When Louise and I lived in Germany in 1986-87, we visited Dachau with our family. The crematoriums shocked our children, but even more so because this was simply a “detention facility” and not one of Hitler’s death camps. The ovens were for those who had been worked to death or killed by cholera.

The death camps, it turns out, were all located outside of Germany so Dear Leader could deny responsibility for them. You know, like Gitmo.

Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” (aka the “GOP Donor Fellatio Act”) contains a 13-fold increase in Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s budget, turning it into the largest single (secret, masked) police force in America, along with, in aggregate, close to $100 billion to build a new series of “detention facilities” all across America.

The most dangerous thing about Alligator Alcatraz isn’t the alligators. It’s the message.

If this passes, soon the country will pockmarked by concentration camps. As Trump said yesterday:

Let’s stop pretending. Let’s stop dancing around the language, around the morality, and around the history.

What’s being built in the Florida Everglades, for example—what they’re calling “Alligator Alcatraz”—is not just another immigration facility. It’s a political prison engineered not merely to detain, but to humiliate, dehumanize, and broadcast terror.

It’s America’s first open-air symbol that our democracy is not just dying: it is being dissected publicly, cruelly, and with calculation.

Donald Trump is back in the White House. The Republican Party controls Congress. And with a permanent “immigration emergency” in place, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is running point on an experiment in authoritarian governance.

Alligator Alcatraz is the proof-of-concept.

Rising in a remote wildlife preserve in Big Cypress National Preserve—Indigenous land, no less—Alligator Alcatraz is expected to hold thousands of undocumented migrants. Some reports say 1,000 at launch; others say 5,000. Either way, it is the largest civilian detention project built on U.S. soil in a generation.

It’s surrounded by dense marshland, home to pythons and alligators.

This isn’t just cruelty. It’s performance. It’s state-sponsored sadism, broadcast as patriotism. DeSantis and Trump are now competing in a bizarre effort to show who can be more cruel.

But it’s not unprecedented. If you want to understand what’s happening in Florida, you have to travel back to 1933, to a small, remote town in Bavaria.

When Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany, the first thing he built wasn’t a tank or a warship. It was a “detention facility.”

The Dachau concentration camp, opened in March 1933 just three months after he became Chancellor, was described at the time as “the first concentration camp for political prisoners.” As the Dachau memorial site explains,

They weren’t criminals. They weren’t traitors. They were “undesirable immigrants.” Trade unionists. Communists. Jews. Catholics. Writers. Teachers. Students. They were anyone the regime considered a threat or a convenient enemy.

The Nazis didn’t hide Dachau. They advertised it. It was a warning. A message. Step out of line, and this is where you go.

Sound familiar?

Alligator Alcatraz is not Dachau. It’s not exterminating people. Yet. But Dachau didn’t begin as a death camp either. It began as a “protective custody” facility, built on the idea that “certain people” posed a threat to the national body simply by existing.

That’s what Florida’s new facility represents. Not immigration enforcement. Not public safety. Protective custody for political purposes.

Under Trump’s new national emergency framework, virtually anyone deemed “unlawfully present” can be detained indefinitely without trial.

That means asylum-seekers. Victims of trafficking. Children.

And if you believe this won’t expand—if you believe this power will remain solely focused on brown-skinned migrants fleeing violence in Central America—then you haven’t read a history book lately.

Stripping people of their citizenship is called denaturalization, and it was one of Hitler’s favorite tools against his enemies and Jews, who were referred to as “undesirable foreign elements” and denaturalized en masse in 1935.

Trump’s DOJ just........

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