In August, a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to close the Florida concentration camp commonly known as Alligator Alcatraz. And while Trump and his deputized Proud Boys continue to harass, kidnap, and deport all the brown people they can find, most Americans saw the closing of the facility as a small win for the good guys.
But according to the Miami Herald, at the end of August when the closure happened, two-thirds of the 1800 people wrongfully detained there could not be located. That’s right – when the smoke cleared, Trump and his legion of unqualified yes men had “misplaced” almost a thousand people.
As of the end of August, the whereabouts of two-thirds of more than 1,800 men detained at Alligator Alcatraz during the month of July could not be determined by the Miami Herald. The Herald had obtained the names from two detainee rosters. Around 800 detainees showed no record on ICE’s online database. More than 450 listed no location and only instructed the user to “Call ICE for details”—a vague notation that attorneys said could mean that a detainee is still being processed, in the middle of a transfer between two sites or about to be deported.
Now, while it would be nice if the missing detainees managed to create a Shawshank ending for themselves by escaping and engineering a way to hold their unjust captors accountable, reality is often much more disappointing than our favorite movies. And simply put, no one knows where most of these people are.
Some Alligator Alcatraz detainees who couldn’t be located in the ICE database might have been deported—even though the internal data obtained by the Herald show the vast majority of detainees didn’t have final orders of removal from a judge before entering the facility.
Given the staggering levels of incompetence that have become the norm in the enforcement of our immigration policies, it’s possible that this is all just bungled record keeping. But when we factor in the multiple times that Trump has defied court orders and used all his power to deny due process rights to those here legally, we can’t help but come to the conclusion that some of the missing detainees have simply been disappeared – sent out of the country against their will and in violation of their rights. But we don’t know who, and we don’t know how many.
And while the Trump administration would like us to think the people they’re abusing are all criminals and drug dealers, we see the ICE agents outside the court houses waiting to scoop up people who are here legally as they do what our laws require. We don’t see ICE agents taking on gangs of criminals in the streets, but we do see them raiding factories and farms, hassling working people, and separating families. In fact, the “bad hombres” Trump says he’s after are the only ones ICE doesn’t seem to be arresting, but the people supporting our communities end up behind bars because the rules we ask them to follow make them easier targets.
Due process exists to make sure everyone on American soil is treated decently, but it’s also much more. It is a protection we give ourselves – protection from our biases and fears, and from the cruelty that exists in each of us. But under Trump, cruelty is the goal, and our biases and fears now control how our government behaves, and while America’s immigrant population is the primary target of that cruelty at the moment, we all see it expanding day by day.
And it isn’t going to stop until we stop it.
Brett Pransky is a writer, a teacher, a father, and a husband, but rarely in that order. He spends his days amplifying the voices of freedom and democracy as an Editor right here at The Political Voices Network, and he spends his nights trying to fix the world one clever sentence at a time.