The lessons I learned from 'Alligator Alcatraz'
It's Been a Minute
NPR
4.6 • 8.8K Ratings
🗓️ 3 September 2025
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
First, the name echoes old Southern American racist tropes and adapts them for a modern audience. Second, its casually playful name is a blueprint for other detention centers popping up across the United States. But what does this all add up to?
In this episode, Brittany, freelance journalist Asher Elbein, and Miami Herald race and identity reporter Raisa Habersham unpack the racist trope of alligators in Florida and how the joke-ified name of the facility dehumanizes its inmates.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This message comes from how to be a better human, a podcast from TED. |
| 0:04.4 | Even if you're a self-help skeptic, you'll find inspiration to improve your life from fascinating |
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| 0:19.0 | Hello, hello. I'm Brittany Luce, and you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR, a show about what's going on in culture and why it doesn't happen by accident. |
| 0:36.0 | This summer, I bet you've been hearing a lot about the immigration detention center |
| 0:40.5 | that the state of Florida built in the Everglades called, quote, alligator alcatraz. |
| 0:46.8 | We have a lot of bodyguards and a lot of cops that are in the form of alligators. |
| 0:51.8 | You don't have to pay them so much. |
| 0:53.3 | But I wouldn't want to run through the Everett Lades for long. |
| 0:57.0 | We'll keep people where they're supposed to be. |
| 1:00.0 | The term Alligator Alcatraz was first coined by Florida's Attorney General in June of this year. |
| 1:06.0 | The detention center opened in July, and now... |
| 1:09.0 | The Department of Homeland Security now moving detainees out of Alligator Alcatraz Detention Center in the Everglades. |
| 1:15.4 | All of this coming just days after a federal judge ordered parts of the state-run facility dismantled, |
| 1:21.0 | citing with environmental activists who argued it violated federal law. |
| 1:25.4 | It's slated to close very soon. |
| 1:27.5 | The ruling cited poor waste management and hasty construction, argued it violated federal law. It's slated to close very soon. |
| 1:33.7 | The ruling cited poor waste management and hasty construction that, quote, creates irreparable harm, end quote, to the Everglades ecosystem. |
| 1:37.7 | But as the doors close, I want you to think about this symbol at the center of all this. |
| 1:43.9 | Yep, the alligator. The terrifying, to me at least, |
| 1:48.7 | reptile, has become like a mascot to the detention center, with the Trump administration and |
| 1:53.7 | members of the GOP posting cryptic memes of alligators in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, |
... |
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