Dispatch #7: The Carceral University, ICE, and Resistance

July 31, 2025

Greetings from the swamp.

I had to take brief respite from my blog duties to escape the tropical heat, which can melt your mind to such an extent that it could turn someone MAGA if left unchecked. I cannot disclose my sanctuary to protect all those involved, but I can report that good times were had by all with only a few pesky misdemeanors trailing after us that my lawyer assures me will be squashed shortly.

During my absence, Florida continues to prove itself to be a crucible of carceral experimentation. In early July, the state converted an airport runway into an immigrant detention facility in the Everglades that has been nicknamed Alligator Alcatraz. The facility has been mired in controversy regarding its unsafe living conditions, being built without permission on Miccosukee land, having no evacuation plan in case of a hurricane, and detaining people without charges. According to one estimate, the facility will cost state taxpayers $450 million a year. Meanwhile, rents continue to escalate and property insurance costs outpace all other states. But the political theater of saber rattling against undocumented people is more important to Caudillo DeSantis than bread-and-butter issues like housing and cost-of-living that concern most Floridians.

This law-and-order mindset extended into public higher education as well with at least eleven colleges and universities partnering their campus police forces with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Essentially, the police are deputized to question people they suspect have entered the country illegally.

Faculty and students have for the most part been appalled by these developments. They are concerned that such a partnership will stoke a culture of fear on campus and could lead to racial profiling that undercuts the mission of higher education. Faculty at Florida International University issued a resolution demanding that FIU withdraw from the agreement. Their faculty union vocally opposes the partnership and continues mobilizing against it.

Larger actions against these partnerships seem to loom on the horizon. As we roll into early August and prepare for the fall semester, if you place your ear close to the base of the mangroves, you might be able to detect a growing vibration of countless students across Florida campuses quietly preparing for actions to take place in the near future.

One should not see these ICE partnerships in isolation from the other reactionary legislation that has passed in Florida and other states against Black, LGBTQ+, and women’s history; that has targeted diversity, equity, and inclusion programs as a source of conflict rather than attempting to reckon with (imperfectly, it must be admitted, at times) with the nation’s settler-colonial past and its biased inheritances that disenfranchise various communities; that wants to privatize education to further segregate students from each other and undermine the idea that public education should serve all people, not the select few.

This is all a part of an authoritarian populist mindset that scholars like Stuart Hall recognized taking shape long ago. It manufactures moral panics in order to impose reactionary legislation and carceral practices. It attempts to assure those who feel they live in “a disruption of the ‘traditional’ ways of life; as a breakdown of the traditional landmarks and social values,” as Hall notes in his brilliant book of essays The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherism and the Crisis of the Left.

During such moments of structural crisis, race has become central in terms of legitimating law-and-order policies and an authoritarian populist outlook. As Hall wrote, “Cultural racism has been one of its [Thatcherism’s] most powerful, enduring, effective . . . . sources of strength.”

One of the central issues that got Donald Trump re-elected was by stoking fears about undocumented immigrants and an insecure U.S. border.  Furthermore, the Trump administration’s attack against Black history and wresting control over cultural institutions like the Kennedy Center and Smithsonian in order to promote a “patriotic” history that translates into a predominantly rich, white, male perspective, reveals a blatant cultural racism at work.

As historian Robin D.G. Kelley observes, such attacks against Black history have deep roots in the U.S. that stretch back to “most state laws prohibiting enslaved Africans from learning to read and write” after the publication of David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World in 1829, a blistering attack against U.S. slavery.  All of this translates into a cultural racist, white supremacist outlook that wants to present “an apparently seamless and unbroken continuity toward pure, mythic time” by whittling down the differences of a multicultural society into the image of “the primordial unity of ‘one people,’” as Stuart Hall once noted.

Florida and Texas were at the forefront of using cultural racism, sexism, and homophobia to aggressively re-assert such a mythic time. But this is a difficult thing for students to stomach who constitute diverse student bodies far beyond the reactionary imaginations of authoritarians like Caudillo DeSantis who hold bygone memories of the college experience as being predominantly white and middle-class. At a place like Swamp University where I teach, the student body is over 25% Hispanic with around 17% Black students. 58% of the student body is women. Such legislation is directly opposed to many of our students very senses of self.

Keep in mind that college should be a time for exploration and experimentation, not where thought calcifies into cliches and orbits around outdated knowledge. It should be a place of self-discovery, not submission to animus and hierarchy. Many of our students at Swamp U have grown up working-class. Their K-12 education was often systematically underfunded, providing little-to-no resources, and taught with a rigid curriculum that centered on testing that allowed little room for exploration. Their skill sets like reading and writing have been undervalued and underdeveloped, often remaining at a rudimentary when they enter college.

Imagine these students entering college, learning how to finally read properly, how to write in their own voice that allows them to explore their own ideas. They are discovering more diverse subjects than their high school could provide. They are learning about their own histories—Latin American, Black, indigenous, Hispanic, gay, lesbian, trans, and working-class—and how their communities helped shape our nation’s and world history. They are starting to conceive of themselves in a much richer and diverse world than they have ever imagined, and they are discovering their talents and skills in the process. This is what college should be like.

But with the passage of reactionary legislation like the STOP WOKE act in Florida and the partnering of campus police with ICE, the state is attempting to re-marginalize these students and their communities who have only had access to public higher education for a relatively short time after demanding access and representation within the curriculum. It champions law-and-order over the well-being of our students. It cherishes a carceral mindset over one of inquiry and exploration. It fears discovery and innovation by instead trying to resurrect ossified thought and bygone ways. It wants to Make America Great Again instead of striving to Make American Great in ways that it hasn’t yet achieved.

But, with all this said, as I mentioned earlier, if you go out to the mangroves and listen closely, you will hear the future resistance vibrating through their roots that will eventually overtake Alligator Alcatraz and other such carceral visions to reveal them as paranoid fever dreams of a dying age.

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