📰 By Cliff Potts
WPS News | August 28, 2025

EVERGLADES, FL — The hunger strike at the controversial immigration detention center known as “Alligator Alcatraz” has passed its tenth day, and the conditions inside the facility are, by every credible account, criminal.

What began as a protest against filth, overcrowding, and abuse has escalated into a political crisis. Yet the government’s response? Denial, obfuscation, and silence. The detainees, many of them held without criminal charges, say they’re being treated like animals. Some say worse.

Pedro Lorenzo Concepción, one of the hunger strikers, collapsed and was hospitalized—then continued refusing food in solidarity with the men still inside (WeAreMiTu, 2025). That’s how deep this goes. That’s how far human beings will go to be seen when locked inside a system run not by law, but by corporate quotas and fascist policy.

Detainees report sewage overflowing from toilets, bugs in food, inedible rations, medical neglect, and physical abuse by guards (AP, 2025; The Guardian, 2025). ICE denies it. DHS claims it’s all fake. The media parrots “both sides” like it’s still 1992.

But let’s be blunt: This is not new. This is not an outlier. This is not a scandal. This is the design.

The fascist rot didn’t start with Trump. It started when the American empire quietly turned on its own poor. In 1959, the executive branch quietly launched covert domestic surveillance operations targeting civil rights leaders and leftist labor organizers under the guise of “national security” (Churchill & Vander Wall, 2001). The groundwork for today’s ICE thuggery and DHS authoritarianism was laid during the Cold War — and paved over with bipartisan cowardice.

Now we are watching the results in real time: children in cages, hunger strikers force-fed, and executive agencies operating as paramilitary death squads with corporate contracts. The United States of America has become the banana republic its own history books warned about — only now the bananas are drones, and the junta wears flag pins.

This isn’t hyperbole. It’s happening in the richest country on Earth.

📢 ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

We, the people, have been gaslit into silence. DHS is not constitutional. It never was. It was born from fear, bred for war, and now exists solely to maintain a caste system of exploitation, violence, and obedience. ICE? They’re not border patrol. They’re the regime’s bouncers — bruisers with badges — answering only to the fascist whims of the executive.

America has no moral high ground. And we should stop pretending it does.

If you’re not disgusted, you’re not paying attention. If you are disgusted, now is the time to act. Raise hell. Share this story. Demand that Alligator Alcatraz be shut down. Demand that every ICE detention center be investigated by independent bodies not run by the feds or their private cronies.

This isn’t just about immigrants. This is about what kind of country you’re willing to live in. Because what they’re doing in the swamp today, they’ll be doing in your neighborhood tomorrow.

📚 SOURCES

Discover more from WPS News

Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.