Hiltzik: DeSantis slinks back into Trump’s good graces

Just as you may have thought that it was finally safe to think about American politics without thinking about Florida’s Republican governor, Ron DeSantis, he has slinked his way into the national news again.

The occasion was a tour he hosted Tuesday for Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem of what has become known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” a detention camp hastily erected in the Everglades to hold immigration detainees in tents and within chain-link cages.

(Environmental groups already have filed lawsuits about the camp’s encroachment into the environmentally sensitive Everglades.)

The day before the tour, DeSantis cackled over the conditions awaiting detainees in the camp located about 45 miles west of Miami amid swamps inhabited by pythons and alligators. “Good luck getting to civilization,” he said. “So the security is amazing — natural and otherwise.”

Trump seconded that view during the tour: “We’re surrounded by miles of treacherous swampland and the only way out is, really, deportation,” he said.

DeSantis, whom Trump humiliated during their campaigns for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024 as “Ron DeSanctimonious,” basked in his apparent return to Trump’s favor.

One could hardly put matters better than Nicole Lafond of Talking Points Memo, who described how DeSantis and Trump came together over their “shared passion: finding creative new ways to dehumanize immigrants, carried out with a trollish flair.”

As it happens, the tour took place the day before immigrant advocates and several people swept up in immigration raids described in a federal court filing the behavior of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents conducting the raids, as well as the atrocious conditions in which the detainees are held in an ICE facility in downtown Los Angeles.

That filing documents the continuum of immigration enforcement under the Trump administration nationwide.

In Florida, officials boast of the cruelty of holding detainees in a swamp before their immigration status is adjudicated — Noem stated that detainees would be offered forms to self-deport at the very entrance to the camp.

In California, “individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force, and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from,” according to the filing. “If they hesitate, attempt to leave, or do not answer the questions to the satisfaction of the agents, they are detained, sometimes tackled, handcuffed, and/or taken into custody.”

Then they’re held in the “dungeon-like” L.A. facility, sometimes for days, and often “pressured into accepting voluntary departure.”

A Homeland Security spokesperson called the assertions in the filing “disgusting and categorically false.” The spokesperson told me by email, “Any claim that there are subprime conditions at ICE detention centers are false.”

More on that in a moment. First, a quick review of how DeSantis, like other GOP politicians, has exploited immigration and other hot-button issues for political advantage.

On the national level, this began as a campaign against pandemic lockdowns and mask mandates — at one point while COVID was raging across his state, DeSantis publicly upbraided schoolchildren for wearing masks at a presentation, calling it “COVID theater.” He progressed to questioning the safety of COVID vaccines and to trying to demonize Anthony Fauci, then the most respected public health official in the land.

The ultimate harvest was one of the worst rates of COVID deaths in the nation. DeSantis’ defenders explained that this was because Florida has a high proportion of seniors, but couldn’t explain why its rate was worse than other states with even higher proportions of elderly residents. He pursued attacks on LGBTQ+ people through an “anti-woke” campaign, though judges ruled against his efforts to legislate how teachers and professors did their jobs.

DeSantis tried to take his show on the road via a quest for the presidential nomination, but his culture warfare didn’t obscure his maladroit skills on the stump. (I once described DeSantis as having “all the charisma of a linoleum floor,” after which The Times received an indignant letter from a reader asserting that I owed linoleum an apology.)

But his policymaking has long ceased to be a laughing matter, especially when it comes to immigration.

In February, DeSantis signed a law making it a felony for an undocumented immigrant to enter the state of Florida. That law was blocked in April by federal Judge Kathleen M. Williams of Miami, who subsequently found state Atty. Gen. James Uthmeier in contempt for indicating to law enforcement officers that they didn’t have to comply with her order.

The cruelty-for-cruelty’s-sake nature of Trump’s immigrant crackdown is vividly illustrated not only by his glee over the Everglades camp, but also the brutality of the ICE raids as depicted by the plaintiffs in the Los Angeles lawsuit.

The plaintiffs in the class action include five individuals (among them two U.S. citizens) who were detained in the raids, the United Farm Worker and three immigrant advocacy organizations.

Since early June, Southern California “has been under siege,” the lawsuit asserts. “Masked federal agents, sometimes dressed in military-style clothing, have conducted indiscriminate immigration operations, flooding street corners, bus stops, parking lots, agricultural sites, day laborer corners, and other places, setting up checkpoints, and entering businesses, interrogating residents as they are working, looking for work, or otherwise trying to go about their daily lives, and taking people away.”

The plaintiffs ascribe this behavior to a quota of 3,000 immigration arrests per day set by presidential aide Stephen Miller. “It is practically impossible to arrest 3,000 people per day without breaking the law flagrantly,” Mohammad Tajsar of the ACLU of Southern California, which represents the plaintiffs, told me.

The lawsuit cites reporting by my colleague Rachel Uranga that, although the administration describes the raids’ targets as “the worst of the worst,” most of those nabbed had never been charged with a crime or had no criminal convictions.

Of the five individual plaintiffs, three were arrested at a bus stop while waiting to be picked up for a job, one — a U.S. citizen — at an Orange County car wash and one at an auto yard where he says he was manhandled by agents even after explaining that he is a U.S. citizen.

The agents’ refusal to identify themselves and give detainees the reason for their arrest violates legal regulations, the lawsuit states.

As the lawsuit describes the L.A. holding location, the basement of a federal building downtown, it’s not designed for long-term detention. It lacks beds, showers and medical facilities. The detainees are held in rooms so overcrowded that they “cannot sit, let alone lie down, for hours at a time.” Lawyers and families have often been prevented from seeing them the plaintiffs say.

A 2010 settlement of a previous lawsuit stipulated that detainees would not be held in the facility for more than 12 hours, and that they be permitted to meet with their lawyers for at least four hours a day seven days a week. Some detainees have been held there for days.

The settlement has since expired; the plaintiffs say “the unlawful conditions that led to the settlement more than a decade ago are recurring today.”

Make no mistake: None of this is accidental or unavoidable. Trump’s comments during his tour of the Everglades camp, and the actions of immigration agents in L.A. — many of which have been documented by onlookers’ videos — make clear that sowing fear among people trying to go about their daily lives is high among the goals of what has become a theatrical anti-immigrant farce. It’s no less tragic for that.