In June, Florida’s attorney general James Uthmeier extolled the benefits of the concentration camp they were rushing to build in the wetlands of the Big Cypress Nature Reserve, west of Miami and just north of the Everglades. The swamp location wasn’t incidental to the 5,000-bed facility, but a plus. “It presents an efficient, low-cost opportunity to build a temporary detention facility because you don’t need to invest that much in the perimeter,” he crowed. “If people get out, there’s not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons.”
What happened next was, perhaps, predictable. The Department of Homeland Security formally named the camp “Alligator Alcatraz,” a sweaty piece of branding that the rest of the administration picked up with customary glee. DHS social media posted AI-generated images of smug-looking alligators wearing ICE baseball caps. Online stores run by the Florida GOP (and Uthmier himself) immediately began selling “Alligator Alcatraz”-branded t-shirts and beer koozies. During Trump’s first term, the New York Times reported, the president had often fantasized behind closed doors of a moat beneath his border wall, one that could be filled with snakes and alligators; when he toured the installation on July 1st, he leaned and swayed and grinned at the sight of chain link cages under tent awnings, and returned again and again to the reptiles in the surrounding swamps. “We’re going to teach them how to run away from an alligator,” he rambled in response to a reporter’s question. “OK, if they escape prison, how to run away, don’t run in a straight line, run like this. And you know what? Your chances go up at about one percent, okay? That’s a good thing.”
It is, as with so much in the second Trump administration, an act of performative cruelty and malice and money-grubbing dressed up—not especially convincingly—as expediency. But like so much marsh gas, the lurid fantasies which drive these people are continually bubbling up to the surface. American fascism writ large yearns for ethnic cleansing and the concentration camp; in the south, American white supremacy yearns for the Alligator.
Let’s begin with the fact that there are two types of alligators, and they have very little do with one another. There’s the real American alligator (A. mississippiensis), a large but—as crocodilians go—rather docile and shy predator of the southern wetlands, subsisting on everything from fish to deer. Forget that one, please. We are concerned here with the symbolic one: the Alligator, Scourge of the Swamp, the monster that dwells in the mire of the American imagination. This latter form “is most fond of human flesh as an item of diet,” according to a characteristically breathless 1923 report in the Oakland Tribune. “Hunters say that while an alligator will risk its safety for a young dog, it will jeopardize every hope of life for a live baby. And in the matter of color … black babies, in the estimation of the alligators, are far more refreshing, as it were, than white ones.”
The idea that alligators and other crocodilians lust for non-white flesh—to the point where such people can be used as lures to bring the reptiles under the hunter’s guns—had a global appeal, with the identities of the babies in question swapped to fit different circumstances. In 1894, Ohio’s Mansfield Daily Shield ran a lengthy and wretched piece on an anonymous British former army officer, who claimed that he’d shot 100 crocodiles by repeatedly employing the same “Hindoo infant” as bait; three years earlier, the Toronto Daily Mail had run a story about the stolen children of Russian Jews being used to lure in Nile crocodiles from Egypt. Writers inserted the folktale wholesale into unrelated incidents, such as a 1908 Washington Times piece that spiced up an account of Bronx Zoo keepers moving alligators with allegations that they—“knowing as [the keepers] did their epicurean fondness for the black man”—lured the reptiles along with the aid of “plump little Africans.”
Whether or not this ever happened is a subject of some debate. The Jim Crow Museum maintains that it did, if rarely; Snopes, kicking the tires on the more prominent stories, suggests it probably didn’t. Certainly it was something later southern writers were eager to laugh off. In 1968, baseball pitcher Bob Gibson recalled being heckled with “gator bait” stories during his time in Columbus, Georgia. Clearly stung—and thumbing his suspenders with every word—the sports editor of Columbus’ newspaper fired back, wondering how Gibson could be “naive enough to fall for such a fantastic tale,” one that had to be “tongue-in-cheek.”
Gibson, of course, wasn’t falling for anything. That this bit of racist invective was not a literal threat does not mean that it wasn’t a serious one: it’s hard to laugh off a joke when the punchline is your disposability. And as folklorist Patricia Turner writes in her 2002 book Ceramic Uncles and Celluloid Mammies, it was a joke that white southerners simply delighted in making. Among several too flatly racist to repeat, Turner records one where Lyndon Baines Johnson’s helicopter stops over in Louisiana to award a medal for integration to two white men pulling a black man on water skis through a swamp. After LBJ leaves, the two white men glance at each other, baffled. “Who in the shit was that?” “I don’t know, but he doesn’t know a goddamn thing about catching alligators.”
