An open letter to the editors and producers of our nation’s newsrooms:
I am writing today out of deep concern over the language being used by many media outlets to describe the immigrant detention center in Florida currently known as “Alligator Alcatraz.” As an English teacher of nearly 20 years, I understand that language matters. While it may seem like a harmless nickname or a clever turn of phrase, referring to this facility by such a flippant term has dangerous consequences for public understanding and moral clarity.
Let’s call this place what it is: a government-run detention camp, where human beings — including children — are being held in conditions that have been widely criticized by humanitarian organizations. Hundreds held there are facing no criminal charges. A catchy nickname, especially one coined by the administration responsible for its operation, serves to sanitize and trivialize the very real suffering taking place there. It diminishes public outrage and makes it easier for these facilities to continue existing in the shadows of normalized cruelty.
The words we choose shape public perception and, ultimately, public policy. Both history and current events offer chilling reminders of how euphemisms can be weaponized to obscure injustice.
During World War II, The United States referred to the unconstitutional incarceration of Japanese Americans as “relocation,” and the German Nazi government used the term “Sonderbehandlung” (which translates to “special treatment”) in the context of the Holocaust.
More recently the first Trump administration’s Zero Tolerance Policy on immigration, led to the creation of detention centers for migrant children who were taken from their parents. They were branded “tender-age shelters.”
Right now, as our government publicly condemns China for rounding up Uyghur people and sending them to “reeducation camps,” it is sending people snatched from their jobs and immigration hearings to a camp that sounds like a Disney attraction.
The mass media has no control over what an administration that has no shame will do. However, it does have a responsibility, not to repeat the government’s talking points, but to speak truth to power. Going along with that name minimizes the gravity of a human rights crisis. The fact that this nickname has been circulated by officials, or gained social media traction, does not mean it should be perpetuated by responsible journalists.
I urge you, as people with power to shape public conversation, to reconsider how your organization refers to this facility. Call it what it is: a detention center, an immigrant holding facility, or — if you have the courage to name the moral reality — a modern-day concentration camp. The stakes are too high for us to play along with euphemisms. People’s lives and dignity hang in the balance.
Sincerely,
Nikki Kincaid
Nikki Kincaid is a proud lifelong Missourian, a veteran teacher and a believer in plainspoken truth.
