Florida's Concentration Camp in the Everglades is Unconstitutional

Florida’s newest monument to fear, an offshore-mindset detention compound the state proudly calls “Alligator Alcatraz” (a concentration camp)⁠, is more than a policy misfire. It is a live-action civics lesson in how to violate the Constitution on several fronts at once.

1. The Supremacy Clause and the Anti-Commandeering Principle

Immigration regulation is an exclusively federal power. In Arizona v. United States (2012) the Supreme Court struck down state measures that “operate in areas the federal government has occupied.” Here, Tallahassee is not merely “co-operating” under 287(g); it is building and controlling its own detention archipelago and then inviting federal agents to fill the beds. That flips the anti-commandeering doctrine on its head, creating a reverse commandeering that usurps Congress’s plenary power over immigration and foreign affairs. Where Congress has legislated a detailed detention framework, a state may not substitute its own.

2. The Public-Trust Doctrine and Article IV’s Property Clause

The compound sits on wetlands within the Everglades/Big Cypress system, lands historically held by Florida in trust for the public’s use and ecological health. The Supreme Court has treated such submerged lands as being held in “perpetual trust” for navigation, fishing, and the environment (Illinois Central R.R. v. Illinois, 1892). Handing that trust land to a single punitive purpose that bars the public, wallops the ecosystem, and forecloses restoration violates both the state’s public-trust obligations and Congress’s parallel duty under the Property Clause to preserve federally influenced wetland corridors. Even Florida’s own constitution (Art. II § 7) obliges the state to protect its natural resources for future Floridians. Trading a river of grass for razor wire is the textbook definition of abdication. 

3. Tribal Treaty and Religious-Freedom Violations

Miccosukee and Seminole leaders have called the site sacred and integral to traditional lifeways. Using it for mass incarceration without meaningful tribal consultation brushes aside the Indian Commerce Clause, federal trust responsibilities, and, after McGirt v. Oklahoma (2020), modern understandings of reservation boundaries and usufruct rights. Because the compound blocks ceremonial access and threatens burial mounds, it also triggers strict scrutiny under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The government must show it used the least restrictive means, a near-impossible showing when hundreds of alternative locations exist on non-sacred ground. 

4. Fifth-Amendment Due-Process Deprivations

Constitutional rights do not evaporate in a mosquito-laden swamp. By design, “Alligator Alcatraz” is 45 miles from Miami courts and law offices, accessible only by a two-lane levee road that routinely floods. That isolation, coupled with poor phone service and limited counsel space, imposes an undue burden on detainees’ ability to file habeas petitions and confer with lawyers, precisely the access-to-courts problem the Court condemned in Bounds v. Smith (1977). Conditions that obstruct due process are unconstitutional even before we reach Eighth-Amendment questions about heat, flooding, and reptiles. 

5. The Equal-Protection Through-Line

At bottom, the project targets one discrete class, non-citizens of color, for harsher treatment than anyone else Florida confines. When a state singles out a vulnerable group for unique physical and environmental dangers, dangers it would never impose on criminal detainees, it triggers heightened judicial suspicion. Discriminatory purpose is plain in the governor’s own marketing: “Miles of treacherous swampland…the only way out is deportation.” Intent to punish immigrants is not a legitimate state interest, and no swamp-side cost-saving argument can survive rational-basis review when safer, constitutional alternatives abound. 

The Remedy

Courts should enjoin further use of the land for detention, order a full NEPA-level environmental review, and require Florida either to return the site to its protected-use status or cede it to the National Park Service for restoration. Anything less not only normalizes constitutional shortcuts; it teaches our children that in America, the Bill of Rights ends where the sawgrass begins.

Until the judiciary speaks, that lesson will echo across the glades, louder than any bull-alligator’s bellow, and infinitely more dangerous.