Eight Days to a Concentration Camp
The shadow stretches from the Everglades to Auschwitz.
In the middle of a swamp filled with alligators, mosquitoes, and snakes, the state of Florida just built a prison camp for migrants. It took eight days. The state calls it emergency management. Let’s call it what it is: a concentration camp built in a cloud of secrecy, thrown up with military speed, and celebrated with merch.
The location? An old airfield in the Everglades, the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport, long since abandoned, now revived for one purpose: mass detention and removal. The runway, once meant for jumbo jets, now serves as the launchpad for deportations. This is where Florida’s government decided to disappear people.
It started with trucks. Generators, tents, barbed wire, floodlights. Eight days later, the thing was alive, fully staffed and fully armed. Holding up to 3,000 people, with room to grow. It is everything a Concentration Camp is supposed to be.
Governor Ron DeSantis used a pre-existing emergency order to take the land and begin construction and the Trump regime signed off without blinking. The logic was simple: treat migrants as a natural disaster. Use FEMA, emergency powers and call it a crisis. That way, you can build anything, you can skip laws and you can erase rights.
The people locked inside are held in military-style tents. Chain-link fences divide them. Generators hum day and night, pumping artificial air into the thick heat. There are no proper toilets. No plumbing. Showers are on trucks. Water is brought in and pumped out. The entire system is built to vanish when needed, like it was never there. Like the people it cages were never there.
Officials have already floated using Florida National Guard members as immigration judges. One hearing, one ruling, one-way flight. That’s what this place is for. There’s a fucking runway right there. The whole thing is designed to be a funnel: arrest, process, deport. All in one place. Quietly. Efficiently. Out of sight.
President Trump stood in front of it like he was admiring a new golf course. When asked about the alligators, he smiled and said, “I guess that’s the concept.” His press secretary bragged that the only way out was a deportation flight. They call it a one-stop shop. They say it like it’s clever. Like it’s not horrifying.
Behind the operation are dozens of unnamed contractors. Private firms brought in to handle construction, logistics, and security. Over 400 staff on site. All of it paid for with federal emergency funds meant for disasters. FEMA is writing the checks. The Florida Division of Emergency Management is running the show. The public doesn’t get to know who’s profiting off this, only that it’s being done in their name.
The speed wasn’t an accident. It was the point. They wanted to prove they could do it. That they didn’t need to wait for Washington or Congress or even ICE. That a state government could build its own infrastructure for mass detention. This was Florida’s proof of concept. And now that it’s worked, they’ve announced a second site. A bigger one. Near Jacksonville.
This is how fascism builds. Not with tanks in the streets. With tents in the swamp. With makeshift infrastructure and enough plausible deniability to keep the news cycle moving. No one’s even pretending this is about safety or security. It’s about showing power. About testing how far they can go before people fight back.
This isn’t a temporary installation. It’s a blueprint. And it worked.
What they built in eight days is not just a facility. It’s a warning. A statement. A challenge. And if it’s not stopped, it will be copied.