America has a shiny new “congregation facility” down in Florida knows as “Alligator Alcatraz,” where the Trump administration’s best and brightest congregated Tuesday for a guided tour. The troupe included Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem, who took the opportunity to spin fear around immigrants and support for her agency’s policy of mass deportation by telling the story of a cannibal migrant who supposedly began to eat himself on a deportation flight:
“The other day I was talking to some marshals that have been partnering with ICE. They said that they had detained a cannibal and put him on a plane to take him home, and while they had him in his seat he started to eat himself and they had to get him off and get him medical attention.”
Noem presented her story without evidence, though arbitrarily deciding that immigrants to the U.S. are eating things — without evidence to support the claim — is both a classic of the Trump administration as well as a longer-standing right-wing anti-immigration narrative. The plane anecdote was meant to justify the administration’s massive deportation efforts with a cartoonish image of the uncontrolled consumption of “the other.” It has big “Don’t kid yourself Jimmy, if an immigrant ever got the chance he’d eat you and everyone you care about,” kind of fear-mongering vibes.
These people will not see heaven
Trump himself said that Alligator Alcatraz was meant as a threat, so that immigrants would “self-deport” rather than face internment at the facility — presumably by buying their own plane tickets, in the world of the administration’s collective imagination, where they can eat themselves to their hearts’ content. As of yet it’s unclear whether the site will be exclusively used to imprison immigrants for such heinous acts as “having tattoos” or “attending their legal immigration hearings,” or whether it will be included in Trump’s newly announced interest in revoking the citizenship of even American-born citizens. As this fascist snowball continues to roll down the hill, accumulating mass from our own rendition of “First They Came,” there’s no telling who’ll be swept up in its path and deposited on a bunk bed behind chain-link fence under a tent on a Florida airstrip.
Stories like these are meant to move the needle on Trump’s unpopular immigration policy, making its targets out to be such inhuman others that any act against them can be justified .It matters less whether any immigrant really self-cannibalized on any immigration flight, and whether such a story can be backed up with evidence, than it does that you believe it could happen — and thus support any action that would get such people out of the United States. It doesn’t matter whether Kristi Noem is telling the truth or not, because her words will do their job either way.
