The theater of cruelty: America’s immigration shame
The dehumanization of immigrants has been steadily normalized, first through language, then through enforcement, and now through pageantry.
On a sweltering July afternoon in the Florida Everglades, Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and Kristi Noem stood before a newly constructed immigration detention center newly built with cages and tents in a remote Everglades location where the heat and mosquitos kill as much as the alligators. They smiled for the cameras, laughed among themselves, and made light of the facility’s location. The place had already acquired a macabre nickname: “Alligator Alcatraz.” Trump quipped that if detainees tried to escape, they would have to “run zigzag” to avoid becoming meals for the surrounding predators. For these politicians, it was a moment of levity. For the rest of us, it should be a moment of national reckoning.
This was not an isolated image, nor a stray joke. It is the culmination of a pattern—systematic, deliberate, and escalating—through which the U.S. government has recast immigration policy as spectacle and punishment. What was once a policy domain shaped by humanitarian principles and legal process has now been reduced to political theater and cruelty for the sake of publicity.
The dehumanization of immigrants has been steadily normalized, first through language, then through enforcement, and now through pageantry. The White House recently released a stylized deportation video titled “ASMR: Illegal Alien Deportation Flight,” where the forced removal of human beings was treated like a soothing bedtime ritual. Another video featured deportees boarding a plane set to the 1990s song “Closing Time,” replete with tasteless-joke captions, converting trauma into a punchline. These videos are not meant to inform. They are meant to entertain morbosely, to devalue, and to degrade.
In other settings, the cruelty is not just symbolic—it is literal. In Huntington Park, California, masked ICE agents raided homes and businesses using unmarked vans, dragging away residents in front of their neighbors. The city’s mayor described it as a campaign of governmental terror. In Los Angeles, detainees have been held without food, water, medicine, or access to legal counsel. As in Alligator Alcatraz, captives are forced to drink from basins connected to toilet sinks. Several, including naturalized U.S. citizens, were detained in error and subjected to invasive searches and shackling before finally being released—without receiving even an apology.
Even those with no criminal history, who had lived in the United States for decades, have been caught in the dragnet. Dozens of Venezuelans were deported en masse under the Alien Enemies Act, some selected based on ordinary tattoos or unsubstantiated rumors. They were sent not to their home country but to El Salvador’s CECOT prison—a gulag known for brutal conditions. The legal justification for these deportations was tenuous at best, the human toll devastating.
Stephen Miller, the architect of much of this policy architecture, defended the Alligator Alcatraz facility in a televised interview, praising it as a “clean and efficient deterrent.” He labeled critics as saboteurs and insisted that any concern for detainee welfare amounted to softness on border enforcement. Meanwhile, children have gone missing in the surrounding swampland, and one was later found injured by an alligator.
And now people are dying. In recent weeks, multiple individuals have lost their lives while in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody, sounding renewed alarms over detention conditions and access to medical care. Johnny Noviello, a 49-year-old Canadian permanent resident, was found unresponsive on June 23 at the Federal Detention Center in Miami, where he had been held since April. Despite resuscitation efforts, including CPR and defibrillation, he was pronounced dead, and the cause of death remains under investigation. Just three days later, on June 26, 75-year-old Isidro Pérez, a Cuban fisherman who had lived in the United States for nearly sixty years, died at HCA Kendall Hospital after being transferred from the Krome Detention Center. Pérez had been hospitalized earlier that month for unstable angina and released on June 25, only to return to the facility and report chest pain again the next day.
Earlier in the year, Jesús Molina-Veya, a Mexican national, was found dead in an Atlanta detention facility in what ICE described as a suicide. Abelardo Avellaneda Delgado, another detainee, died while being transported in Georgia; he was reportedly wheelchair-bound and denied timely medical intervention. Maksym Chernyak, a 44-year-old Ukrainian man, also died while in ICE custody in Florida after complaining of freezing conditions and receiving inadequate medical attention. According to ICE data, thirteen detainees have died in custody so far in fiscal year 2025, making it one of the deadliest years on record and intensifying scrutiny of the agency’s detention practices and accountability mechanisms.
We must ask ourselves what we are becoming when we allow this schadenfreude to continue. When we turn the removal of immigrants into TikTok reels, when we build camps in swamps and laugh about the threat of the wildlife, when we let the sick and elderly die in our custody without even granting them the dignity of proper care, we are no longer enforcing laws—we are abandoning our humanity.
What’s unfolding is not enforcement. It is banquet of the beasts. It is punishment as theater. It is cruelty not just as a means, but as message. The photograph of Trump and DeSantis smiling before the barbed wire is not a moment of irony or accident. It is a confession of inhumanity.
We can still choose another path. We can demand oversight, dignity, and a return to principles rooted in human rights and constitutional guarantees. But to do so, we must first acknowledge what this is. Not a border crisis. Not a bureaucratic misstep. But a moral collapse in plain sight. And we must decide, urgently, if this is the country we wish to be.
