By Rivera Sun
After spending months firing federal workers, slashing public services, gutting healthcare, and raising taxes for everyone but the rich, our country just wasted hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on a detention center in Florida.
Dubbed Alligator Alcatraz, it’s nothing more than a collection of tents on an old airstrip in a swamp. It has already flooded. It cost $450 million. For reference, that’s what it costs to build a skyscraper in New York City. While the State of Florida paid out for it, they plan to get refunded from FEMA and the Department of Homeland Security. In other words: you’re paying for it.
Maybe we should have built a skyscraper full of apartment buildings to house immigrants while their paperwork and legal proceedings unfold. (At least it wouldn’t flood.) Or we could have let them stay in their homes, working their jobs and taking care of their kids. (And paying taxes – because contrary to popular view, most undocumented immigrants pay taxes.)
But I digress. The point is: Alligator Alcatraz is a waste of money. And it’s the tip of the iceberg. The $170 billion in the new budget bill to expand ICE and immigration enforcement is the most wasteful government program ever designed. Around 63 percent of immigrants taken by ICE had no criminal record and 93 percent of them committed no violent crimes. They’re not causing problems to you or anyone else. But now it’s costing us around $245 per day to detain them in terrible conditions.
Why don’t we just let them stay at home? Wouldn’t it be easier to just knock on their doors when our backlogged courts are ready to handle their cases?
Or better yet, why don’t we just have a simpler and more streamlined naturalization process?
But what about the criminals, you say? We already have an entire criminal justice system and around 18,000 police agencies designed to stop crimes committed by people in the United States and deliver them to a court of justice. If found guilty, we also have the largest prison system in the world.
These mass deportations are largely targeting ordinary people – hairdressers, day laborers, farm workers, house cleaners, ice cream cart vendors, students. There’s no evidence that targeting these kinds of immigrants helps to prevent crime. The fastest, most efficient way to resolve the problem of 11 million undocumented people in the United States is to document them. That is: make a clear and simple path to becoming a citizen. Why wouldn’t we want more hardworking, culturally-rich friends and neighbors?
As for the common complaint that undocumented immigrants are being hired at lower wages than US citizens can afford to work at … there’s a solution to that: unionize together and demand living wages from meat packing factories, farms, construction sites, hotels, and landscaping companies. Otherwise, as Kristy Noem recently alluded to, they’ll just replace immigrants with able-bodied American citizens currently on Medicaid. (She forgets that 62 percent of Medicaid recipients already work at least halftime and that if you work fulltime at the average minimum wage of $11/hr – which is often higher than what undocumented immigrants make in field labor or other jobs – you are still likely to qualify for Medicaid in most states.) Wages won’t increase by removing one group of people from this equation. Deportations will only change the faces of who is underpaid.
Naturalization shouldn’t be so hard. Our response to undocumented immigrants shouldn’t be armed agents, militarized vehicles, and snatching them off the street. ICE’s entire job should be done by a bunch of pencil pushers graciously reminding immigrants to file their paperwork on time so they can get their citizenship within a reasonable timeframe.
If it’s that simple, why are we building tents in a swamp?
Mass deportation and detention centers are now a massive industry that benefits only the very few. Who do you think is benefiting from government gravy train that is Alligator Alcatraz? Who do you think will build their mansion from the $245 per day it takes to hold 59,000 people in horrible conditions? Who will buy a private jet from skimming off this situation?
Not me or you.
Our entire immigration policy and system is wasteful and cumbersome. And we’re paying for it. You. Me. Working class people. Because, remember: the entire system of ICE and detention centers is a government program that the rich aren’t paying for – they just got their taxes lowered. This is being paid for by hardworking Americans like us who are already struggling to get by. This handout to the wealthy comes from ballooning the national deficit (which Trump promised he wouldn’t do) and by slashing public services, the National Parks budget, museum funding, cancer research, consumer protections, science and technology advancement, job opportunities for our youth, and much more.
This boondoggle of mass deportations isn’t saving us. Not from crime. Not from wasteful spending. Not from losing our jobs.
It’s costing us. And not just tax dollars. We’re also losing important rights and values as ICE puts armed agents and militarized vehicles into our streets.
We’re losing our Fourth Amendment Rights to privacy. We now know that Palantir is using massive database integrations put in place by Elon Musk and DOGE to trawl through all our data in an effort to find undocumented immigrants. Why are we allowing this?
We’re losing our freedom from military rule. Constitutional law prevents the use of US troops on US soil. When Trump ordered 700 US Marines to deploy to Los Angeles, he violated the constitution and committed an impeachable offense. A president cannot send troops onto US soil without Congress invoking the Insurrection Act. Additionally, is also almost unheard of for a president to send in the National Guard against the will of the mayor and governor. We face a constitutional crisis.
We’re losing our peace of mind. Masked, unidentified, armed agents are crawling through our communities. Some are imposters. Others may have badges, but they’re acting like secret police. This is shockingly un-American. It flies in the face of everything we stand for.
We’re losing our constitutional rights to dissent. Students are having their visas revoked and being arrested for speaking, writing, and protesting. They obeyed all the immigration laws. Their paperwork was all in order. The only thing they did was speak out. The administration has also threatened to revoke the citizenship of even fully naturalized and American-born citizens who disagree with them. This is the behavior of tinpot dictatorships. It is unworthy of the United States of America.
We’re losing our souls. ICE has snatched parents out of cars, leaving children abandoned in them. They have dragged respected community members out of workplaces, schools, and churches. They have beaten and assaulted people. They have smashed in car windows to yank people out. They routinely attempt to circumvent the law. They refuse to show their faces or identify themselves. They frequently misrepresent administrative ‘warrants’ which have no legal authority with judicial warrants (which do). How can we stomach these abuses?
We’re losing our pride, dignity, and national identity. We are Americans. We stand for democracy, rule of law, freedom. We are a nation of immigrants. We stand up for the downtrodden. We rise up to defend liberty and justice for all. But now we’re falling into a police state in which we terrorize instead of naturalize immigrants. We cut funding to beloved services to give handouts to private contractors. We allow them to violate the constitution and our rights as citizens.
Is this immigration policy worth the cost? I don’t think so. Do you? We need to naturalize, not terrorize.
Rivera Sun, syndicated by PeaceVoice, has written numerous books, including The Dandelion Insurrection and the award-winning Ari Ara Series. She is the editor of Nonviolence News, Program Coordinator for Campaign Nonviolence, on the board of Backbone Campaign, and a nationwide trainer in strategy for nonviolent campaigns.
