Complicit in Crisis
"A moral debacle that demands a moral response"
The governor of my state sanctioned the construction of a ramshackle prison camp on the site of the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport. It’s in the middle of the mosquito-infested Everglades. They’re calling it “Allegator Alcatraz,” and it is used to detain illegal immigrants.
According to The Guardian, the president said the facility is “reserved for immigrants who were ‘deranged psychopaths’ and ‘some of the most vicious people on the planet’ awaiting deportation.” Of the more than 700 people detained there, The Miami Herald reports, over 250 inmates have no criminal record or pending charges other than their immigration violations.
My Congressman, Maxwell Frost, toured the facility on Sunday. Here’s how he described it, as reported by The Guardian:
There were three exposed toilets for 32 people held in each cage, some often not flushing, and drinking water was provided from a spigot on the cistern, Frost said. “It’s a huge cleanliness concern,” he said. “It’s the same unit where people are shitting, and if you really need to drink water you have to wait until somebody’s finished using the bathroom.”
I don’t like that there is a facility like Alligator Alcatraz. I don’t like the glib tastelessness of the name. I especially don’t like that it is in my state, because I feel even more complicit in the inhumanity.
This morning, the Orange County Board of Community Commissioners is meeting, as Sister Ann Kendrick writes in an Orlando Sentinel op-ed, “to discuss their current contracts with ICE, including the IGS Agreement that has already been used to send immigrant detainees to Alligator Alcatraz in the Everglades.”
Kendrick, Sister of Notre Dame de Namur and Founder of the HOPE CommUnity Center, continues:
I have never been one to mince words and my more than five decades of ministry with immigrant communities stand as proof. If any elected officials once believed that the county’s involvement in immigration enforcement would not look like chaos, the violent arrests, the presence of masked and unidentified law enforcement agents, and the militarization of our communities reveal a very different reality. At this point, knowing what we now do about how ICE is operating, the county’s continued participation is a conscious choice.
I’ll be attending this meeting with some like-minded friends. We’ll be there to show our opposition to our county supporting ICE as it operates under the current administration. We’ll be there as witnesses to decisions that will determine whether my community is complicit in the growing tyranny in America.
As Sister Kendrick writes: “Our elected officials are not facing a political crisis but a moment in history testing their conscience and ethical values. We are facing a moral debacle that demands a moral response.”
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