on a fascist trajectory. They are bent, at the very least, upon returning the U.S. to a time when political dissidents were sometimes stripped of citizenship and deported. Harriet is no Emma Goldman, and I’m no Alexander Berkman, but impunity precisely means a regime can act without reason or law. 

Dark fantasies of my own vulnerability are an indulgence when assaults upon immigrants, or people whom ICE agents think are undocumented immigrants, are proceeding at speed. In my beloved Pasadena, CA., where I lived for about 15 years, and where my former home last January burned to the ground in the Eaton Canyon Fire, people are being snatched from bus stops, car washes, and shopping centers. A few weeks ago, on the corner of Orange Grove Boulevard and Los Robles Avenue, at a bus stop in front of a Winchell’s donut shop, agents seized six people, at least three of whom were elderly. When a passersby tried to record the event with his cellphone, reported U.S. Rep. Judy Chu: “The ICE agent jumped out of the car and pointed a gun as though he was going to shoot the young man, just for shooting a video of that license plate”.  Pointing to the video recording, Chu told reporters: “As you can see, these ICE agents are pointing guns at innocent individuals, no warrants, no explanations, just fear and intimidation.”  (It’s legal to record ICE agents so long as you don’t physically interfere with them.) Two of the people detained at that bus stop were U.S. citizens. 

Republic of fear

Fear arises from the prospect of loss: of life, love, safety, money, liberty, and time. The deprivation of one is damaging, but all six, devastating. That’s the reasonable fear of millions in the U.S. who lack documents that protect them from arrest and deportation. In fact, no one is safe.  If immigrants, including some with Permanent Resident (Green Card) status, can be snatched by masked men, and then detained and deported without so much as a hearing, so can anybody. 

The current surge in arrests of undocumented immigrants, legal residents, and even a few citizens, is self-evidently intended to instill fear. Raids by mounted officers, SWAT teams, and masked men operating out of unmarked vans, have occurred at bus stops, city parks, convenience stores, nurseries, big box retailers, landscaping companies, construction sites, and plant nurseries. Undocumented workers sometimes congregate at these places, but so do working-class people of all backgrounds, and some wealthy people too. Nevertheless, it’s unsurprising that raids have not been conducted, as far as I know, in places like Bel-Air, Beverly Hills, and Rancho Mirage, California, or Palm Beach, Fisher Island and The Villages in Florida. In those places, undocumented workers mow the lawns, cook, clean, and mind the children of the wealthy or the Republican. 

The recent, temporary restraining order blocking ICE agents from using race, ethnicity, language, location, accent or appearance as the basis for arrest and detention, indicates the punitive nature of the federal sweeps. (The case was brought on behalf of five of the people detained at that bus stop in Pasadena.) The plaintiffs in the suit alleged and the court affirmed, that “individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force, and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from.” One such worker died last week while fleeing ICE agents at a farm in Ventura County, California that grew vegetables and legal cannabis. He had lived peacefully and worked in the U.S. for decades, mostly picking tomatoes. 

ICE agents generally wear shabby, civilian clothes, baseball caps, and scarves or balaclavas to cover their faces.  The reason for the latter is claimed to be fear of doxing, or reprisals. But they are in no greater danger than local police, FBI agents, ATF or any other enforcement officers. Besides, they are supposed to be tough. The real reason for their anonymity is to foster fear and intimidation; if you can’t see the faces of your captors or tormentors, you may assume they are unassailable.  The same cloak of anonymity was used by interrogators at the various secret or “black” sites around the world where U.S. agents conducted interrogations or torture during the decade long “Global War on Terrorism” that commenced after the attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11. 

It’s not clear how the raids, abuse, and cruelty can be stopped. ICE will soon become the largest police force in the country by far. Homeland Security plans to hire at least 10,000 new ICE agents. There will be plenty of applicants:  Starting salaries range between about $50,000 and $90,000, with more in overtime and annual bonuses. And after years in the field, agents can earn considerably more. Expect applications from far-right militia members, ex-Marines, and Jan. 6 conspirators. ICE will soon have the capacity to detain and house more than 125,000 people, about the number in the entire Federal Bureau of Prisons.  Unlike other cabinet agencies, Homeland Security expenditures are not likely to be clawed back, at least not anytime soon.  Federal District courts may temporarily slow the pace of immigrant arrests and detentions, but the Supreme Court will eventually clear the way for more. The only thing that can stop the advance of the carceral state, is mass, public resistance. Some strategically located alligators might help too.

 

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