An outbreak of a respiratory disease, possibly Covid-19, is running rampant through the remote Florida immigration jail known as “Alligator Alcatraz”, according to the attorney of an infected detainee removed from the camp last week.
Eric Lee said he was told by his client Luis Manuel Rivas Velásquez that conditions at the facility had deteriorated significantly since Thursday as more migrants held there by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agency experienced symptoms.
Lee said authorities removed Rivas Velásquez, a 38-year-old Venezuelan man, from the camp after he was diagnosed in a hospital visit last week, then secretly taken to a similar facility in Texas.
Protesters at the gates of the jail in the heart of the Florida Everglades have recorded a number of instances of ambulances arriving and leaving.
Lee said the hastily erected tented camp, which Democratic lawmakers have decried for holding thousands of undocumented detainees in cages as they await deportation, is a “petri dish for disease”.
He added: “Based on what multiple detainees have told me, in the last 72 to 100 hours, there is some respiratory disease which has made the majority, or I would even say vast majority of detainees, sick in some form.
“There are people who are losing breath. There are people who are walking around coughing on one another. Their requests for masks from the guards are denied, and they only are allowed to shower once or maybe twice a week.
“I said to Luis, ‘pass the phone. Let me hear it from somebody else. I just want to make sure that people’s stories are straight.’ And unfortunately they very much are.”
The development follows a claim by a woman, a state licensed corrections officer, who said she contracted Covid-19 after working at the camp in unsanitary conditions for about a week last month, and was subsequently fired.
“We had to use the porta-johns. We didn’t have hot water half the time. Our bathrooms were backed up,” the woman told NBC6 News after being granted anonymity to discuss conditions there.
“[The detainees] have no sunlight. There’s no clock in there. They don’t even know what time of the day it is. The bathrooms are backed up because so many people [are] using them.”
The Florida department of emergency management, which is responsible for operations at the jail, did not immediately respond to a request from the Guardian for comment.
In a statement to the Miami New Times, Stephanie Hartman, a department spokesperson, did not answer questions about a possible outbreak, but insisted: “Detainees have access to a 24/7, fully staffed medical facility with a pharmacy on site.”
Lee said Rivas Velásquez told him in a phone call that he pleaded for medical attention for 48 hours after contracting breathing difficulties, and eventually collapsed inside the metal cage in which he and dozens of other inmates were being held.
He said his client was taken to Miami’s Kendall regional medical center, where he was diagnosed with a respiratory infection, then returned only briefly to the Everglades camp before disappearing for three days. Lee said Rivas Velásquez called on Sunday from a new detention camp in El Paso, Texas.
“He said when he was returned to the Alcatraz facility he asked the guards to provide his medical records and they said they would not do that,” Lee said.
“The guards came to his bed, opened his pillow, took all the poetry and letters he’d been writing, and all the notes he’d been taking about his experiences, and told him he’s no longer allowed to write.”
Apart from the brief call from Texas, Lee said he had no further information about his client’s wellbeing.
“I haven’t heard from him for two days now. I have no idea how he’s doing or frankly whether he’s alive or not. It’s hard to wage a legal fight when you don’t even have access to your client,” he said.
If the outbreak is Covid, Lee added, it would have consequences beyond Alligator Alcatraz.
“The disease doesn’t recognize the prison walls and guards are going to get sick. They’ll give it to their kids, it’s going to get into the Miami school system, people are going to get sick and die as a result of the conditions that are in this facility,” he said.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/12/attorney-covid-outbreak-alligator-alcatraz
For years, prominent voices on the right argued that Democrats were enacting a police state. They labeled everything—a report on homegrown extremism, IRS investigations into nonprofits—a sign of impending authoritarianism. Measures taken by state governments to combat the spread of COVID? Tyranny. An FBI search of Mar-a-Lago? The weaponization of law enforcement.
Now that a president is actually sending federal troops and officers out into the streets of the nation’s cities, however, the right is in lockstep behind him. This morning, Donald Trump announced that he was declaring a crime emergency, temporarily seizing control of the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department and deploying the D.C. National Guard to the nation’s capital.
“This is liberation day in D.C.,” Trump said. Nothing says liberation like deploying hundreds of uniformed soldiers against the wishes of the local elected government. District residents have made clear that they would prefer greater autonomy, including congressional representation, and they have three times voted overwhelmingly against Trump. His response is not just to flex power but to treat the District of Columbia as the president’s personal fiefdom.
