ArcaMax

One year ago, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed into law a path toward restitution for boys who endured unspeakable torture. For decades, these boys were beaten and raped, spirits and bodies broken at the state's notorious reform schools. Others were murdered on taxpayer dimes, their remains buried beneath shrouds of soil and reduced to ghastly archeological finds.

Those boys stole things. They were truant. They broke the law. But back then, just a year ago, society agreed that their offenses did not justify their fates. No matter what indiscretions these boys committed, they didn't deserve to wake in hell with their humanity pulverized.

How, then, can we not see so clearly now?

Today, leaders are not even bothering to conceal their depravity as they gleefully launch Alligator Alcatraz in the service of pleasing a red devil daddy. They are funding campaigns by selling T-shirts that read, "Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide," hawking branded golf balls and beer koozies, reducing public service to a dollar store. President Donald Trump clearly finds it hilarious, this sycophantic rush to kiss his toes. He can say anything he wants unscathed, unchallenged in any meaningful way, and he knows it. During a visit to the Everglades site Tuesday, he warned would-be escapees, "Don't run in a straight line."

This country and state's Republican leaders have gone spiritually bankrupt. They do not care for the least among us. They do not welcome the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. They are callous, unsparing, rotten from the soul out.

Not me, some will say, equivocating, looking for an exemption to prove an anomalous mercy. I'm in favor of detaining only undocumented immigrants who have flouted the rule of law, they will explain. They will underscore the worst possible criminal cases in order to excuse mounds of evidence to the contrary: the severing of families and the snatching of migrants en route to hearings. They will blame the last administration's laxity for inspiring this one's salacious deeds.

They'll ignore the reports coming out of facilities like Miami's Krome Detention Center, the detainees joined body-to-body signaling "SOS" and "libre," the overcrowding, the sleeping on floors, the men asking for food and water and medication and instead being sprayed with rubber bullets. They'll reason away the five people who have died under Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in Florida this year, including a 75-year-old man who had lived in this country for 60 years.

Maybe this is you. In this case, let's assume the very best. Let's say this new tent city really does temporarily hold and process only the most vile criminals, benevolently giving them access to air conditioning and clergy and laundry as DeSantis says. Let's say that, if the detainees should be so foolish as to escape, they'll get what's coming to them regarding wildlife.

Well, then, maybe you're fine with using humans as storefront gator bait. Maybe your compass is ruled by a sense of violent justice, by a vengeful God. Maybe you sleep great.

Then again, maybe you are unsettled.

Maybe you have started to suspect that an inflection point like Alligator Alcatraz offers a moral test, one that exists outside the fickle bounds of political affiliation. Maybe you quietly believe this arrangement is archaic, demonic and plain bizarre. Maybe you simply think we are better than this.

If so, say it. Say it not just in the corner of your soul before your head hits the pillow but to your friends and neighbors, to your stubborn spouse, to the other Little League parents and Scout parents and dance parents, to the person who cuts your hair, to the bottomless pit of the internet. To whoever will listen.

Tell them you still care for the immigrant, the poor, the vulnerable, the hungry, the refugee, the addict, even the criminal. Tell them you are not so far gone, not so intoxicated by the cult of personality that you would laugh at the notion of families and flesh being ripped apart.

Do not sink into the ignominious gray, the profligate no-man's land in which you "see both sides" about whether or not human beings should be eaten in swamps.

Say it before it's too late. Say it before you wake up to find yourself a dead-eyed, complicit extra wandering around the background of a story that, in crystallizing hindsight, was always so obviously wrong.

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Stephanie Hayes is a columnist at the Tampa Bay Times in Florida. Follow her at @stephhayes on X or @stephrhayes on Instagram.

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