“Every manner of horror,” the immigration reporter Jonathan Blitzer says, of the reported conditions inside Florida’s immigrant-detention facility. Plus:

• Can A.I. solve loneliness?
• A previously unpublished story by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• How Beauford Delaney hid himself in his art

Erin Neil
Newsletter editor

Earlier this month, a detention facility known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” which can house up to three thousand migrants, opened in the Florida Everglades. I called Jonathan Blitzer, a staff writer who has written extensively about Trump’s border policies, to discuss why this facility stands out—and what it tells us about the Trump Administration’s immigration crackdown. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

How bad is this particular detention facility?

This is something that the incoming Trump Administration fantasized about because it allowed them to really scale up their capacity both to instill terror and to arrest as many people as possible.

What is utterly horrifying about it in practice is it’s just a recipe for mass racial profiling. Lawyers are already reporting that some people being held in this facility were arrested for traffic violations or just the most minor offenses, likely because they look Hispanic.

How does it compare to other detention facilities in the U.S.?

Two things immediately strike me as being unprecedented with the opening of this facility. The first is the idea that a state is doing this on its own. It’s not the federal government making those immigration arrests. State agents are making them, and using this facility specifically to hold those arrested.

The Administration—Stephen Miller and others—are already calling on other red states to do the same. The federal government would give these states money, in part, to open these facilities. And the money is largely coming from FEMA’s budget. We’re seeing flash floods all across the country, including the devastation in Texas. But FEMA has basically been gutted in its capacity to deal with those sorts of things, and instead money from FEMA is being used to help stand up these facilities.

The second striking thing is quite simply just the horror of the conditions that are being reported from this facility already. The facility opened on July 3rd. We’re seeing reports of everything from wastewater sloshing around on the floor to worm-infested food to multiple people crammed into individual cells, cuffed, denied medical care. Every manner of horror.

How is the Administration responding to these reports?

The word for how the Florida officials involved in this are behaving, and certainly the Trump Administration officials, is gleeful. I mean, they are loving this.

There used to be a time, not that long ago, when descriptions of horrible conditions were met with a certain gravity—maybe they were denied, maybe they were looked into. Now, reports of the cruelty are almost worn as a badge of honor.

What does this reflect about the Administration’s immigration policies more broadly?

This is part and parcel of how the Administration and its state partners are now carrying out immigration enforcement, with a complete and total lack of transparency.

Journalists at the Miami Herald and the Tampa Bay Times did get their hands on a list of seven hundred and forty-seven detainees at the facility, and entered those names into the ICE-detainee locator, which should tell you where someone is being held. Only forty of them actually appeared in the database, which is to say that all these other people are unaccounted for.

It’s not an exaggeration when people describe this Administration’s approach to immigration enforcement and detention as basically disappearing people. What makes them disappearances is the fact that the public—that is to say family members, friends, relatives, lawyers—cannot know or easily find out where their loved ones are being held.

For more: read Blitzer on how some deportees became “ghosts” in U.S. courts, and on the unchecked authority of the President’s immigration orders.

The discomfort of loneliness shapes us in ways we don’t recognize—and we may not like what we become without it, Paul Bloom writes. Read or listen to the story »

“Double Time for Pat Hobby,” written by F. Scott Fizgerald in the summer of 1940, was filed away at Princeton University for decades, with no title. It was recently identified as a complete story about his recurring character Pat Hobby, a dissolute, luckless Hollywood screenwriter. It is published today for the first time, part of our Flash Fiction series. Read the story »

P.S. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a Holocaust survivor who played cello in the Auschwitz women’s orchestra, turns a hundred today. “The word ‘indomitable’ might have been invented for her,” Alex Ross wrote, after spending time with her last year. “She is perhaps the most awe-inspiring person I have ever met.” 🎻

Hannah Jocelyn contributed to this edition.