Trump’s move is based on out-of-date statistics. It places two officials without municipal policing experience in positions of power over federalization and the MPD, and seems unlikely to significantly affect crime rates. What the White House hopes it might achieve, Politicoreports, is “a quick, visually friendly PR win.” Trump needs that after more than a month of trying and failing to change the subject from his onetime friend Jeffrey Epstein.
But what this PR stunt could also do is create precedent for Trump to send armed forces out into American streets whenever he declares a spurious state of emergency. Some of Trump’s supporters don’t seem to mind that fact: “Trump has the opportunity to do a Bukele-style crackdown on DC crime,” Christopher Rufo, the influential conservative personality, posted on X, referring to Nayib Bukele, the Trump ally who is president of El Salvador. “Question is whether he has the will, and whether the public the stomach. Big test: Can he reduce crime faster than the Left advances a counternarrative about ‘authoritarianism’? If yes, he wins. Speed matters.”
Rufo seems to view everything in terms of a political battle to be won via narratives; the term authoritarianism appears to mean nothing to him, and maybe it never meant anything to others on the right who assailed Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Democratic governors. It does have a real meaning, though, and Bukele is its poster boy. Despite the constitution having banned it, he ran for a second term in office; his party then changed the constitution to allow “indefinite” reelection. Lawmakers in his party also brazenly removed supreme-court justices, and his government has forced journalists into exile and locked up tens of thousands of people without due process. This is apparently the America that Chris Rufo wants.
To justify the crackdown, Trump has cited an alleged carjacking attempt that police records say injured the former DOGE employee Edward “Big Balls” Coristine. But MPD has already arrested two Maryland 15-year-olds for unarmed carjacking. That’s good news. Carjacking is a serious crime and should be punished. But Trump has used the incident to claim that violent crime is skyrocketing in Washington. This is, put simply, nonsense. During a press conference today, Trump cited murder statistics from 2023, and said that carjackings had “more than tripled” over the past five years. He didn’t use more recent numbers because they show that these crimes are down significantly in Washington. Murder dropped 32 percent from 2023 to 2024, robberies 39 percent, and armed carjackings 53 percent. This is in line with a broad national reduction in crime. MPD’s preliminary data indicate that violent crime is down another 26 percent so far this year compared with the same timeframe in 2024, though as the crime-statistics analyst Jeff Asher writes, this drop is probably overstated.
Trump’s descriptions of Washington as a lawless hellscape bear little resemblance to what most residents experience. Not only is D.C. not “one of the most dangerous cities anywhere in the World,” as Trump claims, but his prescription seems unlikely to help. He said he is appointing Attorney General Pam Bondi and Terry Cole, the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration, to help lead the federalization effort and MPD, but neither has any experience with municipal policing. They have not said what they will do differently. If the administration deploys its forces to high-profile areas such as the National Mall, they won’t have much impact on violent crime, because that’s not where it happens; if they go to less central areas with higher crime rates, they won’t get the PR boost they seek, because tourists and news cameras aren’t there.
Throughout his two presidencies, Trump has treated the military as a prop for making statements about which issues he cares about—and which he doesn’t. He deployed the D.C. National Guard during protests after the murder of George Floyd in summer 2020. Earlier this summer, he federalized the California National Guard and sent Marines to Los Angeles to assist with immigration enforcement, but they were sent home when it became clear that they had nothing to do there. Yet according to testimony before the January 6 panel, Trump did not deploy the D.C. National Guard when an armed mob was sacking the U.S. Capitol in 2021 to try to help Trump hold on to power.
Good policing is important because citizens deserve the right to live in safety. Recent drops in crime in Washington are good news because the district’s residents should be able to feel safe. But Trump’s militarization of the city, his seizure of local police, and his lies about crime in Washington do the opposite: They are a way to make people feel unsafe, and either quiet residents’ dissent or make them support new presidential power grabs. Many of Trump’s defenders are angry when he’s called an authoritarian, but not when he acts as one.
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2025/08/trump-national-guard-dc/683839
An Alligator Alcatraz worker is blowing the whistle on “inhumane” conditions at the notorious immigrant detention facility in South Florida after working there for less than a month.
