“I’m going to pray,” Betty Osceola said, near the entrance to the Florida Everglades concentration camp three miles from her home. “I’m not doing a protest.” Around her neck, next to her reading glasses, the 58-year-old Native activist wore strands of tiny beads in black, white, red, and yellow. She was speaking in July, at an interfaith prayer gathering that took place under small canopies not far from the fence marking the camp perimeter. Inside the fence, four enormous tents held hundreds of prisoners, each outfitted with a color-coded wristband. All had been recently rounded up by immigration enforcement officers. Outside, smiling into their cameras like the president, tourists posed for ghoulish photos in front of a blue sign with white lettering: “Alligator Alcatraz.”
Osceola is a member of the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians of Florida, which has joined a federal lawsuit brought by the environmental groups Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity, challenging the “unlawful construction” of Alligator Alcatraz. On September 4, an appeals court ruled against a preliminary injunction from a federal judge that had blocked new detentions and ordered much of the facility to be removed; the ruling will allow it to remain open. In a motion, the Miccosukee asserted that its members “have lived in and cared for the land” where the camp is located “since time immemorial.” Osceola was among the first to observe trucks moving equipment and trailers onto the site, at a moment when local officials said they were still mostly in the dark about the project. She was among the Miccosukee who gathered there in the days leading up to President Donald Trump’s July 1 visit and the camp’s grand opening. She was there again nearly two weeks later, when a group of Democratic lawmakers tried to inspect the site, as is their right by law. One night some weeks after that, she was across the road from the camp’s sign, streaming live on Facebook with her laptop and a generator. She has kept returning, as have other activists, who have over these months offered both protest and prayer.
The activists’ focus on the land is intentional. Osceola is of the last generation, she has said, who “knew some form of subsistence living” in the Everglades, which she describes as having become “a skeleton of its former self.” And the land is central to the story told by the camp’s boosters. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier speaks of the swamp as if it’s a wasteland, invoking the animals as a kind of natural guard force. “If people get out, there’s not much waiting for them other than alligators and pythons,” Uthmeier said in June. “Nowhere to go, nowhere to hide.” But the Miccosukee survive in the area just fine, Osceola said. “I’m out here,” she told an NBC outlet in South Florida. “My family’s out here.”
In fact there are 15 traditional villages in the area, where people live to this day, the majority of them within three miles of the camp. Mad Bear Osceola, another local who has spoken out against Alligator Alcatraz, grew up in a village close by, he told The News-Press of Fort Myers. For the Miccosukee, he said, “any type of prison or where you’re caging people up, it’s something that you don’t do…. We are not in favor of putting people in chains like animals.”
Later in July, at a local gallery, Betty Osceola and photographer Clyde Butcher told stories about what the land is really like. It was held by the Miccosukee through decades of resistance to forced removal. It is home to some of the darkest sky in the Eastern United States. People hike through the cypress, deep into the swamp; on nights with a new moon, the stars draw out photographers. Now a halo of light pollution spreads above the camp. Some of it may issue from the fluorescent lights hung over the bunks, always on. “I no longer know when it’s daytime or when it’s nighttime,” said Juan Palma Martinez, who was detained at the camp and spoke to press from inside. “It’s a type of torture.”
At the interfaith event, Osceola spoke to this suffering. “I can feel it in the trees—the uncertainty of what’s going on with all these people coming and going,” she said. “They’re taking in all the anguish from the people who are kept here.”
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