Florida officials have announced they are building something called Alligator Alcatraz.

Florida’s attorney general James Uthmeier painted a dystopian picture of this development, a migrant detention facility to be built on an abandoned airstrip in the Florida Everglades where, if anyone escapes, they risk coming to a gruesome end.

“[If] people get out, there’s not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons. Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide,” said Uthmeier, probably hoping to slither his way to Donald Trump’s notice.

Trump did notice: earlier this week he jeered that people would have to “know how to run away from an alligator” to escape it.

The Dade-Collier Airstrip isn’t so very far from Palm Beach and Mar a Lago, home to Trump and the wealthy elites. Welcome to Florida’s version of the Hunger Games.

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Dear Keir, voters expect a Labour government to reduce poverty - not make it worse

The demise of empathy on one side of US politics is stark and shocking. Undocumented migrants who have lived and worked in the United States for decades – childcare providers, waiting staff, tradespeople, small business owners – supporting the voracious US economy and paying taxes, are going into hiding in fear of deportation raids; in fear of places like Alligator Alcatraz.

People who have committed no crime don’t go into hiding from the government in healthy democracies. Last month, Donald Trump enacted the next part of the authoritarian playbook........

© Herald Scotland