In the depths of the Florida Everglades, a place teeming with mosquitoes, swamps and predatory reptiles, the U.S. government has endorsed what many human rights activists now call Alligator Alcatraz — a sprawling 39-square-mile detention facility for immigrants surrounded not only by steel fences, but by living, breathing barriers: alligators and pythons. Hundreds of environmentalists, Native Americans and civil rights advocates already have taken to protesting this “facility,” denouncing it as ecologically reckless and ethically grotesque.
But beneath this controversial policy lies an even more chilling historical echo — one that ties America’s original sin of slavery to today’s dehumanizing immigration practices.
‘Alligator bait’
To understand what Alligator Alcatraz symbolizes, we must look backward, toward one of the darkest and often buried chapters of American history: the documented position of feeding enslaved Black infants to alligators for “bait” and sport.
Edmond W. Davis
Yes, this happened.
The term “alligator bait” was not born from folklore or metaphor. It emerged from the mouths of 19th- and 20th-century Southern hunters who sought the thick hides of alligators for shoes, belts and other commodities. According to multiple reports, including archived Snopes and New York Times coverage from June 3, 1908, and research compiled by authors like Patricia Turner (Ceramic Uncles & Celluloid Mammies), it was common practice for enslaved babies — or children born to Black men and white women in the Deep South — to be left at the edge of swamps as live bait. The practice was so widespread that it even inspired postcards and memorabilia, depicting caricatured Black infants and the phrase “alligator bait” without shame.
The reptilian legacy of racial terror in America is real, yet the Trump administration, full steam ahead!
In parts of south Louisiana, Creole and multiracial communities once flourished — societies rooted in cultural mixture, linguistic diversity and economic cooperation. That is, until the hardline white supremacist ideology of the post-Reconstruction South arrived and shattered these ecosystems of racial fluidity. Suddenly, Creole children, especially those born of white mothers and Black fathers, were no longer seen as members of an emerging multicultural world.
They were “othered,” hunted and used. They became trophies for a rising racial caste system that rejected nuance in favor of brutal clarity.
Colonizers used alligators, much like they used bloodhounds — trained not only to subdue, but to terrorize, maul and kill Black men accused (often falsely) of infractions. The swamp became a graveyard, a lawless zone where “accidents” were common and justice was optional. Black Americans also were the original “swamp people” during this time, as the path to freedom often entered waterways in Southern states.
President Donald Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and others, tour “Alligator Alcatraz,” a new migrant detention facility at Dade-Collier Training and Transition facility, Tuesday, July 1, in Ochopee, Fla. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
History repeats
Now, in 2025, it seems history is repeating — not just as farce, but as active policy.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, backed by federal support and DHS funding (to the tune of $450 million annually via FEMA), has championed the construction of this Everglades-based immigrant detention center under the pretense of national security and cost efficiency. Photos published by DHS have sparked outrage, showing alligators near detention perimeters with politically charged, racially insensitive symbolism.
Chairman Talbert Cypress of the Miccosukee Tribe said it best: “The Everglades is the lifeline of Florida. Any impact there will be felt everywhere.” Yet the impact goes beyond ecology.
“This is not just an environmental assault; it’s a racial insult.”
This is not just an environmental assault; it’s a racial insult — an attack on human dignity wrapped in bureaucratic language.
Consider the demographic breakdown: Predominantly nonviolent Black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean and brown immigrants from Latin America have been targeted for detainment in this swamp-bound purgatory. Young, employed and often legally processing their paperwork, these individuals are being treated as subhuman in the ways slaves were treated generations ago. Not a single arrest has been reported involving undocumented white immigrants from cities like Boston, Chicago or Philadelphia.
The pattern is unmistakable, yet too many American lawmakers on all sides have been too quiet as the browning of immigration has been successful.
A living metaphor
Alligator Alcatraz is not simply a detention center. It is a living metaphor, an eerie throwback to a time when Black and brown life was disposable and government-endorsed brutality was as natural as the surrounding wetlands.
In the 1983 film Scarface, the Cuban refugee Tony Montana faces hostility and criminalization — but not even he, or his fellow Marielitos, are condemned to mosquito-infested pits surrounded by alligators and pythons. Even in the worst of American xenophobia, there was the pretense of due process. Today, that pretense is dying, along with the humanity of those this nation is supposed to shelter.
And it wasn’t ripe either, baby. That’s what the gator always says. Anything. Children, women, men. Fingers taken as souvenirs. Limbs turned to trophies. Cooked and eaten — cannibalized not just in flesh, but in dignity. The pain was not just physical. It was ideological. It was American.
“This is about control, about punishing brownness, blackness and difference.”
The Black community stands firmly with our Latino brothers and sisters in denouncing this abomination. The construction of Alligator Alcatraz is not merely an ecological miscalculation or a policy mistake. It is a spiritual violation — a desecration of everything we claim to hold dear. As America loses it humanity, it gains the most powerful president ever. It turns a land of transitioning Americans-to-be into a kingdom of terror. It replaces Lady Liberty with Lady Reptile, her torch extinguished in swamp gas and history’s rotting carcasses.
It’s about control
And let’s be clear: This is not about crime, or borders or economics. This is about control, about punishing brownness, blackness and difference. It is about making sure Barack Obama’s presidency feels like an anomaly and not a new direction. Trumpism, and all it has summoned along with Trump’s U.S. Supreme Court justices, is a backlash against Black progress, Latino resilience and multiracial democracy.
Black and brown Americans need passports, as they don’t want to be stuck in this nation the way Jews were stuck in Germany during the late 1930s and early 1940s.
America must choose. Will we continue building walls in the swamp and calling it justice? Or will we finally reckon with the monsters in our national closet, as it will be illegal to talk or teach what happened? Don’t demonize gators, pythons or mosquitoes as they all keep the ecosystem healthy.
The question is: Do you see this as a healthy ecosystem? Adolph Hitler learned how to exterminate Jews from what Americans did to Native Americans. Americans inspired Nazi Germans to be more efficient terrorists.
Edmond W. Davis is a native of Philadelphia. He is an award-winning college and university history professor (retired), No. 1 new release author on Amazon, international speaker, licensed journalist and a globally recognized Tuskegee Airmen authority.
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