Speaking to NBC6, Lindsey, a corrections officer, said that she only wanted to give her first name out of fear of retribution against her or her family.
She confirmed she arrived at the facility on July 6 and was there for about a week before she caught COVID and was forced to isolate.
Lindsey’s comments come just 24 hours after Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-GA) announced that they “identified 510 credible reports of human rights abuse” against immigration detainees.
In response to questions about the report, DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs, Tricia McLaughlin, said in an email to NBC, “Any claim that there are subprime conditions at ICE detention centers are false.”
DHS bragged on X that they are hard at work attacking “fake news” and announced that they “have the backs of the brave men and women of @ICEgov, who risk their lives every day protecting our homeland.”
But Lindsey said that her experience was different.
“When I got there, it was overwhelming,” she told NBC6. “I thought it would get better. But it just never did.”
She said that she knew going into it that the team would be living in a trailer, but the report described the conditions as “harsh” for the corrections officers as well as the detainees.
“We had to use the porta-johns. We didn’t have hot water half the time. Our bathrooms were backed up,” she said.
“The bathrooms are backed up because you got so many people using them,” she added.
Her story confirms the account from detainees and their family members that DHS has also denied.
When it comes to where the detainees are held, Lindsey called it “an oversized kennel.”
The large cages hold 35 to 38 inmates. There are about eight cages per tent.
“They have no sunlight. There’s no clock in there. They don’t even know what time of the day it is. They have no access to showers. They shower every other day or every four days,” Lindsey continued.
There were reports of flooding at the facility on the day that President Donald Trump toured the tents. Lindsey said that it has continued and each time it rains water floods into the tents.
Lindsey noted that despite Trump’s promise only to deport criminals, there are a number of people there who are not criminals.
“These people are still human. They pulled them from their livelihood. They’re scared. They don’t speak our language,” she said.
When Lindsey got COVID, the facility accused her of trying to falsify medical paperwork, and she was fired. She denies their accusations.
“I was fired. And yeah, I’m pissed off. But more so than ever, like they’re doing wrong,” she said.
Detainees complained last month that there was a lack of food, and when they were provided something to eat, there were worms in it, the Associated Press reported in July. That report also cited the overflowing sewage, which was discounted by spokesperson Stephanie Hartman of the Florida Division of Emergency Management.
“The reporting on the conditions in the facility is completely false. The facility meets all required standards and is in good working order,” she claimed.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Trump want to see the facility as the model for others.
The far-right conspiracy theorist has taken credit for numerous high-level firings over what she claims is “disloyalty” to President Trump.
A self-described “proud Islamophobe” and “pro-white nationalism” influencer is one of the most influential people in the Trump White House — despite not actually working for the administration. And she’s brought a particularly odious form of cancel culture to President Donald Trump’s second term that’s led to well over a dozen White House and federal employees recently fired for wrongthink.
Laura Loomer, 32, is known as much for her overt racism as her peddling of evidence-free conspiracy theories — such as 9/11 was an “inside job,” the Parkland high school shooting was staged, and Ohio was being overrun by “cannibalistic Haitians” who were “eating people’s pets.” Loomer has been described by many news outlets as a personal friend and confidant of Trump’s, and she’s fond of bragging about the “scalps” she’s collected, referring to the former White House and federal employees she successfully targeted for firing.
James Risen, writing in The Guardian, noted that Loomer’s critics insist “she has just been taking credit for moves that Trump was already planning,” but added that “Trump himself has said he takes her seriously, so it may be more accurate to describe her as Trump’s de facto national security adviser.”
Loomer has also referred to herself as Trump’s “loyalty enforcer,” and she has just added a few more “scalps” to her collection.
The Daily Wire — a right-wing partisan site co-founded by MAGA pundit Ben Shapiro — reported that National Security Agency general counsel April Falcon Doss had previously worked for Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., on the Senate Intelligence Committee investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. The Daily Wire’s Luke Rosiak called her a “transparently partisan activist who has written publicly about her opposition to Trump.” As evidence, Rosiak cited Doss’ call “for Trump to be permanently banned from social media for staging an ‘insurrection.’”
Loomer told The New York Times that she “reposted a tweet that exposed her last week and flagged it for the right people.” Doss was fired last week.