If anything, Turner writes, antebellum and Jim Crow society couldn’t get enough of the idea that their racial order had, as it were, teeth. There were popular minstrel songs, like 1899’s “Mammy’s Little Alligator Bait.” There was the merchandising, too, enough so that it was arguably a commercial phenomenon as much as anything else. A customer could buy souvenirs like “Coon cards,”—postcards full of (often naked, always caricatured) black children placed in peril from toothy jaws—and bits of bric-a-brac like the souvenir spoons or matchboxes or letter openers depicting slavering alligators closing in on a black baby. All of it is kitsch in its sentimental art style and camp in its fundamentally theatrical nastiness, a combination that feels particularly modern: a smile too stretched and strained to hide the bloodthirst lurking behind it.
The entire material culture of gator-bait underscores the nature of the society that produced it: one deeply obsessed with racial subjugation and violence, and hell-bent on weaponizing the surrounding landscape to do it. White culture always gave the alligator the upper hand, drafting it as a symbolic deputy, a scaly slave-taker. “The alligator,” Turner observed, “is an accomplice in a dual effort to eradicate—or at least intimidate—the black.”
There are deep veins of irony here, of course. The first is that—whatever white writers told themselves—black storytellers and writers never seem to have regarded the alligator with undue terror. They were dangerous, certainly, but not a particular threat. In fact, for maroon communities of escaped slaves, the deep alligator-infested swamp was often a place of refuge. It was the white settlers arriving in the southeastern woodlands who saw alligators as particularly fearsome, Turner argues, and sought frantically to both assuage that terror and displace it. Walking the post-Confederate South, conservationist John Muir recorded white southern men’s tendency to boast of their prowess against alligators. (Indeed, they still do, sometimes with very funny results.) That a society so built on inflicting terror would recruit the symbolism of the Alligator to their cause is not surprising. That they would come to believe it was, perhaps, inevitable.
The concentration camp that has been erected in Ochopee, Florida promises to be one of many. The first detainees arrived on Thursday, Jul. 3, the same day that the Republican-held legislature delivered Trump $171 billion for his anti-immigration agenda, including $45 billion to fund more such detention centers, a set of snapping mouths likely to chew through visitors, residents, and citizens alike. The man-catchers of the antebellum era are back in tactical gear, plucking people off the street; the naked infliction of terror on undesirables is public policy. Gone are the halcyon days of 2020, when organizers pushed the University of Florida into dropping the “gator bait” cheer, pointing to the racist imagery associated with the phrase. To hear Trump and his goons tell it, the Alligator is back. “They have a lot of bodyguards and a lot of cops that are in the form of alligators,” the president remarked during his visit, demonstrating his gift for stating the subtext. “You don’t have to pay them so much.” Hangers-on like Laura Loomer, meanwhile, were fantasizing bigger. “Alligator lives matter,” she gloated. “The good news is, alligators are guaranteed at least 65 million meals if we get started now.” (There are, interestingly, at least 65 million Hispanic people in the United States.)
I would not assume that any of these people know about the history of “gator bait,” or are trying to intentionally invoke it, not because it would disgust them, but because they do not read. But the streams of authoritarian and racist thought are, if nothing else, predictable. The Alligator is on the side of the slave catcher and the overseer against the black underclass; why not the ICE agent and the concentration camp guard against the immigrant, the dissident, the stripped-of-citizenship? The threat is the same: you will be eaten up and disappear.
Of course, American alligators—the actual living animals, rather than the snapping beasts of the White American imagination—are not on anyone’s side, particularly. They would much prefer cracking open a turtle or taking a bird than a person. They rarely attack humans at all, and not for want of opportunities. To the extent that they will have anything to do with their namesake camp, it will likely be dying on the road that leads to it, hit by an ICE van carrying a new group of prisoners.
But the real animal is subsumed by the fantasy, in the way that the real human lives under threat—every man, woman and child under the gun of a government carried away with its own gleeful cruelty—become nameless statistics or worse, fodder for photo-ops. They really all might as well be figures on a postcard or a matchbox, the prospect of their pain digested into merchandise. What we are left with is something characteristically Trumpian: memetic alligators eating memetic undesirables, leading to a fascist policy where real humans will be placed into a concentration camp in sight of real alligators. All of this is in the service of an ugly dream, spoken through gnashing and lipless teeth, grins as fixed as any you’ll find out in the swamp, and significantly more malicious.
Alligator Alcatraz will have a body count sooner rather than later, and it will be the body count of detention facilities and forced labor camps the world over. It will come from the brutal heat and rising water, from mosquitos and epidemics of disease, from neglect and cruelty and levels of medical and physical and sexual abuse that will be staggering to contemplate. The people inclined to buy such things will purchase t-shirts and hats; some enterprising soul may, in the fullness of time, start offering postcards. All the while, the alligators will be out there in the water, minding their own business, generally unconcerned with people. If only we were allowed to take our chances with them.