3/6/26
Witness at the Bored South Florida Convening - Witness account by Lee Goodman
For a week, we stood outside Alligator Alcatraz in Florida. A lot of people thought it had closed down, because a judge ordered it closed. But a higher court put the closure on hold, and the case is still pending. So it never closed. There are probably about 1,400 migrants imprisoned there right now. New ones are brought in daily, and others are taken out. The windows on the buses they are transported in are darkened, so we can't tell how many prisoners are on the buses. Some prisoners are flown directly into and out of the camp. It is built on an old airfield in the Everglades. We have seen the planes come and go.
Getting information about the camp requires patience. Yesterday, a guard who was leaving stopped to talk with us. Normally they don't, but this guy had just been fired, so he wasn't very motivated to keep the camp's secrets. Among other things, he told us about the camp's Special Housing Unit (SHU), which is where prisoners who are considered troublesome are confined in what is commonly called isolation or solitary confinement. We didn't get many details, because he only talked with us briefly. But he did tear the patch off the arm of his uniform and give it to us.
The guard's patch had images of the grim reaper riding on an alligator skeleton. Below the skeleton are two human skulls, similar to the Totenkopf or death's head that the Nazis who ran and guarded German WWII concentration camps had on their SS uniforms. The death's head imagery is still used by Neo-Nazis and white supremacists. The guard we spoke to said a number of the guards wore the patches on their uniforms while on duty.
It is understandable that one ill-informed guard might be insensitive enough to wear a Nazi-inspired patch. It is, however, incomprehensible that the administration would permit multiple guards to regularly display such frightening imagery inside the camp. There can be no doubt what effect seeing the patch would have on prisoners. The death's head conjures up memories of mass-murder, sadistic medical experimentation, sexual exploitation, and other atrocities that were committed on an industrial scale inside Nazi camps. It warns prisoners that Jeffrey Epstein died inside a prison where he should have been safe. It reminds them that Trump has already sent migrants to the notoriously violent CECOT camp in El Salvador. It tells the migrants that they might suffer the same kind of abuse here in the U.S. that some of them fled in their home countries.
In addition to terrorizing the prisoners, the death's head patch also affects the guards who wear it. It encourages them to think of themselves as being brethren in a group that has impunity to abuse the life-or-death power they have over those in their charge. It signals to them that the people who run the camp are not concerned about whether they mistreat those in their custody. It tells them that they are aligned with Proud Boys, insurrectionists, the KKK, and others who believe their race gives them license to act violently in furtherance of some imagined divinely-inspired vision. It suggests that they are free to brutalize people who are helpless to defend themselves.
The administration and its supporters and apologists have strongly objected to people calling the camps concentration camps. It would seem obvious that if the administration doesn't want people to think it is running Nazi-style concentration camps, it shouldn't let the guards dress up in uniforms that are patterned after Nazi SS uniforms. The only people who dress up like Nazis are people who want to act like Nazis. That's who Trump has running his camps.
If we hadn't been outside the camp at the moment the fired guard left, we wouldn't have discovered that the guards are imitating and identifying with Nazi concentration camp guards. We don't know what other horrors are being concealed within the camps. What we do know is that we need to shut down the camps at once, before this Nazi-inspired abomination goes any further.