Another civil servant recently “Loomer’d” is Jen Easterly, a former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA), who had her job offer to serve as the distinguished chair of the Military Academy at West Point’s social sciences department rescinded by Army Secretary Dan Driscoll. Loomer earlier this week called Easterly’s job offer a “vetting crisis” and later boasted that “All Biden holdovers must be removed from the Trump admin.”
Loomer has taken credit for at least a dozen other “scalps” for “disloyalty” — including federal prosecutors, directors and aides on the National Security Council and even Trump’s original surgeon general nominee, Dr. Janette Nesheiwat, because of her support for the Covid vaccines that Trump helped bring into existence in his first term.
But one of the most striking Loomer-influenced cancellations is the resignation of Dr. Vinay Prasad from his roles as the Food and Drug Administration’s head of the Center for Biologics Evaluation and chief medical and scientific officer.
Prasad — an acolyte of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. who made a name for himself during the Covid pandemic by blasting the FDA and other health agencies on social media, podcasts and his blog — was only on the job a little more than two months. But he made his MAHA mark when he overrode the FDA’s vaccine experts’ recommendations on two Covid vaccines, which led directly to the FDA announcing its plan to only recommend Covid shots for people over 65 or with high-risk health conditions.
But Prasad was not spared from MAGA cancel culture, after Loomer dug up some old podcast clips where Prasad was critical of Trump. In a classic case of people supporting the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party being shocked that the leopards subsequently ate their faces, the MAGA-friendly and cancel culture-obsessed Free Press (where Prasad has been a contributing writer) published an editorial decrying Loomer’s “shameful smear campaign against our honorable, decent friend.”
Loomer told Politico that she expects “hundreds” more to be purged for disloyalty to the dear leader. And Loomer is soliciting snitches via an anonymous tip line.
“I’m happy to take people’s tips about disloyal appointees, disloyal staffers and Biden holdovers,” Loomer said. “And I guess you could say that my tip line has come to serve as a form of therapy for Trump administration officials who want to expose their colleagues who should not be in the positions that they’re in.”
We’re a little more than one-eighth of the way through the second Trump administration, and one of its defining features is that it is led by astoundingly unqualified people whose raison d’etat is ruthlessly enforcing ideological orthodoxy and slavish devotion to the president, rather than the country and the Constitution.
And whether you previously worked for people Trump doesn’t like, or you told the objective truth about Trump’s attempted self-coup, or even if you previously criticized him before turning MAGA sycophant, your job is not safe from being eliminated at the behest of a person who during the 2024 election made comments about Vice President Kamala Harris that were so unimpeachably racist they even drew rebukes from loyal Trumpists JD Vance and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Trump’s election was widely seen as a rebuke against the excesses of left-wing cancel culture. But the Loomering of the federal government shows we probably haven’t seen the worst of MAGA cancel culture yet.
When the Trump dictatorship decides to reenact the Night of the Long Knives, Laura will be running the show.
A Michigan Democratic effort would open up ICE agents to state prosecution if they conduct immigration enforcement operations while wearing masks that conceal their identity.
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The bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Betsy Coffia, D-Traverse City, said Friday ICE’s masking-up “mirror the tactics of secret police in authoritarian regimes and strays from the norms that define legitimate local law enforcement.”
“It confuses and frightens communities,” she said. “Those who protect and serve our community should not do so behind a concealed identity.”
A banner on the dais from which Coffia announced the bill read, “Justice needs no masks.”
State Rep. Noah Arbit, D-West Bloomfield, added his name as a co-sponsor and said in a statement when a person is unable to discern whether someone apprehending them is a government authority or not, it “shreds the rule of law.”
“That is why the Trump administration and the Republican Party are the most pro-crime administration and political party that we have ever seen,” Arbit said.
Attorney General Dana Nessel, who was one of several state prosecutors to demand Congress pass similar legislation at the federal level, also threw her support behind the bill.
“Imagine a set of circumstances where somebody might be a witness to a serious crime and that defendant has some friends go out and literally just mask up and go apprehend somebody at a courthouse,” Nessel told the Traverse City NBC affiliate.
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Nessel also lent her name to an amicus brief this month supporting a case brought against ICE over tactics used during its raids in Los Angeles.
“When masked, heavily armed federal agents operate with no identification, they threaten public safety and erode public trust,” Nessel said in the brief.
