MAGA world is yet again trying to market a prison where it will lock up people targeted by the president’s bigoted anti-immigrant crackdown.
First, there was “Alligator Alcatraz,” the facility in the Florida Everglades that an appeals court panel on Thursday said could remain open after a federal judge previously issued a preliminary injunction requiring it to cease operations.
Then came “Deportation Depot,” another recently announced facility in Florida whose moniker Republicans sought to play on Home Depot — much to the home improvement company’s displeasure.
Now the administration is attempting to rebrand the infamous Louisiana State Penitentiary — also known as Angola prison, after the former slave plantation there — as the “Louisiana Lockup.”
Characterized in a 2019 New York Times Magazine report as “one of America’s most violent and abusive,” the prison is also known for disproportionately locking up Black people, its brutal work conditions, its history of prison deaths, its imprisonment of children, and spectacles — like its prison rodeo — that one might imagine coming out of the Jim Crow era. At a news conference Wednesday in front of a lectern that read “Louisiana Lockup,” Noem claimed the prison’s “notorious” and “legendary” reputation would encourage immigrants to leave on their own. As Noem has falsely claimed in the past, she said the prison would be reserved for hardened criminals swept up by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The Trump administration is leaning into the scandals of a retrofitted slave plantation to boost its anti-immigration push. Rebranding Angola with some cutesy, alliterative name can’t erase the fact that Noem is quite literally using the legacy of slavery and the threat of racist brutality as nightmare fuel to spur undocumented immigrants (or any others it may imprison) to flee the country.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
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