If MSNBC told its viewers the moon was a detention facility for trans migrants and Ron DeSantis built it with unlicensed gators, they’d nod and pour another cup of oat milk.
This week, the network did something nearly that dumb.
They compared Florida’s new temporary migrant holding site, nicknamed “Alligator Alcatraz," to a concentration camp.
It's not a holding center. Not a makeshift facility. Not a concentration camp.
And with that, MSNBC finally hit the bottom of the barrel, grabbed a shovel, and started digging.
What They're Selling and Why It Stinks
The writer, Andrea Pitzer, begins with a tone of moral panic. Not concern. Not questioning. Not even a critique of logistics. But full-blown historical conflation, using words that belong to the Holocaust to describe a tent in the swamp.
They genuinely want you to believe that a barge-based processing center in the Everglades is America’s Auschwitz.
And there are parallels in U.S. history for these camps as well. Centuries of Indian removal and genocide set the stage for abuse of those not counted as citizens. Lawmakers and courts wielded the weight of law or executive authority to prop up slavery, allowing cross-border trafficking and detention of humans denied rights. Concentration camps holding Japanese Americans during World War II showed the U.S. government was eminently capable of unjust detention of citizens and noncitizens alike. And Trump himself has hailed “Operation Wetback,” a lethal, abuse-filled deportation operation carried out by Dwight D. Eisenhower’s administration that included detention camps.
Alligator Alcatraz, they argue, is cruel by design: It’s remote, it floods, it’s filled with mosquitoes, and it exists solely to punish migrants. What they fail to mention, intentionally, is that it exists because the border is so overrun that other detention centers are beyond full. This isn’t cruelty, it's triage.
What It Actually Is
There isn't a damn death camp in the Everglades! It's temporary lodging for illegals to stay until the states find a solution.
That's all it is.
Because the prior administration completely dropped the ball, Florida had to act. With so many illegals arriving so quickly, the usual facilities are bursting at the seams: overloaded.
The solution for Florida is to build a facility in a patch of swamp and say, "This will have to do for now." It's not ideal, but consider this: What's more inhumane, cramming people into smaller facilities or this?
What it boils down to is people entering the U.S. illegally need processing because they broke the damn law, no matter how hard MSNBC and news readers bloviate!
Alligator Alcatraz doesn't have torture rooms where people are getting rubbed out. Not one person is taken for a long walk into the swamp to never be seen again.
It's rough, remote, and a temporary stopgap, because people kept slipping through the cracks.
If you only read headlines, you would never know that.
Twisting the Language
What MSNBC did was run straight to the worst thing they could think of. They flew past facility, holding center, or even a state-run processing site.
Those brilliant thinkers went to something that resounds with evil: a concentration camp.
Did any editor stop and ask if "we're sure about this?" They dumped nitrous into the engine and opened up the throttle fast enough to make Vin Diesel jealous.
Analysis wasn't the goal. Hysteria was.
What does the phrase "concentration camp" conjure? Death by Design through starvation and disease contained behind barbed wire.
We have people still alive who have nightmares because of what they lived through. Acts of evil by the Devil incarnate.
Pitzer put together an opinion column, using words like seasoning in a soup, creating cheap drama that's disconnected from the truth.
Pitzer isn't concerned about sensitivity; she's telling her truth. Unless she's prepared to directly point to gas chambers, don't invoke Auschwitz.
If she doesn't have the courage, then it's time to keep your mouth closed and fingers away from a keyboard.
Why They Did It
They need the audience scared. That’s the game now. You don’t click on measured reporting. You click on panic. And nothing sounds scarier than “concentration camp,” especially when you throw Ron DeSantis into the mix.
Today in Florida, the U.S. is expanding on its own concentration camp legacy. We’re seeing other clues that police-state tactics are intensifying in America. Masked agents in unmarked cars or without warrants who refuse to show IDs are sweeping people off the street. Some who vanish reemerge; others have been effectively disappeared.
You can see the formula. Red state. Border enforcement. Tents in the woods. Boom—cue the alarm bells.
But they’re not sounding alarms. They’re pushing buttons.
What’s really happening is simple: Migrants are being held safely until they can be processed and sent home. That’s the law. That’s all it is. Nobody’s smiling about it. But it’s legal. It’s manageable. And it’s a hell of a lot better than letting smugglers keep running the show.
But MSNBC can’t sell that story. They need villains. So they made one.
They could’ve pressed DHS about oversight or FEMA about flood response.
However, that would have required work, and it might not have fit the story they already wanted to tell. So they skipped to the headline. Skipped to the outrage. Skipped to a Holocaust reference, because that’s easier than reporting.
We Deserve Better Than This
When news networks prioritize outrage over reporting, the country loses its grip on reality.
We can’t solve immigration if every action taken by law enforcement is framed as evil. We can’t have policy debates if detention is always genocide. We can’t tell the truth if the vocabulary’s already been burned down.
Words such as “concentration camp” mean something. They should never be used casually. And if MSNBC truly believes a swampy processing site with floodlights and fencing belongs in the same sentence as Dachau or Treblinka, then they have no business holding a microphone.
Final Thoughts
There are real problems in the immigration system. Real pain. Real policy failures.
But calling a temporary, legally managed detention site a concentration camp isn’t brave. It’s lazy. And dangerous.
We’re not in 1942. We’re in 2025, trying to untangle the disaster of a broken border. States are being forced to improvise, and while the optics may not be ideal, the motives aren’t evil.
The only thing being manufactured in this story is outrage.
And MSNBC? They’ve stopped reporting the news.
They’re just selling fear now by the headline.
