Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost (D) on Monday described the conditions immigrants are being held under at the Trump administration’s newest detention center known as “Alligator Alcatraz.”
The lawmaker visited the site over the weekend and said he could see a reflection of his image while looking at the individuals being detained in the Everglades.
“Looking at the hundreds of men in there, I saw myself in those cages. I saw people who were my age, people who looked exactly like me,” Frost said during a Monday appearance on MSNBC’s “The Rachel Maddow Show.”
“And I thought when we were walking out of those doors of the — of the internment camp, I thought, I’m one of the only people that looks like me and that’s my age that’s going to actually walk out of this place without being deported or without being a staff member that’s not allowed to really talk about what’s going on in there,” he added.
Frost is of Puerto Rican, Lebanese, and Haitian ancestry, according to his official website.
He has railed against the Trump administration’s efforts to detain and deport large numbers of immigrants in recent months citing his own ties to various migrant communities. The Florida lawmaker has specifically taken issue with what he says are the “Alligator Alcatraz” site’s inhumane conditions. He also described the facility as an “internment camp.”
“Everyone’s using different language, different names. I’m going with internment or even prison detention center because this — and this isn’t even a detention center, right? The thing people have to realize too is when an immigrant is being detained, they’re being detained because they’re going through the legal process of deportation,” Frost told Maddow.
“They are not — have not been convicted of a crime. They’re not serving a sentence for a crime. And so they should not be treated in this way. And to be honest, even if you’re treated as a — even if you’ve been convicted of a crime in this country, you don’t — you shouldn’t be treated this way as well. The conditions were horrible,” he added.
Lawmakers in California have also flagged poor conditions and overpopulation at detention centers on the West Coast. Frost said the Trump administration is using immigration enforcement as a means to racially profile and remove unwanted immigrants.
“They want more people behind bars. They want to incarcerate more people. And they want to ethnically cleanse — cleanse this country of certain types of immigrants. Because here’s the thing, they’re not going for every person here that’s undocumented,” Frost said on Monday.
“Because when I was in that internment camp in the Everglades, I didn’t see any Europeans who overstayed their visa. I saw nothing but Latino men and Haitian men. And as we look at these operations going around the country, they are targeting specific types of people. And it’s the type of people that look like me.”