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Donald Trump won the presidency in part on promises to deport immigrants who have criminal records and lack permanent legal status. But his earliest executive orders—trying to undo birthright citizenship, suspending critical refugee programs—made clear he wants to attack immigrants with permanent legal status too. In our series Who Gets to Be American This Week?, we’ll track the Trump administration’s attempts to exclude an ever-growing number of people from the American experiment.
President Donald Trump’s immigration raids have disrupted life in Los Angeles in a way the mayor is comparing to COVID; they’ve created a climate of fear that’s driving people into hiding and hurting local businesses. This week, the president promised to expand those raids in blue cities, all in a futile attempt to hit 1 million deportations by the end of the year. After suggesting last week that ICE would stop targeting the agriculture and hotel industries, which disproportionately rely on immigrant labor, the administration also walked back that guidance.
And a troubling trend is emerging: As Trump’s immigration enforcement efforts get more aggressive and reckless, several elected officials who attempted to conduct oversight or question what is being done have been arrested.
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“Overwhelmingly, Americans do not want ICE raids that focus on those without criminal records. That’s why polls show that Trump is losing voter approval on these key issues,” Mukherjee said.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/06/donald-trump-brad-lander-ice-raid-los-angeles.html
As logistics professionals sound the alarms on emptying U.S. ports as a result of steep tariffs, President Donald Trump said those major import slowdowns are actually a boon.
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Trump not only acknowledged the shipping slowdown in a Thursday press briefing announcing a trade deal with the UK; he seemed heartened by it.
“We’re seeing as a result that ports here in the U.S., the traffic has really slowed and now thousands of dockworkers and truck drivers are worried about their jobs,” a reporter said in the press briefing.
“That means we lose less money,” Trump said. “When you say it slowed down, that’s a good thing, not a bad thing.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-calls-emptying-u-ports-180609056.html
The White House’s push for for expanded presidential power threatens US economic stability
Donald Trump is systematically purging every US government institution, a pattern familiar to anybody who has studied the caudillo regimes of Latin America, or the playbook of today’s Putin-Orbán-Erdoğan prototypes.
It is a racing certainty that he will soon do the same to the Federal Reserve, forcing the central bank to cut interest rates into the teeth of rising inflation, with epic consequences for the world’s dollarised financial system and for €39 trillion (£33 trillion) of offshore dollar debt contracts and swaps.
Late last week he fired the head of the National Security Agency and its top officials at the behest of Laura Loomer, a fringe conspiracy theorist, who whispered into Trump’s ear that they were disloyal to the Maga movement.
He has already fired the heads of the FBI’s intelligence division, its counterterrorism division and criminal investigations division, as well as the heads of the Washington and New York offices.
He has fired the top brass of the US military, starting with a preemptive strike on the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. An earlier chairman – General Mark Milley – refused to ratify Trump’s attempted coup d’etat on Jan 6 2021.
“We don’t take an oath to a king, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We take an oath to the constitution,” said Milley in his parting shot.
But Trump also fired the three judge advocates general, who are legally independent by Congressional statute and have the authority to decide which military orders should be disobeyed – such as Trump’s order to “just shoot” American protesters, on American soil, during the Black Lives Matter saga.
That obstacle will not recur. Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, said the three judges had been sacked to stop them posing any “roadblocks to orders given by the commander-in-chief”.
You can go through the list, agency by agency, extending to the universities and private law firms, and even to the muzzled editorials of some of America’s once great newspapers: the purge is Bolshevik in ambition.
Does anybody in their right mind think that Trump will spare the Fed’s Jerome Powell as the two men gear up for an almighty clash over US monetary policy? “CUT INTEREST RATES, JEROME, AND STOP PLAYING POLITICS!” bellowed Trump in capital letters on Truth Social on Friday.
In January, just days after Donald Trump was sworn in as president, immigration agents came to Dana Beauty Salon in Mount Rainer, Maryland, located just two minutes from the Washington D.C. border. They were looking for one of the employees, an undocumented migrant, who was taken into custody and is being held at a detention center in New Hampshire pending a court hearing. That day changed the life of the salon’s owner, Daysi García. “They showed up one day, I think it was a Thursday. By the time the weekend came around, no one was coming in, our workers weren’t coming in for their shifts, not even the clients were coming in,” she recalls sadly.
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“What is happening now is worse than what we experienced during Covid. Back then, people could put on a mask and come in. Now, they don’t even want to leave their homes,” says García.
