Florida state Rep. Angie Nixon (D) condemned President Trump’s visit to the opening of “Alligator Alcatraz” — a new migrant detention facility in the Florida Everglades.
“This isn’t about safety. This is actually about Donald Trump building modern-day concentration camps in an effort to disappear people from our communities,” Nixon said Tuesday during an appearance on CNN’s “Out Front.”
“Donald Trump‘s blueprint for America has now become barbed wire and broken families,” she told host Erin Burnett.
Her comments come days after mass demonstrations popped up across the country to protest the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration — which has included mass deportations, controversy over migrant flights, an uptick in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids to foreign student visa revocations.
“You don‘t make America great again by doing these types of things,” Nixon said. “All he’s simply doing is returning our country to the worst chapters of our history.”
The migrant facility, built near a remote airport, includes soft-sided holding units for hundreds of detainees through a partnership funded by the federal government and maintained by the Florida Division of Emergency Management (FDEM). Additional holding units are expected to be added through next month.
The Trump administration has argued the site will help hold migrants awaiting deportation.
“There is only one road leading in, and the only way out is a one-way flight. It is isolated and surrounded by dangerous wildlife and unforgiving terrain,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said earlier this week. “The facility will have up to 5,000 beds to house, process and deport criminal illegal aliens.”
“This is an efficient and low-cost way to help carry out the largest mass deportation campaign in American history,” she added.
Trump visited the “Alligator Alcatraz” site Tuesday alongside Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. He lauded the natural barriers blockading the building.
“It’s known as ‘Alligator Alcatraz,’ which is very appropriate, because I looked outside and it’s not a place I want to go hiking anytime soon,” he told reporters on Tuesday. “We’re surrounded by miles of treacherous swampland and the only way out is, really, deportation.”
The president, ahead of his trip, joked about how migrants could evade alligators: “Don’t run in a straight line.”
Democrats have pushed back against Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) described the site as an “internment camp” while House Democrats are lobbying for the site’s closure.
“They target migrants, rip families apart, and subject people to conditions that amount to physical and psychological torture in facilities that can only be described as hell on Earth,” Frost said in a statement last week. “Now, they want to erect tents in the blazing Everglades sun and call it immigration enforcement. They don’t care if people live or die; they only care about cruelty and spectacle.”
“I’ve toured these facilities myself — real ones, not the makeshift tents they plan to put up — and even those detention centers contain conditions that are nothing short of human rights abuses,” he continued at the time. “Places where people are forced to eat, sleep, shower, and defecate all in the same room. Places where medical attention is virtually non-existent.”