(Hill) – Florida Rep. Angela Nixon (D) condemned President Trump on Tuesday for opening “Crocodile Alcatraz.”
“This isn’t safety. This is actually about Donald Trump building modern concentration camps to remove people from our community,” Nixon said Tuesday when he appeared on CNN’s “before going out.”
“Donald Trump’s American blueprint is now a barbed wire and a broken family,” she told host Erin Barnett.
House Democrats demand that “Crocodile Alcatraz” be closed
Her comments come days after they gathered for large groups around the country to protest the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration, including massive deportation, immigration flights, immigration and customs enforcement (ICE) attacks and cancellation of foreign student visas.
“You’re not going to make America great again by doing these types of things,” Nixon said. “All he’s doing is bringing our country back to the worst chapters of our history.”
The immigration facility, built near a remote airport, includes softside holding units for hundreds of detainees, through federally funded and maintained partnerships by the Florida Department of Emergency Management (FDEM). Additional retention units are expected to be added until next month.
The Trump administration argued that the site would help retain immigrants awaiting deportation.
“There’s only one path to get there. The only way is one way. It’s isolated and surrounded by dangerous wildlife and merciless terrain,” said Karoline Leavitt, White House spokesman, earlier this week. “The facility will have up to 5,000 beds to house, dispose of and deport illegal aliens of criminals.”
“This is an efficient and low-cost way to help run the biggest deportation campaign in American history,” she added.
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Trump visited the Alligator Alcatraz site on Tuesday, along with Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) and Homeland Security Secretary Christie Noem. He praised the natural barriers blocking buildings,
“It is known as the ‘Alligator Alcatraz’. This is very appropriate. Because I look outside and not the place I want to go hiking right away,” he told reporters Tuesday. “We are surrounded by miles of dangerous swamps, and the only way we can do that is actually deportation.”
The president joked about how immigrants can avoid alligators ahead of his trip: “Don’t run straight.”
Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) described the site as a “concentration camp,” with House Democrats lobbying for the site’s closure.
“They are putting conditions equivalent 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 build a tent in the fiery Everglades sun and call it immigration enforcement. They don’t care if people are alive or dying. They only care about cruelty and the sight.”
“I toured these facilities myself. The actual facilities are not makeshift tents they plan to hold back, and even those detention centers contain conditions that are nothing more than human rights violations,” he continued at the time. “A place where people are forced to eat, sleep, shower, or defecate in the same room. A place where doctors are virtually not seen.”
