Date: 2025-11-19 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00029191 | |||||||||
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TRUMP PRIORITIES
NOT MY IDEA OF AMERICAN VALUES! Alligator Alcatraz is still open and keeping detainees in its caged facilities Original article: | |||||||||
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Alligator Alcatraz is still open. Why? | Opinion
Alligator Alcatraz is still open and keeping detainees in its caged facilities
Michael Finkel MD
An appeals court has overturned a lower court's order to close the Alligator Alcatraz detention facility.
Protesters continue to hold weekly vigils at the facility, demanding its closure and legal representation for detainees.
The author alleges that detainees, including one man from Mexico, are being denied necessary medications like insulin.
The article compares the network of U.S. immigrant detention centers to the Soviet Gulag system described by Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Alligator Alcatraz is still open and keeping detainees in its caged facilities.
Most people we talk to do not know that an appeals court overturned the lower judge’s order to close the camp. Our national and state disgrace continues.
The Sunday afternoon interfaith vigils continue at the entrance to the facility, and the numbers who come to keep the vigil grow every week. We continue to insist that the detention camp be shut down and that the detainees receive the legal representation to which they are entitled by U.S. law. We observe trucks carrying supplies in, and companies that deal in human waste removal coming out. We have seen the white prison buses entering.
We know of one detainee from Mexico, who has lived in the U.S. for 36 years, who has U.S. born children and grandchildren, and no criminal record, who was picked up at his scheduled legal hearing. He told his daughter in his one phone call that he is not receiving his insulin in Alligator Alcatraz, but he is told that he will get it in Mexico as soon as he agrees to go back there. By reports from other families of detainees, this denial of medications is not a singular occurrence.
Attendees line the street outside Alligator Alcatraz in Ochopee, Florida, some holding signs during a vigil on Aug. 10, 2025.
The number of detainees is still not public information. The whereabouts of twelve hundred people nationwide are not available to the families. They are “disappeared” in the system.
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We now know that there are a multitude of immigrant detention centers throughout the U.S. and sites like Guantanamo Bay. The system of camps is reminiscent of the system that Alexander Solzhenitsyn termed the Gulag Archipelago in his books by that name: the vast prison system spread across the Soviet Union in isolation from the public.
At the beginning of 'The Gulag Archipelago,' Alexander Solzhenitsyn introduces the “archipelago” not as a literal chain of islands, but as a vast and hidden system of prisons and labor camps spread across the Soviet Union — an invisible geography that exists within the body of the state itself. He uses the metaphor of an archipelago to describe how these camps are scattered “like islands in the sea,” connected by the “invisible gulag current” of prisoners being transported from one to another. Like islands, only the tops of the entities are visible. But like icebergs, most lies below what can be seen above the horizon.
He begins not with abstract analysis but with a vivid, ironic question: “How do people get to the Archipelago?” He then answers in his signature bitter irony — “In the same way, in general, as people get into hell — without realizing it.”
From there, he describes the process of arrest, which is how the journey into the Gulag Archipelago begins for every prisoner. He emphasizes that the arrest always comes suddenly —often without warning, and almost never with any clear explanation. He details how people are seized in doorways, trams and buses, at their workplace, or even in hospitals. The terrifying randomness of arrest becomes his way of showing how the Gulag’s power depends on secrecy and fear. The same is happening in the U.S. now.
After arrest, the prisoner typically begins to pass through the “islands” of this Archipelago — interrogation cells, transit prisons, long-term detention centers — connected by the routes of prisoner transports. The similarities of what happens in our detention centers is striking.
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He uses the metaphor of geography: “A vast country lies within our own, with its own laws, customs, economy, and population — millions strong. This is the Gulag Archipelago.”
The descriptions of the system of ICE and CBP detention centers throughout the U.S. are frighteningly similar to what Solzhenitsyn described before the fall of the Soviet Union. The system there occurred within a society of enforced oppression. That is not our society, our country, or our values. This detention archipelago continues to exist because of the general public’s lack of knowledge, and sometimes, indifference.
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What is happening now is not the United States of our national story or of our Constitution and the government it creates. This national disgrace must end and will end when enough of the public objects peacefully and non-violently. It is time for likeminded people to speak up and not remain silent.
Michael Finkel, MD, is a resident of Naples.
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