Native Americans in Florida’s Everglades are being displaced again — this time not by colonizers with muskets and treaties, but by Florida’s governor and the razor-wired detention camp now known as “Alligator Alcatraz.”

Long before Europeans arrived — before trailers and guard towers popped up on the Dade-Collier airstrip — this land was home to the Calusa, Tequesta, and Glades people: thriving cultures that lived as stewards of the environment as far back as 4,500 years ago. Later, the Seminole and Miccosukee tribes resisted white colonization and made the swamp their sanctuary.

But in 2025, history repeated itself. A new immigrant detention facility was fast-tracked on that very land, built without tribal consultation or archaeological review in what many view as a modern act of erasure.

That’s why, on July 14, the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida filed a motion to join a lawsuit alongside environmental groups against multiple government entities, including the Department of Homeland Security, ICE, Miami-Dade County, and the Florida Division of Emergency Management.

The lawsuit argues that the facility’s construction threatens Miccosukee villages, sacred and ceremonial sites, and traditional hunting grounds. Tribal members, who reside within the Big Cypress National Preserve, have lived on and cared for this land “since time immemorial,” according to the filing.

The site in question, the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, (TNT), was originally developed in the 1970s as part of a now-defunct plan for a supersonic “Everglades Jetport.” That $1 billion dream was ultimately shut down by scientists, environmentalists, and tribal advocates who successfully fought to preserve the ecosystem.

But that historic victory has now been bulldozed — literally and figuratively — in a matter of days.

In June 2025, Governor Ron DeSantis invoked a 2023 executive emergency order to erect the detention camp at lightning speed. Using emergency funds originally reserved for natural disasters, the state awarded no-bid contracts to private firms with ties to the Republican Party, which quickly slapped together tents, bunk beds, chain-link fencing, and guard towers — right in the middle of sacred Indigenous ground.

All of it was done without:

  • An Environmental Impact Statement
  • A Section 106 review under the National Historic Preservation Act
  • Any tribal consultation or community input

Public records confirm that no input was requested from the Seminole or Miccosukee tribes, both federally recognized with long-standing cultural and legal claims to this land.

Today, the detention site sits inside Big Cypress National Preserve, part of one of the most fragile ecosystems in North America. The Everglades is a slow-moving river of grass teeming with wildlife — alligators, pythons, panthers, manatees, rare birds and hawks, and orchids.

Scientists have raised serious alarms:

  • Razor wire, floodlights, and construction disrupt key wildlife corridors
  • Fuel and human waste runoff could pollute the water table
  • The facility is in a high-risk hurricane and flood zone
  • Extreme heat threatens the safety of both detainees and guards

Yet despite all this, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier proudly coined the name “Alligator Alcatraz” in a promotional video for the site. The name stuck.

Former President Donald Trump, during a July 1 visit, praised the facility and joked that it might be “better than the real Alcatraz.” The irony is chilling: that infamous penitentiary in San Francisco was occupied by Native Americans in 1969 in a historic protest for tribal land rights and civil justice.

To add insult to injury, the Department of Homeland Security posted a mocking image of alligators wearing ICE hats, as if laughing at the outrage — and the sacredness of the land they’re now desecrating.

It’s more than a cruel joke. It’s a xenophobic branding campaign, designed to dehumanize migrants, glorify punishment, and mask the deeper injustice with political theater. The optics are intentional. So is the erasure.

And that’s where the tragedy deepens.

Many of the migrants detained at this site are themselves descendants of the K’iche’, Ixil, and Garifuna peoples of Central and South America — fleeing persecution, violence, poverty, and climate disaster. Now, in 2025, they are being detained indefinitely on land stolen from another Indigenous people — in a swamp, behind razor wire.

It’s a haunting symmetry. Displacement on top of displacement. Centuries apart, yet eerily alike.

Already, more than 43,000 people have signed a MoveOn petition demanding that DeSantis shut down the camp.

Among the most vocal voices is Betty Osceola, a Miccosukee environmental activist who lives just miles from the detention facility. She and others say the site was built near sacred burial sites and the Corn Dance ceremonial grounds, as also noted by Florida artist Clyde Butcher.

This isn’t just a Florida issue. It’s a national reckoning.

We are watching history repeat itself — again — as one group of Indigenous people is locked up on the ancestral land of another, while political leaders mock the consequences and corporations’ profit from the pain.

And perhaps most heartbreaking of all, many voters — even within marginalized communities — supported the very system that is now enacting this cruelty.

That’s how erasure works. It’s slow. It’s generational. And by the time it becomes visible, it’s already been cemented.

This post originally appeared on Word In Black on July 29, 2025.