David Mourer and his niece Rena Mourer visit the entrance to “Alligator Alcatraz” at the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport on July 12, 2025, in Ochopee, Florida. Mother Jones illustration; Joe Raedle/Getty
Even before the immigration detention camp deep within the Everglades officially opened, the name of the facility, Alligator Alcatraz, had become a punchline for jokes within MAGA circles.
“People get out, there’s not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons,” Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who was the first to announce plans for the project, quipped in a video posted on social media in late June. A few days later, the US Department of Homeland Security shared on X an AI-generated meme of alligators wearing baseball caps emblazoned with the acronym ICE standing guard outside a detention facility. “Coming soon!” the post read. By the way, Alligator Alcatraz is not some clever nickname that appeared on social media. Florida officials have made it the official name of the site.
The humor didn’t let up during President Donald Trump’s tour of the camp in July. “They have a lot of bodyguards and a lot of cops that are in the form of alligators,” the president said outside one of the white tents where immigrants are detained, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis standing by his side. “You don’t have to pay them so much. But I wouldn’t want to run through the Everglades for long.”
The juxtaposition between reports of life inside Alligator Alcatraz and the comical branding of the facility by Republicans could not be more jarring. Since opening in early July, Alligator Alcatraz has been accused of dire conditions for the roughly 900 migrants detained there. As I reported last month, reports of the inhumane circumstances have emerged, such as mosquito infestations, malfunctioning air conditioning, and no access to attorneys. Detainees live under tents within chain-linked fenced areas that hold up to 32 beds and three toilets. The facility is at the center of lawsuits filed by environmentalists and human rights groups.
“This just looks like political theater,” Marsha Espinosa, a Biden-era assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security’s public affairs office, told ABC News last month. “If the goal is to enforce immigration effectively, building a camp in the middle of a swamp just doesn’t do it. The optics seem to be the point here. The Everglades location, the alligators, this is about visuals. It’s a campaign ad to make headlines.”
“The optics seem to be the point here. The Everglades location, the alligators, this is about visuals. It’s a campaign ad to make headlines.”
Even as Alligator Alcatraz has become a symbol of the Trump administration’s relentless deportation machine, Uthmeier, the Florida attorney general, is selling branded merchandise on his campaign website promoting the facility. Among the swag for sale are shirts with the phrase, “Nowhere to Run. Nowhere to Hide,” a gator ominously peering above the words. They include stickers, baseball caps, and beer koozies. The Republican Party of Florida is also selling similar merchandise, including a shirt for $30 with an image of a correctional facility being guarded by a giant alligator and python.
But the thrill of creating merch from a facility fraught with accusations of human rights abuses is not restricted to Florida. Others are also capitalizing on the camp’s notoriety. A search for “Alligator Alcatraz” on Amazon brings up shirts, hats, car decals, mugs, and flags. One $35 shirt reads, “Make Alligators Great Again.”
In fact, the narrative that alligators would be interested in human prey is inaccurate, according to Axios Tampa Bay. The creatures don’t consider humans a food source. And references of “the alligator lusting for human flesh is rooted in racism, dating back to Jim Crow, when tourists could buy postcards illustrating Black children as ‘gator bait,’” Axios reported.
Marcus Collins, a marketing professor from the University of Michigan who studies culture and its impact on human behavior, has observed a connection between the days of Jim Crow and today. “This is a bit of a stretch, but it doesn’t feel too distant from when people used to take pictures of lynchings and sell them as postcards,” he says. “This consumption is signaling that these people aren’t people, at least not in the frame of how we evaluate humanity.”
We’ve seen what Collins describes in more recent history. A Business Insider story published in 2019 showcased items the US Navy was selling near the prison, where stories of human rights abuses of detainees emerged in the past. Items for sale included shirts with the phrase “JTO GTMO (meaning Joint Task Force Guantanamo) Detainee Operations” and baseball caps that read “Straight Outta GTMO,” a reference to the 1988 NWA album “Straight Outta Compton.”
I wanted to understand the motivation behind all the Alligator Alcatraz swag and how sales for shirts and other merchandise were going, so I reached out to Uthmeier’s campaign and the Republican Party of Florida for an interview. My emails and phone messages went unanswered.
David Dunning, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, has written about the allure of Donald Trump for certain voters. He says that connecting the facility with merchandise or a nickname, and making “it sound like a tourist attraction as opposed to something like a concentration camp,” normalizes the facility. Political campaigns have always relied on merchandise to attract and unite supporters, but the Trump administration has “turned up the dial a little bit more than everybody else,” he noted. “You’re more likely to see a van or a pickup truck tricked out in MAGA.” The sale of Alligator Alcatraz swag is just the latest example of that.
Who the individuals and institutions are that market the merchandise also boosts its legitimacy. In this case, the items for sale come directly from powerful sources, such as Florida’s attorney general and the Republican Party. Supporters of Alligator Alcatraz receive tacit permission to engage and purchase the merchandise without fear of judgment. “These consumption patterns become a way of facilitating social coordination so we can find people who are like us,” Collins says. “For some, it’s repugnant. For others, it’s reality.”