Donald, you toured those cages last July and stood beside the metal bars—the photograph shows the satisfaction of procurement on your face. Ron DeSantis, your partner in the architecture, signed the directive that brought ICE to Ochopee. A private contractor has hired men who draw a wage, and the men you smiled beside are drinking tub water thick with mosquito larvae because they refuse to sign documents they cannot read.
At Alligator Alcatraz—a tented facility on a disused training strip deep in the Everglades—guards are systematically withholding food and clean water to extract signatures on English-language papers from men who do not speak English. Over a thousand detainees live in metal cages inside tents whose tin roof turns the interior into a convection oven by ten o’clock. The federal government pays Florida a daily per-detainee rate; the state passes the guarding to a private contractor; the contractor posts men who turn spigots. More than half a dozen men told an advocacy group the water provided over three days was rotten and swimming with larvae. On Monday the water tasted wrong. On Tuesday it had a film. On Wednesday the mosquito larvae were visible and the taste was of something gone to rot. On Thursday the detainees could not read the documents and would not sign them. So the guards lifted the tubs.
One detainee spoke by telephone from inside the cage, naming his section, his cell. “They took all the water, and they don’t want to give us water.” He named diabetics who received insulin hours late. He named the empty stomach that hadn’t seen food since breakfast. A man standing barefoot on the hot metal at one-thirty in the afternoon had not eaten since morning. Chants of agua, agua, agua broke out when the tubs went dry. Noelle Damico documented the pattern. The Florida Department of Emergency Management—the agency that pays the contractor—released a statement denying any abuse. The denial lifts nothing. The tubs still hold larvae. The throats are still dry.
You reach for a glass of water on a table in a cooled room, Donald, but there is a metallic catch under your tongue before it touches your teeth. Your throat tightens on the swallow. You cough it back up and cannot say why. The men in Section G have drunk their third day of rot. You built a house where men are made to swallow it. You will swallow it. The catch does not leave.
Ron, you sit in Tallahassee. Your own medicine was taken on time, with the meal you did not miss. You reach for the glass on your desk, and the water has the taste of a standing swamp in it. Your stomach contracts into a hollow knot below the sternum before you register that you are empty. The men in the cages your state opened for ICE have eaten nothing since morning. Your stomach is carrying what you made them carry. The hollow ache sits at the base of your rib cage. It does not go away when you stand up.
The stomach is a specific organ. It expects what has been patterned. Breakfast arrived, briefly, and then lunch was the silence after the chants, the heat of the tent, the dry swallow that produces nothing. A stomach patterned to expect water and denied it begins to register the denial not as thirst-as-concept but as a contraction, a hollowing, the slow conversion of the stomach’s own lining into the substance the body is being refused. The diabetic’s blood sugar is dropping; the medication that came late cannot be processed without water; the man in the cell is not thinking about the document but about whether the tub will return.
The guard who took the tubs on Thursday afternoon—his skin knows what aluminum feels like when the sun has been on it since dawn. The back of his neck goes cold in the dark, alone. His knee gives out on the stair he has climbed at home for ten years. He does not know what it is, but his body is carrying the weight of the men who stood all day on hot metal and were given no water. The guard will carry it. It does not come off.
The mechanism is simple: the paper is in a language the signer cannot read. The refusal to sign is treated as defiance. The defiance is treated as cause. The guards who treat it as cause are paid by a contractor who holds a state contract. The state is paid by the federal government, whose chief executive you aspire to be again, Donald. At each link the hands that actually touch the tub belong to someone on the clock, performing a duty, drawing a wage. At each link the water that came out of the tap clean arrived at the cage with mosquito larvae, and on Thursday it did not arrive at all.
You sign the paper you cannot read. You do not sign the paper you cannot read. Your children sleep in beds with clean sheets in a house where the tap runs clear. Picture your daughter in the cage, Ron. Picture the larvae in the tub beside her bed. Picture her going without lunch because she will not write her name on a paper she does not understand. You would not permit it. You have permitted it. The house you live in was purchased with the water you took from them.
The distance between the room you dine in and the cage in the Everglades is measurable in miles. The distance between the water tub and the drinking mouth of the man who said agua at half past one is measurable in signature. A paper. A refusal. The refusal of a stomach to process what it cannot understand.
Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. Matthew 25:40
The men are still in the cages. The tubs still hold the larvae you put in them. The men’s throats are still dry. Nothing has been undone.
The Gnostic gospel remembers the souls ascending through the powers. Each power interrogates the soul. The fourth power demands: where are you coming from, slayer of humans, and where are you going, destroyer of realms? The soul answers with the calm that belongs to those who have passed through. The soul is not a slayer of humans. The soul is what the powers misname.
The men in Section G are not slayers of humans. The power misnames them. The power withholds water. The power prints the document in a language the man cannot read. The power removes the tub and says nothing. The power is a guard who holds a contract. The contract holds the signature of the governor. The governor holds the ambition of the man who toured the cage. The cage holds the man who cannot read the document. The man holds his stomach. His stomach holds nothing.
Where are you coming from, and where are you going?
Into the water that was lifted out of the cage on Thursday morning, and the answer no one in the building gives, and the throat that has forgotten what it means to swallow, and the paper that will be signed eventually because the signature is the only route back to the water, and the taste of the signature will stay in the mouth longer than the rot the water had.