Stop comparing #AlligatorAlcatraz to Nazi concentration camps. The U.S. gov has built concentration camps before.

What Trump is doing is not un-American. The worst things he could do are things our government has already done.

Last week, democratic lawmakers reported appalling conditions after touring Alligator Alcatraz. The detention center for undocumented immigrants was placed in the Florida Everglades because, as Trump claims, the site is surrounded by alligators and pythons. Constructed in a little over one week, the facility has beds for 3,000 prisoners. Inside, men are housed in metal cages with only three toilets for every 32 people. Their drinking water comes from a spout on the toilet.

As details emerged about the inhumane conditions at Alligator Alcatraz, people started comparing the facility to Nazi concentration camps–in opinion pieces, tik tok videos and with the hashtag #AlligatorAuschwitz. The comparison, of course, is meant to underscore the gravity of what the Trump administration is doing. But there is a problem in constantly comparing Trump to Hitler and other foreign regimes. It reinforces a deep ignorance Americans need to unlearn.

When Cherokees refused to leave our homeland, the United States decided to use force. To prepare, the army split logs lengthwise, drove them into the ground and built 25 open-air stockades. On May 23, 1838, 7,000 U.S. soldiers and militiamen went out into the hills and valleys of Cherokee Nation to round the people up.

Cherokees, startled by bayonets in their gardens or kitchen, were not allowed to collect any possessions for the journey or find their loved ones. When a deaf man didn’t understand the militia’s orders, they shot him. At gunpoint, they drove a woman in labor from a remote town to the main concentration camp. Even after she gave birth, they would not let her rest. Finally, on a river bank near the stockade, she laid down and died. Over 15,000 people were herded into the camps. The US Army General in charge of the operation had estimated the round up would take 20 days. It took 25.

The open-air stockades provided no shelter or sanitation–there was not even a place to use the bathroom. At night, militia men roamed the camps, abducting and assaulting Cherokee women. After only a few months, Cherokees had buried 2,000 of their fellow citizens–one eighth of the total population. The concentration camps became the departure point for what is now known as the Trail of Tears.

Cherokees are not alone in experiencing this history. In the 1860s, the US Army forced over 10,000 Navajo and Apache men, women, and children to walk hundreds of miles to a desolate concentration camp, where a third of those the army interned died. Even Florida knows this history, where, during the Second Seminole War the army purchased bloodhounds to hunt Seminoles down. When Nazis designed their now infamous concentration camps they looked to the United States for examples.

It’s ironic when you think about it. Our government spent literal centuries rounding up civilians and putting them into concentration camps. But when contemporary Americans need an example, they look across the ocean.

After touring Alligator Alcatraz on July 7, Florida state Senator Carlos Guillermo Smith spoke to reporters. “People in cages like animals is un-American,” he told them. This idea, that what Trump is doing is deeply un-American, has been repeated over and over. After federal immigration officers raided a popular L.A. park in military fashion, Mayor Karen Bass called the operation “outrageous and un-American.” When Trump planned a military parade to coincide with his birthday, the organizers of the counter “No Kings” protests called Trump’s plans “costly, wasteful, and un-American”.

But is it? Are Trump’s actions un-American?

At one of the “No Kings” protests last month in Annapolis, Maryland, a man came dressed as George Washington. As the founding father, he symbolically read Washington’s 1783 speech in which he relinquished military command. The point was that, in contrast to Donald Trump, George Washington did not want to rule by tyranny. But that is not entirely true.

Our founders wanted a government that, unlike the King of England, would rule by consent not tyranny. But they also wanted an empire. And so they built both. A democracy that at its center gave every citizen a voice and a vote. And an empire that as it constantly expanded controlled the lives and the lands of peoples who had no say. Like a king, our founding fathers wanted power outside the norms and limits of liberal democracy. They wanted to rule by conquest, not consent. We don’t talk about this history, because the people they wanted that power over were Indigenous. From Indigenous nations, to Guam and Puerto Rico, to migrants in detention camps, there have always been people who lived under the raw power of our government, but not the liberties and protections of our constitution.

Over the course of our history, the United States has invaded Indigenous nations, put tribal citizens into concentration camps, systematically used starvation as a tool of war, sterilized Native women, tortured and abused Native children, and engaged in campaigns of mass execution and slaughter many consider genocide. It has never reformed itself or changed its laws to prevent such atrocities from happening again. And so, today when our government wants to annex Greenland, deny citizenship to people born in the US, separate families at the border, or put migrants in detention camps, it uses laws first passed to colonize Indigenous nations to do so. This connection is not abstract. To challenge birthright citizenship, the Trump administration argued it had precedent–because generations of Native Americans born on U.S. soil were not citizens. Which is true.

Native history is often treated like a tragic, distant chapter of the American story and the legal terrain it created like a siloed, backwater of American law. But it is foundational. Not knowing this history is like not knowing you have cancer. One day it will take over.

After the rise and fall of Nazi Germany, a theory about fascism started circulating: Fascism is what empires did to the people they colonized being turned against their own citizens. Aimé Césaire was a French intellectual, poet and politician from Martinique–a Caribbean island that is still a part of France. Césaire called out the hypocrisy of his French countrymen who were quick to condemn the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany, but silent on the atrocities France committed against the peoples it colonized. “Before [Europeans] were its victims, they were its accomplices,” he wrote. Europeans tolerated “Nazism before it was inflicted on them… they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because until then, it had only been applied to non-European peoples.” To Césaire, the atrocities of Nazi Germany were no different than the atrocities of European colonization. What had changed was who the atrocities were being committed against.

What Trump is doing is not un-American. It is not new to U.S. democracy. He has simply pulled the tyrannical power our government has always exercised from the shadows of our empire into the center.

What is scary about this political moment in particular is not the idea that Trump is breaking American norms; it is the fact that the worst things Trump could do are things our government has already done. Which makes it all the more possible.

Let’s connect!

• A couple of months ago professional actors (including Gary Farmer!!!!) performed the article I wrote on long COVID. You can now listen to or watch the performance thanks to WNYC!

• A reading recommendation–At a moment when the problems our world is facing feel insurmountable, I found a lot of inspiration in this. My friend and reporter Allison Herrera sat down with recently freed Leonard Peltier, one of the longest serving political prisoners in the U.S.

I want to hear from you!

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What to Expect from Native America:

Thank you so much for reading! It’s really exciting to be engaging with readers and authors on Substack. I publish this newsletter twice monthly–with one longer form article (like this one), and another post with a Native News Roundup and a deeper dive on a current event or interview with Native folks who are making news. Please keep reading, sharing, and subscribing!