Since taking office, President Donald Trump’s administration has held thousands of undocumented immigrants — including many without a criminal record — in a network of domestic and international detention centers. Two of these, El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) and the newly opened “Alligator Alcatraz” in Florida, have already been criticized for appalling conditions and human rights abuses.
As firsthand accounts of these detention centers began to be widely reported, right-wing media have justified the conditions by claiming that people being sent there are “the worst of the worst”; arguing that Alligator Alcatraz is meant as “a deterrent more than punishment"; and suggesting that “you got to break a couple eggs in order to make an omelet.”