Technically, they’re transit — not concentration — camps

ALSO INSIDE: Class action lawsuits are the new nationwide injunctions

Jul 02, 2025

Cam here 👋 bringing you your daily dose of what people are doing – good, bad, and otherwise – in the world of politics. We’re diving into the stories you won’t see anywhere else. And remember, you can also keep up with me over on TikTok and Bluesky.

And if you’re looking for a little more from COURIER, Akilah Hughes’ darkly comic culture and politics show, “How is this Better?” just featured Roy Wood, Jr., and Ryan Broderick’s got the scoop on Laura Loomer and horse electrolytes in the newest episode of “Panic World.”

Since day one of Trump’s political career, people have desperately attempted to normalize his absurd abuses of power and blatant corruption – and 10 years later, much of corporate media remains a victim of their own attempts to return to a sense of normalcy.

It’s time to stop sane-washing the insanity.

What Happened

“Alligator Alcatraz” is the lighthearted, catchy name given to the $450 million, 5,000-capacity tent city — complete with an airstrip for expedited deportations — the Trump administration hastily opened Wednesday in the swampy Everglades of Florida.

The idea was pitched by the state’s attorney general in late June as a place where people abducted by ICE agents could be housed temporarily while they await deportation. Trump saw the pitch, loved it, and Florida Republicans rushed to make their massive immigrant detention center dream a reality. In true small-government fashion, Gov. Ron DeSantis used emergency powers to seize the land from local control after rejecting the county’s offer to sell it for $190 million.

The transit camp went from idea to operational in less than 10 days, but in the name of efficiency, the site wasn’t hurricane-proofed and has already been flooded by a much smaller-than-a-hurricane thunderstorm.

While its attention-grabbing name is what put this detention center in the spotlight, it only represents a sliver of the explosion of prison beds and detention facilities the Trump administration has invested in this year. Private prisons have opened facilities on ICE’s behalf in at least seven states as they desperately try to accomplish the administration’s goal to have 100,000 people detained by the end of the year.

And if they included deportations, they’d be close: There are about 56,000 people currently detained, and have deported nearly as many, according to an analysis by NBC News (the administration claims much higher, but verifiable data is hard to come by). Those being held in Florida’s new transit camp are expected to quickly move from detained to deported with almost no oversight, as the site has an operational landing strip for exactly that purpose.

The built-in deportation infrastructure, coupled with the expansion of detention facilities, would more accurately categorize the Trump installations as transit camps, not concentration camps. Concentration camps, according to the Weiner Holocaust Library, are when a high concentration of “‘enemies of the state” are imprisoned without trial, indefinitely, like the mega-prison the US has sent over 200 people to in El Salvador.

Attempts to Sanewash

Far-Right Spin

Class action lawsuits are the new nationwide injunctions

The US Supreme Court last week severely limited district courts’ authority to use nationwide injunctions to pause federal government policy that is being litigated, but left the door open for an alternative: class action lawsuits.

Class actions are lawsuits filed on behalf of a group, or class, of people. With this type of lawsuit, judges can issue class-wide injunctions to halt potentially harmful laws from affecting the entire group while the lawsuit proceeds through the courts. The organizations that sued the Trump administration over its executive order limiting birthright citizenship wasted no time refiling their suit as a class action on behalf of the class of newborns impacted by Trump’s executive order.

Karla McKanders, director of the Legal Defense Fund’s Thurgood Marshall Institute, said her organization joined the lawsuit to protect the right to citizenship, and believes limiting that right would create a subclass of people who are born in the US but denied basic rights and are restricted from participating in democracy.

“The Trump administration’s executive order is an unlawful attempt to entrench racial hierarchies and establish a second class of citizens in the United States,” McKanders said in a statement. “We will continue working to ensure that birthright citizenship — a right granted by the U.S. Constitution — is protected, and that families are not torn apart because of this executive order.”

Without action taken by the Legal Defense Fund, Asian Law Caucus, and the ACLU to request a class-wide injunction, the Trump administration’s limits on birthright citizenship would go into effect in 28 states, as soon as July 27. The lawsuit also provides a guide for plaintiffs in the dozens of other lawsuits against the federal government whose nationwide injunctions have been voided by the Supreme Court.

US Rep. Jefferson Van Drew, New Jersey’s 2nd Congressional District

Since taking office in 2019, Rep. Van Drew has:

Refrained from trading stocks, but maintains a net worth somewhere between $2.4 million and $5 million
Sponsored 144 bills
Authored two bills that have been signed into law, both to rename post offices
Switched political parties after internal polling showed it would give him a better chance of winning
Voted to expand the draft to include women
Voted in 2022 to pass a law protecting same-sex marriage federally, then voted against it five months later
Believes drone sightings in New Jersey are a result of an Iranian “mothership” located in international waters, launching drones the size of minivans at the US

Fun Facts

Rep. Van Drew held elected office as a Democrat for 28 years before switching parties in 2019—along with almost all of his core principles and morals. The split began during Trump’s first impeachment; Van Drew was one of two Democrats to vote against it, and later introduced legislation to have all impeachments expunged from Trump’s criminal record.

Shortly after, he met with Trump, offered his “undying support,” and went all-in: he contested the 2020 election results, defended Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene when she was reprimanded for her history of “ anti-Semitism and zenophobia.”

On policy, Van Drew founded the Offshore Wind Caucus to further US investment in wind as a renewable energy. He changed his tune, however, as Trump’s erratic rage at wind energy surfaced. He quit the caucus in 2024 and personally drafted Trump’s executive order to freeze offshore wind energy projects.

His support of the LGBTQ community is tenous at best, as illustrated by his involvement in the Congressional LGBTQ+ Equality Caucus: joined in 2019, left in 2020, joined again in 2021, then left once more in 2022.

Van Drew claimed to support abortion rights protected under Roe v. Wade—until it was overturned in 2022. He has since described himself as pro-life.

Kicking people off healthcare to ‘supercharge ICE’

The Republican budget being rushed through Congress comes with a hefty price tag, mostly due to the massive tax cuts Trump has promised to the 1% wealthiest Americans. But it’s not all cuts: in between votes today, I spoke with US Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., about what this budget does to expand Trump’s mass incarceration and deportation efforts.

“Across the country, ICE is now going to be able to, essentially, double the deportations, double the kidnappings that they're doing. It's horrific for the American public,” Garcia said. “People need to continue to call their members of Congress, stand up, push back, do whatever they can.”

Garcia has been at the forefront of elected officials standing up to the Trump administration’s abuse of the US immigration system. He was one of four House members to travel to El Salvador in April in an attempt to help facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and just this week, he demanded accountability from DHS for their continued efforts to prevent oversight visits by members of Congress.

If you have a few minutes, the whole interview is worth a watch — check it out below:

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